June is right around the corner and so is Black Music Month, our favorite month to celebrate here at On The Groove Line. To honor the contributions of Black musicians and music industry professionals, we will present our “Black Music Month 30” podcast series on our YouTube channel. Called #BMM30…
Mya Harrison has long been a talented singer, songwriter and dancer, as well as one of the most aesthetically enchanting women to walk the planet. And just in time for Summer 2026, she returns with a fun and funky, electric and electro-influenced album called Retrospect. Retrospect pays homage to a…
Carla Benson is one of the most recorded background vocalists in music history and after over 50 years, she’s ready to tell her story. “Journey Into Love” is Carla’s self-published memoir about her time with her late cousin Barbara Ingram and late best friend Evette Benton as the dynamic backing…
In what is expected to be a great year of R&B, Ari Lennox dropped her third studio album, Vacancy, last Friday and it’s a promising sign of things to come in 2026. With production from Jermaine Dupri and Brian Michael Cox, longtime collaborator Elite, J White Produced It and Camper,…
Growing up in the 90s, consuming Black Media and music felt like a birthright more than a privilege. Living just about a half hour south of Philadelphia, music was always accessible as were the morning talk shows my mom had on the car dropping me and my younger sister off…
Aleem had long been a part of New York’s thriving Black music scene, going back to their association with a wild-child guitarist from Seattle named Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s. TaharQa Z. and Tunde Ra Aleem, also known as the Fantastic Aleems, started their own NIA Records imprint in 1979…
Dexter Wansel, the Philadelphia-based songwriter/producer, turns 75 years young today and his contributions to the Sound of Philadelphia are as important as those of the producers he followed. Wansel joined Philadelphia International Records in the mid 70s just as Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff started delegating more production duties out…
The Valentine Brothers, John and Billy, are R&B veterans of many years, spanning the Stax era to the synth-dominated early 80s. After experiencing success with the 1982 song “Money’s Too Tight (To Mention),” the Columbus, Ohio-born siblings returned to the studio for Have A Good Time, released on A&M Records…
Our long national nightmare is over as Hall & Oates are no longer feuding…at least from a legal perspective. A business dispute between Philly rock legends Daryl Hall and John Oates was resolved privately Monday, bringing an end to a feud that did not seem likely to ever end. “That…
August 8th is celebrated in the music community thanks to the Roland TR-808 drum machine, a programmer that gave Hip-Hop, House, Electro and more a solid base to craft memorable jams on. The TR-808 was introduced by the Roland Corporation of Japan in 1980, on the heels of the CR-78,…