The Summer of Love and the Holy Fair

A Story About American Music Festivals
Woman leaning on man, both wrapped in blankets, at the 1969 Woodstock festival, which looks both fun and desolate
1796, the Presbyterian minister James McGready arrived in Kentucky to take charge of three small congregations near the Tennessee border. The Revolutionary War had only been over for five years, and the alliance of six tribal nations that sought to block American expansion into the northwest had just recently been defeated at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. What was once enemy territory had become a frontier. Newly-minted “American” speculators were now free to claim the land’s vast resources without fear of retaliation or interference. McGready’s arrival preceded a much larger wave of migration that would see hundreds of thousands of settlers pour into the region seeking fortune. He stood ready to meet them there, Bible in hand. McGready’s singular focus was conversion. According to his theology, it required a legitimate change of heart, not just a shift in habits or… Read More...

Streaming Services

Streaming Services is a new blog on the music Industry
  Hi, I’m Jaime. I’m an artist. I have valued music very much since I was quite young. I learned early on that everything that mattered to me could be taken away, except for music. No matter what I was going through, music was there to remind me that there was something worth living for on the other side of it. No matter how bleak and unrelatable I thought my life experiences were, I could still talk to people about music. Later, I would learn to express all of those hidden parts of myself through songs, which connected me to people all over the world who understood exactly what I was singing about. Music had only saved me once or twice when I first resolved to devote myself to it. It has saved me many more times since then. About… Read More...