Randa Abdel-Fattah
speaker
3,221 appearances
41 recordings
9 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 8 Sep
Randa Abdel-Fattah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 38 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 15.
Appearances
This is scholar and classical pianist Lara Downs.
She's been working on her own AP250 series with NPR, looking at the last 250 years through music.
I realized that classical musicians start our training very young.
I mean, by the time I was four years old, I was already a musician.
That understanding of the world by playing music that's 200 and 300 years old.
For me, 250 years, I'm like, yeah, that's where I live all the time.
When you think about it, there really is no better through-line to history than music.
How songs, the very music notes, are passed down, sampled and recycled, and sometimes turned into something completely new.
Not only do they get passed down, but they get passed around.
They move among different sectors, and with the constant flow into this country, too, there's just been this never-stopping evolution.
Today on the show, we're going to hear some of Lara's series, three stories featuring writers, musicians, and scholars about three songs that have defined America.
Amazing Grace, My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free, and Get Happy.
What I always say about these songs is that, like, my great-grandmother knew this song and your great-grandmother knew this song.
And they might have lived totally different lives in very different places.
And that song, like, connected them across time and place.
And I think that that is the superpower of music is that these songs, they illustrate that our journeys have been shared and our troubles have been shared.
And, you know, that we have worked together in many ways to bring this country to the present day.
That's coming up after a quick break.
Author Isaac Butler takes us back to when the Christian right mobilized against provocative art.
Listen to Fresh Air on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Showing 541–560 of 3,221 · page 28 of 162
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