This week we focus on some of the great women in music. The 82-year old jazz diva Anita O’Day talks about her rebound from years of drug abuse, and rockabilly shouter Wanda Jackson recounts her 50 years in the male-dominated music business. We’ll also pay a visit to soul queen Betty Wright, and listen to many other female voices that have helped shape the American musical soundscape.

Dolly Parton talks about her musical and family roots in the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee where she first broke into song, performed on the radio, and admired the fashion of the local trollop. With Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” and hear music from across the American spectrum.

2003 has been designated by Congress as the “Year of the Blues,” and American Routes focuses on two of the genre’s heavyweights: the late Muddy Waters, from Rolling Fork, MS, and the very much alive Buddy Guy, formerly of Baton Rouge, LA. First, a portrait of Muddy from his band members James Cotton, Willie Smith and Bob Margolin, with biographer Robert Gordon. Then Buddy Guy, who played guitar with Waters as a young rising star on the influential 1964 LP “Muddy Waters: Folk Singer,” and who has been regarded as one of finest players of electric city blues for years. We’ll talk with Guy about his extraordinary life, his most recent CD “Blues Singer,” an acoustic tribute to the ’64 Muddy album, and his present-day Chicago nightclub devoted to the blues.