folkways

Ms. Somers is a wonderfully wry chronicler of millennial folkways.

In fact, Mazor’s book points out that the brothers, who were born two years apart, moved around a lot as kids — Iowa and Chicago, mostly — soaking in the musical folkways of those regions and absorbing it all into their musical bloodstream.

Its nine stories concern the complicated Bengali families in India and America, and Lahiri’s elegant, observant prose is constantly alert to the ways that lore and folkways shape or abrade relationships.

Hurley, born in Pennsylvania, honed his cracked perspective on bluegrass, blues and folk in the Greenwich Village folk scene in New York in the ‘60s, after producer and folklorist Fred Ramsey picked him up on a hitchiking ramble. He released his debut album, 1964’s “First Songs,” on Folkways, the acclaimed home of Woody Guthrie and curator Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music.”

The lifetime achievement Grammy Award winner, who recorded primarily for children, died “peacefully” at her residence in Chicago, according to her longtime record label, Smithsonian Folkways.