Steve Earle's latest album pulls no punches in its survey of the American social landscape. The “low highway” of the title track is a sort of hardship highway travelled by the underclass. It's Springsteen territory, occupied with pride in songs like “21st Century Blues” and the elegiac closer “Remember Me”.

Patty Andrews, the last surviving member of popular The Andrews Sisters singing trio of the 1940s and 1950s, has died in California at the age of 94, her spokesman said yesterday.

Her nasal soprano bellows out into the 20,000-strong throng, rising up and up to reach the gravelly top notes of “I Remain”. But where’s Alanis? The crowd can’t see her. There’s a full band but no sign. We crane our necks to double check that the bass player with long hair isn’t her (it's a big venue).

Generous, creative – and still groovy after all these years

The Channel 4 newsreader is to be opening act at London festival

"We consider this the last show of the Relationship of Command tour," keyboardist/guitarist Jim Ward lets us know at the end. "It’s taken us 12 years to finish." Then he adds, of his four band-mates: "I love these dudes more than life itself."

Six albums down the line, Dirty Projectors – aka David Longstreth and his band – show no signs of settling into any one formula.

'Mitch Mitchell wasn't the most accurate drummer ever, but he had that swing...'

Two sisters from the non-Alabama Birmingham playing western swing and bluegrass with their dad on banjo and steel guitar.

There's always been an easy-listening element to the McCartney oeuvre, but the lite-jazz treatment of standards on Kisses on the Bottom seems like a misstep.

For the end of their London Christmas season, English National Ballet dive into Strictly Gershwin with a will. Derek Deane’s production blends ballet and ballroom, with a dollop of tap dancing and a fair bit of padding. The dancers do it all with care and attention. At the back of the American in Paris crowd scenes, you can spot corps dancers giving their steps a flirtatious edge.

This 3CD set attempts to map out the most exhaustive pre-history of rock'n'roll so far committed to one album, and for the most part it does a pretty decent job, tracing the line back as far as the 1916 "The Camp Meeting Jubilee", a pre-blues minstrel-tent recording of such scratchy authenticity it sounds like a parody.

Displaying Olympian knowledge of this protean genre, Gioia combines facts and background information in an absorbing narrative that tootles along, from ragtime which peaked in 1909, to the "struts and prances" of vocalist Jamie Cullum (born 1979).

Pure gold: nearly three hours of classic 1950s Holiday (mostly recorded for Norman Granz on Clef), for about a fiver.