Besting the likes of Lil Wayne and Coldplay, the tandem of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss surprisingly won five statuettes at the 51st annual Grammy Awards last night. Their country-esque Raising Sand took Album of the Year and "Please Read the Letter" bagged Record of the Year. Lil Wayne took home three awards. Here's a more detailed account.

This article appears in Feb 4-10, 2009.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...