Bob Dylan's influence on popular music is incalculable. As a songwriter, he pioneered several different schools of pop songwriting, from confessional singer/songwriter to winding, hallucinatory, stream-of-conscious narratives. As a vocalist, he broke down the notions that in order to perform, a singer had to have a conventionally good voice,... [+] Read More

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The son of Spanish immigrants, Cuban-born singer/songwriter Carlos Varela started composing in 1978. Two years later, he joined La Nueva Trova, a local movement led by Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanes. Carlos Varela graduated from the Cuban Art Institute ISA with an acting degree. He recorded his first album, Jalisco Park, in 1989, which was... [+] Read More

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Along with Silvio Rodriguez, Pablo Milanés was one of the crucial figures in Cuba's nueva trova popular-song movement of the late '60s; sponsored by Fidel Castro's government, the collective of nueva trova musicians were essentially supposed to reconfigure and update traditional Cuban folk musics for the nation's new, modern, post-revolutionary... [+] Read More

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Singer/songwriter Phil Ochs was a self-coined "singing journalist" when he began performing in New York in the early '60s. Like Bob Dylan, the rival who always outpaced him, Ochs made his reputation singing topical protest songs. He stayed with them much longer than Dylan (and indeed would never really abandon them), but eventually he too would... [+] Read More

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The tender balladry offsets the hard-edged, politically slanted lyrics of Silvio Rodriguez. A spearhead of the nueva trova (new ballad) style of nueva cancion (new song), Rodriguez masterfully blends romantic tunes with protest material condemning colonization and the tyranny that swept through Latin America in the late '60s and early '70s.... [+] Read More

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Tom Paxton proved to be one of the most durable of the singer/songwriters to emerge from the Greenwich Village folk revival scene of the early '60s. In some ways, he had more in common with the late-'50s generation of folksingers such as Dave Van Ronk (who was 16 months his senior) and even older performers than with the new crop of... [+] Read More

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