NPT Music Monthly February 2010

Nashville’s Music Row is at once a street of dreams, and a boulevard of broken ones. Every day people arrive in town full of dreams of music business success. Most leave, or remain, with those dreams unfulfilled. For some, the closest thing to achieving those dreams is to live vicariously through a successful friend or family member (or reality-show contestant).

Take then, the story of Priscilla, a precocious nine-year-old little girl who tells her single-father, Jesse, “I am going to become a rapper and fulfill your dreams of succeeding in the music business.” Moved by his daughter’s passion and impressed with her talent, he begins to teach her all he knows about rapping. Emboldened with a new moniker – P-Star – father and daughter go from a one-bedroom shelter in Harlem to a four-bedroom apartment, from food stamps to shopping sprees, from rapping on street corners to sold-out night clubs. But in the efforts to make her dad proud, Priscilla struggles to remain a child and finds herself trapped in a world of people twice her size and four times her age and doesn’t know whom to trust. The ride has just begun, and P-Star has already secured a recurring role on the reconstituted Electric Company.Independent Lens presents P-Star Rising on Tuesday, February 9 at 9:00 p.m.

In honor of Black History Month. President and Mrs. Obama host a concert in the White House East Room celebrating the Music of the Civil Rights Era. In Performance at the White House, on Monday, February 22 at 9:00 p.m., includes performances by Natalie Cole, Bob Dylan, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, John Mellencamp, Smokey Robinson, Seal, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Yolanda Adams, Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon and the Howard University Choir perform. Morgan Freeman and Queen Latifah host.

Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, Shawn Colvin and Buddy Miller – Three Girls and Their Buddy – are on Soundstage; Them Crooked Vultures – Josh Homme, Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones – are on Austin City Limits. It’s another great month of music programming on NPT.

Read the Rest of the NPT Music Monthly February 2010 on the wnpt.net news page. It’s the complete listing of all the music programming coming to NPT this month, including all the above mentioned artists, plus Kenny Chesney, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Esperanza Spalding, Steve Earle, Kris Kristofferson and plenty more. Subscribe for free at wnpt.net. Tell your friends!