From highlife dance floors in Accra to Ethio-jazz nightclubs in Addis Ababa, ten musicians who turned a continent's liberation into sound. When Ghana lowered the Union Jack in 1957, a highlife band was playing.

Ten voices from ten corners of Latin America, the singers, composers, and bandleaders who turned a continent's songbook into the sound of the twentieth century. No century was kinder to Latin music than the twentieth, and no music did more to define the century's pulse.

Ten composers, from Schubert's parlor songs to Tchaikovsky's ballets, who turned the 1800s into music's most emotional century. When Beethoven died in 1827, he left European music a dangerous inheritance: the idea that a composer was not a servant but a visionary, and that a symphony could carry the weight of a soul.

Ten singers, players, and studio visionaries who turned the sound of Kingston into the heartbeat of the world, from ska and rocksteady through roots reggae and dub. No island has ever exported more music per square mile than Jamaica.

Ten singers, songwriters and one guitar-playing producer who, between the 1950s and the 1970s, turned a radio barn dance in Nashville into the capital of American song. For about a quarter of a century, the center of country music could be found in a single city and, on Saturday nights, in a single room.

Ten voices from a single furious decade, 1986 to 1996, when rap grew from block-party novelty into the defining American art form of its generation. Every art form has a moment when its grammar gets written, and for hip-hop that moment stretched from roughly 1986 to 1996.

Ten singers, guitarists, and harmonica players who took a music born in Mississippi cotton country and turned it into the foundation of nearly everything we listen to now. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, a narrow floodplain in northwest Mississippi produced a body of music out of all proportion to its size.