Honoring William Christenberry (1936–2016) Bill Christenberry was like a spiritual brother who explored his homeland in Hale County, Alabama, with a keen eye. Each summer he returned to document and photograph these familiar worlds. With his meticulous eye, he showed the weight of time on this landscape, tracking change as paint faded and peeled on »
A symposium and celebration in honor of the 30th anniversary of the Center for the Study of the American South and Southern Cultures, and the 50th anniversary of the Southern Oral History Program Events will take place on the UNC campus at the Center for the Study of the American South (410 E. Franklin Street) »
Music
On August 26, 1967, the Lads of Liverpool (a.k.a. the Beatles) yielded the no. 1 spot on Billboard’s pop chart to an unknown musician. Mississippian Bobbie Gentry’s iconic song, “Ode to Billie Joe,” remained in that space for four weeks. During that time, her audience latched onto what seemed to be a mystery in the »
Photo Essay
He stops for the interview, the conversation, the song, the photograph. We’re not 8 AM folks. So we mostly missed the start of William Ferris’s courses on Southern Music and Southern Literature, which he long held down the hall at our home in the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC. Instead, »
Matthew’s article is a great jumping off point for talking about representation in general, and representation of southern communities, in particular. He looks at the “history of documentary work there from the perspective of those who have been photographed, filmed and described. Instead of a place defined by documentarians, Hale County becomes a battleground where struggles over who gets to represent a people and place, and why, have flared for more than a century. The resistance of the documented rather than the revelation of the documentarians becomes the dominant theme” (34). Southern Cultures is full of pictures of southerners who could be considered marginal or disadvantaged. Why might this be so?
This article features photographs by artist and Alabama native William Christenberry as well as excerpts from an interview Ferris conducted with him for his film Painting in the South. Christenberry’s photographs feature a homemade grave marker, an old church and a shot gun house. He professes an attraction to things that are “decaying” or “vanishing from the landscape,” not because he is trying to represent a “decaying South,” he insists, but because he finds these “old and changing” things beautiful. We might ask: wherein lies their beauty? Read the complete piece online for free.
Harbage-Page’s photographs of the women she worked with at the Bollag International Corporation in Charlotte feature subjects at their work place, looking squarely into the camera. Excerpts from interviews accompany the photographs and tell part of each woman’s life story: “I’m thirty-nine years old, and I have six kids. I was fourteen when I had my first one, I was twenty when I had my last one” (104). How does the content of these excerpts fulfill or challenge our expectations? How does the portraiture style Harbage-Page chose, plus the text, impact the way we read the images, these women’s bodies?
Isaiah Rice was an amateur photographer who documented everyday life in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina during the 1950s, 60s and 70s. His photographs featured here offer an insider’s perspective of a vibrant African American community and reveal implicitly the racial segregation that divided (and continues to divide) all southern cities. People attending parades, waitresses in conversation, friends visiting in homes: Rice’s images are often of candid moments that subjects might not be aware are being photographed. These intimate snapshots of Rice’s Burton Street Neighborhood form a picture of an Appalachian town perhaps at odds with readers’ expectations. Read the complete piece online for free.
This photo essay features Mississippi people, sites and objects. Ferris’s captions to his color photographs tell of aesthetic preferences and a deep sense of place. Handmade canes, quilts, signs and, in several cases, their makers, fill up the frames of Ferris’s photographs. What do these handmade objects and the faces and hands of their makers evoke for readers? What conversations do they invite? What is missing? Pair this piece with others in Southern Cultures by Ferris.
Chavez’s photo essay and its introduction invite readers into the world of huapango arribeno music that migrants and immigrants from the Mexican highlands bring with them to the American South. He delivers ethnomusicological perspectives on flows and borders and points to how musical culture is a form of mobile place-making, with the power to dissolve the fixity of nation-state boundaries. Chavez’s photos feature dancers and musicians in US and Mexican contexts. An elaborately ornamented tablado—elevated stand for musicians—in a plaza in Mexico contrasts sharply with sparer counterparts in rural Mississippi and Texas. Couples dancing, straw cowboy hats and tight jeans, straight-backed musicians and flouncy quincenero gowns offer motifs to think with and invite conversations about the “Mexican South.” Do Chavez’s photographs invite a voyeuristic gaze? Or do they provide a self-possessed counter narrative to more desperate conditions revealed in other views of migrant life? (See “Those Who Complain Often Don’t Come Back: Stories of Migrant Life,” Southern Cultures, Vol. 22, No. 1, Documentary Arts.)
