ARCHIVE

Music in Time: Road Trip (Audio)

Aug 24, 2022

This month it's a special summer vacation episode of "Music In Time." As your host -- like so many Americans -- takes to the highway for a summer escape, we leave behind our usual album-feature format in favor of a musical-historical road trip. We'll be listening our way through some of the key moments in the evolution of car stereo systems, exploring the American affair with not just the automobile, but with driving music. We'll make stops with tunes & artists from points familiar and eccentric: from in-car record turntables in the 1950s to 8-track cartridges in the 60s, the dawn of the CD 80s to our streaming dystopia of the present. Along the way, we'll compile a sweet little playlist of our own featuring songs inspired by, about, and suitable for ridin' along in our automobiles.
1. Woody Guthrie - Car Song
2. Cole Porter - Anything Goes
3. The String-a-Longs - Wheels
4. Ricky Nelson - Travelin' Man
5. Dean Martin - C'est Magnifique
6. Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels - Jenny Take a Ride
7. The Supremes - You Can't Hurry Love
8. Canned Heat - On the Road Again
9. Flying Burrito Brothers - Six Days on The Road
10. The Cars - Drive
11. Beastie Boys - Slow Ride
12. New Radicals - You Get What You Give
13. Ms. Lauryn Hill - Doo Wop (That Thing)
14. The Eels - Mr. E's Beautiful Blues
15. The Old 97s - Buick City Complex

Music does not just exist. It exists in specific times and places, and in the sonic world of each individual listener who engages with it. That’s the basic idea behind "Music in Time," which explores the social and political context in which songs and albums emerge, are listened to, and reflected on over the years. Each broadcast will focus on a single album, detailing the social and political circumstances surrounding its release and moments in time that made certain music resonate anew. How is music shaped by these historical moments, and, in turn, how does it shape the histories that we remember?

By day, Evan McCormick is a historian at Columbia University, where he is part of the Obama Presidency Oral History project, interviewing a range of people — from cabinet members to ordinary folks — about their memories of the Obama years. By night McCormick is a music lover and singer-songwriter, recording under the stage name Egan Caufield. For most of his life these two worlds remained separate, but after relocating to Catskill, in 2020, he chose to bring history and music together over the airwaves, and Music in Time was born.