For the first 57 years of his life, Joe Henry rarely worried about his health. As an early teen, he'd suffered the fatigue of mononucleosis and once been in a car crash. A decade or so later, after he hoisted a heavy amplifier the wrong way, he'd required surgery to patch a hernia. Otherwise, for Henry, even common colds tended to be uncommonly brief.

For more than 30 years, Harry Connick Jr. has been putting out music that evokes the legacy of Frank Sinatra and other jazz icons. Now, he's back with a new album, True Love: A Celebration of Cole Porter, and an accompanying Broadway show. NPR's David Greene visited the singer in Hollywood's Capitol Studios, where Connick demonstrated a few Cole Porter classics on the piano and talked about the musician's enduring influence.

This past September, the 20th annual Americana Music Festival & Conference featured a broad range of showcases from diverse musicians across alt-country, roots-rock, bluegrass, R&B, blues, folk and the singer-songwriter genre.

Discover more of the jewels in Celtic roots-based music as we continue to sample the best from the Thistle mailbox. We feature new music from Karan Casey, Eamon Friel, Gerry O'Beirne and Karine Polwart.

NPR wants to read how sports has touched your life — in poetry form.

Country music is synonymous with Nashville. But there’s a city in Southern California that is often dubbed “Nashville West.” 

In the United Kingdom, Veterans Day is celebrated with red paper poppies pinned to lapels in remembrance of those who served in World War I. The practice caught on after the bloody battlefields of France bloomed with red poppies following the war. Every year, British people wear these red flower pins for about a month leading up to Nov. 11, and buying one of these paper flowers funds veterans groups. The U.K. memorializes the end of World War I with purpose and style.

Singer-songwriter and guitarist Alejandro Escovedo is a punk rock pioneer and veteran of Latino rock scene whose career has spanned almost 45 years. But the San Antonio-native and now-Austin resident is not the only one in his sprawling musical family to write a song or pick up a guitar; encouraged by their parents, especially their father who also played played, eight of the 13 siblings in became professional musicians.