The Music Museum of New England

On April 22, 1978, about 14 months before Mike Welch was born, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd debuted as the Blues Brothers on Saturday Night Live, belting out their raucous rendition of “Hey Bartender” and becoming such an embedded element of American pop culture that plenty of GenZers know who they were. And on October 1, 1992, about 14 weeks after Welch turned 13, n...

The word “troubadour” has morphed in meaning since it first entered the English language (around 1741, according to Merriam-Webster), originally referring to lyric poets between the 11th and 13th centuries but used most often today to describe traveling singer-songwriters, particularly those of the folk genre. And when it comes to folk blues, Rhode Island native Paul Geremia ...

Founded in 1946 in downtown Brockton, Massachusetts, Central Music was much more than just another retail storefront. In fact, it was one of the most prominent music shops in Greater Boston for decades, a “music mecca,” as longtime residents describe it, that drew musicians, music students and music lovers in general from Brockton, surrounding towns, parts of the South Shore ...

When the Strand Theatre opened on November 11, 1918, The Boston Sunday Post called it “New England’s most beautiful theatre,” declaring it “a lasting monument to an ideal – the ideal of building a great people’s theatre” and noting that the venue sold tickets “at prices so moderate that all the people could easily pay.” Designed by Boston-based Funk and Wilcox, the a...

Industrial electronic duo Manufacture emerged as an outlier on Boston’s mid-’80s scene, bridging the gap between punk’s raw energy, industrial’s mechanical edge and emerging cyberpunk aesthetics with a pioneering blend of aggressive, synth-driven beats, sampled environmental sounds and politically charged visuals. Unlike the then dominant guitar-rock and college-radio indie a...