McCartney! PBS! Tonight!

PBS tonight airs the long-awaited “Paul McCartney: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song In Performance at the White House” at 8 p.m. EDT, with an encore showing at 9:30.

It’s an all-star concert that features music from McCartney himself and Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello, Jonas Brothers, Herbie Hancock, Corinne Bailey Rae, Dave Grohl, Faith Hill, Emmylou Harris, Lang Lang and Jack White, with remarks by Jerry Seinfeld.

The Library announced in May that Sir Paul was to be the third recipient of the Gershwin Prize, which celebrates a lifetime of creative output in the realm of popular music.  President Barack Obama conferred the Prize on the legendary rocker last month at the White House during the taping of the performance that airs tonight.

To whet your palate, enjoy a couple of videos.  The first is a backstage look at the Jonas Brothers and their White House performance of “Drive My Car.”  The second is White Stripes frontman Jack White’s rendition of the hauntingly beautiful “Mother Nature’s Son.”

You can read a little more about it on the Music Division’s blog, “In the Muse.”

See You In The Funny Papers

There are many avenues of research at the Library of Congress. Some are a laugh riot! Take, for example, the vast collections of cartoons and caricature in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division. For more than a century, the Library has collected pictorial humor  – collections that range from a lifetime’s worth of cartoons by …

Read more »

A Man of the Folk

This is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, program officer with the Library’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program In 1975, Alan Jabbour and I began a project to document the fiddle playing of Senator Robert C. Byrd, who passed away a few days ago at the age of 92.  Sen. Byrd was aware that …

Read more »