Art Silverman

Monday, May 3, 2021, marks the 50th anniversary of NPR's first on-air original broadcast. In the last half century, NPR and Member stations have been essential, trusted sources for local events and cultural programming featuring music, local history, education and the arts. To mark this milestone, we're reflecting on — and renewing — our commitment to serve an audience that reflects America and to Hear Every Voice.

In the 50 years that All Things Considered has been on the air, the ground under journalism has shifted.

Appalachian Road Show — a band formed in 2018 by the independently acclaimed musicians Barry Abernathy, Darrell Webb, Zeb Snyder, Jim VanCleve and Todd Phillips — was just getting ready to release an album full of traditional songs about hardship and heartache when the real-life modern crisis of the coronavirus struck.

Fittingly, the folk and bluegrass supergroup's new release is called Tribulation.

With Americans across the country stuck at home, demand for jigsaw puzzles is surging. Puzzlemakers can't keep up.

"Around the second week of March, we notice sales at one of our largest retail customers ... were up 300% over the same week the previous year," says Carol Glazer, president of Ceaco. The Massachusetts company is one of the largest producers of jigsaw puzzles and family games in the U.S.

"And we said, 'Oh my God. How can you prepare for something like this?' "

High schools are closed and their musicals are canceled around the country because of coronavirus concerns.

Theater kids now have no audience to showcase the numbers they've worked on, some for months and even years.

They won't have a live audience for the time being, but Broadway star Laura Benanti, who won a Tony award in 2008 for her performance in Gypsy, wanted to give student performers the next best thing — an online audience.

She put the call out on Friday.

On All Things Considered 40 years ago this month, here's how host Noah Adams introduced an iconic album:

"New music from a group said by some critics to be the best rock and roll band in the world: The band's name is The Clash, the record is London Calling."

London Calling stood out from the punk rock of its time: It was political, knowing and clever. Compact disks were still a few years away, so the album's 19 songs spilled over two vinyl disks.

As young men, the sons of the Villalobos family in rural Veracruz, Mexico embarked on separate paths — at least, geographically. One by one, the three violin-playing brothers left their hometown of Xalapa to study classical music abroad. Ernesto, the oldest of the three, went to study at the Manhattan School of Music. Alberto, the middle brother, went to the Royal Conservatory of Brussels and finally Luis, the youngest, went to the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg, Germany.

K.Flay kicked off her musical career with experimental rap mixtapes like Suburban Rap Queen. Since then, the singer has dabbled in different styles, but retained a biting, rough-around-the-edges sound. She's dropped such projects as I Stopped Caring in '96 and Life as a Dog and her Grammy-nominated 2017 track "Blood In The Cut" is a raging strutter.

Some music is so ingrained in our collective minds that it's easy to forget how game-changing it was. In the late 1960s, a marriage of rock and folk took place and much of the popular music from that union was being made in a single place — Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles.

Though Pete Seeger, the heralded folk singer, songwriter and social activist died in 2014, his voice has left a lasting impression on American music. May 3, 2019 would have been Seeger's 100th birthday and to mark the centennial, Smithsonian Folkways is set to release a six-CD collection titled Pete Seeger: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection.

Whenever you bring together dozens of different countries from around the globe, there's bound be some cross-cultural confusion. The World Cup is no exception.

And if you're Shin Tae-yong, coach of the South Korean national team, you figure out how to work that confusion to your advantage. In a press conference Sunday, Shin explained the unusual tactic he'd employed against scouts from the Swedish team: He'd had his team members swap jersey numbers for the warm-up games, in hopes that scouts wouldn't be able to tell the players apart.