This year's additions to the eighth yearly National Recording Registry include jazz and rock songs, rap music and a classic motion picture theme song.
VOA: special.2010.07.09
With their colourful flowing robes, fusion of traditional African music and jazz and contagious beat, they even dedicated a song to the godfather of world music, Peter Gabriel.
Top recording artists serve as your guide as they discuss, for example, what makes jazz such an important American phenomenon, what the song-writing process is like or how one genre of music has deeply affected another.
Even within the confines of musically narrow genres, Cooder allows himself room to stretch, manipulating the song structures of 1930s American music: minstrel folk, country ballads, blues and even the lounge jazz of Chet Baker.