Great Lives Folgen

The prolific and most significant of American song-hunters - Alan Lomax - is the choice of English folk singer Shirley Collins. She's joined by singer-songwriter and activist Billy Bragg. Lomax did whatever was necessary to preserve traditional music and take it to a wider audience. He was the first to record towering figures like Lead Belly, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie. He was instrumental in the revival of U.S. and UK folk. Shirley Collins met Lomax in 1954, after he'd moved to England to avoid the U.S. McCarthy witch-hunt. She tells the story of how they fell in love and describes their recording trips around Europe and in America's Deep South, on the cusp of the civil rights movement. Lomax's ambition was to give a voice to the voiceless, and that took him from fisherman shacks to prisons, farmyards to cotton mills. His steadfast drive to capture cultures before they disappeared resulted in a staggering amount of recordings we can listen to today, from gospel choirs to Cajun fiddling, country blues to calypsos and Haitian voodoo rituals.Presenter: Matthew Parris. Producer: Eliza LomasFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in May 2019.

Turner Prize Winner Jeremy Deller believes the music entrepreneur and The Beatles' manager Brian Epstein, has never been properly credited for his role within popular culture.He's arguing that if Brian hadn't have lived, The Beatles might never have left Liverpool.Jeremy and presenter Matthew Parris are joined by The Beatles' historian Mark Lewisohn, author of 'Tune In’, to discuss the deeply turbulent - but highly successful life of Brian Epstein, who died aged just 32. Producer: Eliza LomasFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in May 2019.

In 2013, Caroline Criado-Perez successfully campaigned for a woman to be featured on a banknote. The Bank of England chose Jane Austen. Caroline joins Matthew Parris and Dr Paula Byrne, author of three books about the novelist, to challenge some of the myths which surround the life of one of history's most famous writers. Matthew discovers how Jane Austen's teenage writings shocked and entertained her family and learns about her grit and determination to be published. He finds out whether there was ever a Mr Darcy in the author's real life and hears why Caroline thinks Austen might just be the Georgians' answer to Fleabag. Producer: Camellia SinclairFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in May 2019.