“Little about the South has meant more to southerners than their tunes.” Spirituals, blues, Dixieland, jazz. Ballads, old-time, hillbilly, bluegrass. Country, Cajun, zydeco. Sacred Harp, gospel, Christian rock. R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, rockabilly, “southern rock.” Nashville, honky-tonk, alt-country, progressive country. The list of southern musical varieties and hybrids goes on and on. It’s hard to »

“I almost lost my life trying to save my guitar.” B.B. King’s name is synonymous with the blues. At the age of eighty-one, the blues patriarch maintains a rigorous schedule of performances throughout the nation and overseas that would exhaust a much younger artist. King’s performances and recordings have shaped the blues for more than »

“‘Oh, wake up in the mornin’ ’bout the break of day.'” I think this is how the blues actually started. During slavery, they didn’t always think in terms of God freeing them because they were being sold and separated from their families. Many things of that sort were happening to them, and singing to God »

In Memoriam Sidney A. Seidenberg, a prominent manager in the music business for many years, passed away on May 3, 2006, after a long illness. He was eighty-one. He began as a music business accountant, and, during a career that spanned thirty-five years, he managed the careers of B.B. King, Gladys Knight and the Pips, »

“They stopped at a gas station in Andalusia, Alabama, and found a justice of the peace who had a Bible and the right forms to fill out and on top of that was sober.” Hiram “Hank” Williams was born on a tenant farm in Mt. Olive, Alabama, in 1923. His daddy Lon was a Great »

“Does love have the power to heal our blues?” Where is the Love?” is the title of a memorably wistful duet recorded in the early seventies by Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway; a lament for the way in which Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of redemptive interracial brotherhood or “beloved community,” which animated the Civil »

“We got the feel of the blues, the togetherness of funk music, the conviction of gospel music, the energy of rock, and the improvisation of jazz.” By the summer of 1995, the Atlanta-based rap group OutKast had watched their first album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, achieve platinum sales of over one million. This feat earned them an award »

“Presley faced criticism from ministers about his lewd performances.” In December 1956 Elvis Presley dropped in at Sun Studios in Memphis, just as a Carl Perkins recording session was ending. Presley was now a national star, having transcended earlier that year his previous status as a regional rockabilly performer. That special day became known as »

“The Blue Yodeler’s first royalty came out to $27.” James Charles Rodgers was born in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1897. His mother, Eliza, died when he was four years old. After that, he was off riding the rods with his father, a foreman on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. By the time he reached fourteen, Jimmie »

“I wish they’d get tired of tuning and play.” They seem to think they have something to say,those locusts high in your circle of pines.I wish they’d get tired of tuning and play.

“American popular culture would be unimaginable without the music created by the South’s disfranchised, impoverished, and forgotten peoples.” Southerners have every right to be proud of the music we have produced and bequeathed to the entire globe. American popular culture would be unimaginable without the music—blues and rock ‘n’ roll, jazz and country, gospel and »

“He left the shop stunned and went back and wrote in his diary: ‘Robbed in a New York barbershop—$7.50!'” David Harrison Macon was born at Smart Station near McMinnville on the Highland Rim of Tennessee in 1870. As long as anyone could remember, he was “nuts about a banjo.” When Dave was thirteen, his father, »

“Songwriter and singer Dorsey Dixon was never supposed to live.” Carolina Piedmont singer and songwriter Dorsey Dixon was never supposed to live. At his birth in 1897, in Darlington, South Carolina, he was a puny, oxygen-starved baby weighing only three pounds. “I heard [my parents] tell friends and neighbors many times that I was a »

“I proudly sent the lyrics off to a friend with connections in the country-music business, asking him if he didn’t agree that it was a natural-born hit.” Like many country songs, I suspect, “My Tears Spoiled My Aim” grew out of a title—in this case, one that came to me in a blinding flash of »

“They lit out over the bad roads, and the family car broke down in the middle of a stream.” The Carters started small, singing in churches . . . Alvin Pleasant Carter, born in 1891, sang in a quartet with two uncles and a sister in churches around Clinch Mountain in southwest Virginia. People called »

Music Issue Companion CD Track List 1| “‘A passed-down thing. . .’” B.B. KING 2:07 B.B. King at his home, 11 December 1974. All B.B. King tracks are courtesy of the William R. Ferris Collection #20367, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, UNC-CH. 2| “Boogie Chillun” LOVEY WILLIAMS 2:14 Lovey Williams: guitar & vocals. Recorded in »