(Listen to the interview here.) 

"I've been around it all my life," Calvin Cooke said in a phone interview when asked how he learned to play steel guitar.

He grew up immersed in a Pentecostal culture, where he heard bands in church playing lap-steel guitar, lead guitar, and drums. Starting on regular guitar at an early age, Calvin's hands were too small to go around the instrument's neck, so he played it on his lap like a steel guitar, using the back of a knife for a slide. "Then when my mother realized I really wasn't going to play the lead guitar, she went to the pawn shop and got me an old steel guitar ... and she started teaching me by ear. ... That was back in the '50s. I got better and better, and then my cousin learned the lead guitar and we would play together" in church.

In O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Chris Thomas King plays the young blues musician Tommy Johnson, who sells his soul to the devil for the chance to become a legendary guitar player.

"Oh, son," says Tommy's new acquaintance, Delmar, upon learning of the deal. "For that you sold your everlasting soul?"

"Well," replies Tommy, "I wasn't usin' it."

Obviously, King wasn't being typecast in the role. King's musical accomplishments reveal nothing but soul.

(Listen to this interview here.) 

Modesty is a rare commodity in the world of rock and roll, but Delbert McClinton thinks it's an essential element of writing a good song.

"Being a songwriter, you have to know humility, and embrace it," he said in an interview last week. "In songwriting, there's what we around here call good stupid and bad stupid."

The moon's turned pink again with a "perfect storm" of projects revolving around Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon from 1973, led by a new interpretation of the album and culminating in Roger Waters' fall tour of the United States, performing the album in its entirety. Following up on its recent Back Against the Wall tribute, earlier this month Purple Pyramid Records released Return to the Dark Side of the Moon, boasting Adrian Belew, Colin Moulding of XTC, Tommy Shaw of Styx, John Wetton of Asia, Gary Green of Gentle Giant, Robby Krieger of The Doors, and actor Malcolm McDowell.