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Influencing everyone from The Rolling Stones to Cassandra Wilson, the blues recordings that came out of the Mississippi Delta from the late 1920s through the late '30s have had an enormous impact on American music. Hear songs from Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House and more.

The House actor worked with Joe Henry, Allen Toussaint, Dr. John and other New Orleans greats on his debut album, Let Them Talk.

Benson and the late Nat King Cole have a lot in common: Both started as acclaimed jazz instrumentalists, but became pop stars when they started singing. Cole was a huge influence on Benson, and the guitarist — who turned 70 this spring — pays tribute on his latest album.

Nobody could accuse composer Gunther Schuller of slacking off. He played principal French horn in the Cincinnati Symphony as a teenager, collaborated with Miles Davis and developed a new classical-jazz hybrid. And at 83, he's still composing.

Smith's first short story collection is wide-ranging, covering everything from politics to murder to drag queens. Some of the slighter stories feel like footnotes, but many show off Smith at her best.

A Springsteen concert "created a civic space in which two antithetical sentiments could coexist and communicate with each other," writes A.O. Scott. The Boss turns 70 years old today.

Mark Stryker covered jazz and its people for the Detroit Free Press for decades. He uses his reporter's eye and critic's ear to chronicle the musicians from the city who made their mark on the world.

In Catherynne M. Valente's new novel, a washed-up glitter punk musician has to save all humanity by singing in an intergalactic version of the Eurovision Song Contest. (Also, there are murderhippos.)

Is Don Giovanni the greatest opera of them all, as some have suggested? That's hard to say, but Mozart's brilliant combination of stark human tragedy and realistic comedy features music of limitless genius, and a drama that lives up to the score.

It's the 50th Anniversary of The Blob, one of a series of low-budget horror/sci-fi films that proliferated in the wake of the Cold War. The themes that made The Blob a hit in 1958 are still the ones that keep it in our consciousness today.