Farrell’s photographs of the Brown Island mullet camp off the North Carolina coast are packed with visual information. Cecelski’s detailed descriptions of each photograph explain the significance of their subtle content: a free-range hog wandering in the sea oats; the smooth and narrow Intracoastal Waterway in the distance; a fisherman’s hat waterproofed with linseed oil. The photographs and Cecelski’s descriptions illuminate a history of southern fisheries, the work of two families, and the rhythms of daily life at the fishing camps. A few years after Farrell made his photographs at Brown Island, the two families ceased their annual migration to the fishing camp. How do the photographic choices of documentarians such as Farrell impact our understanding and interest in certain places and pasts?
Evans’ essay features her original paintings of vintage food packaging paired with other symbols–some from women’s worlds (combs, oil cloth table coverings, jewelry), some with resonances beyond those worlds (a rabbit’s foot keychain, a wooden ruler, a dollar sign). Evans describes her artistic process and a bit about her inspiration: “I gravitate to food-related packaging for its connection to another era—one of cheese-laden casseroles, mayonnaise drenched salads, and strong drinks at lunch” (8). How do Evans’ paintings speak to particular perspectives on the South? On southern women and their domestic offices, their significance to larger social fabrics?
Lundy’s discovery of the Saltville Centennial Cookbook in the southwest Virignia town’s history museum led to inspiration for this richly emblematic piece published on the Southern Cultures website. The biographical narratives that accompany these small-town recipes inspired Evans’ original paintings redolent with images of food, kitchen and women’s aesthetic lives. Each of Evans’ paintings illustrates an excerpt from a recipe narrative.
This essay features a short, thought-provoking introduction to Minik’s photographic portraits of teenagers from the Georgia piedmont. Subjects are from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and appear in different contexts, from shopping malls to farm fields. Minik writes: “I wanted to explore the South through its teenagers, in the gray area between affirming and questioning their roles in the places they occupy. This ambiguous personal space resonated particularly well in the evolving suburban landscape of the Georgia piedmont, a place undergoing its own transitions and forging a southern identity beyond the agrarian stereotypes often associated with the region” (40). How do the teenagers featured in Minik’s photographs embody notions of the contemporary South? How do they stand in for the multiplicity of southern experiences?
Interview
“As a small child in the 1920s, I was very much affected by the Harlem Renaissance. As early as age eleven, I had read poetry by Langston Hughes.” I met Margaret Walker Alexander in the fall of 1970 when I taught my first class at Jackson State University. She and I both taught in the »
“I don’t know whether people in [Bulgaria] realize how much they owe somebody they may never have heard of.” —Elena Poptodorova Without ever stepping foot on southern soil, renowned literary translator Krastan Dyankov made southern writing—its language, narratives, and nuances—come alive in his native Bulgarian. “The translator—not only of fiction, but of any text—is the »
21c Fiction
Back when John Updike didn’t get it, Shannon Ravenel did. From her early days in New York publishing, to co-founding Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill and editing the essential New Stories from the South series for two decades, Ravenel has been at the fore of shaping and sharing southern literature. We recently sat down with »
Over our 22-year history, we’re proud to have published 22 articles by our esteemed colleague and friend William Ferris—from interviewing B.B. King to finding Faulkner in Bulgaria. William Ferris is one of the greatest documentarians of the twentieth-century South. His collection of photographs, audio, film, and writings at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Southern Folklife Collection encompasses some »
“Who could miss the blood-pounding rush of events that awful spring, with the bands playing, the girls cheering, elders looking proud and tearful, as scowls of disapproval already darkened against ‘tories’ and shirkers?” Robert Penn Warren is one of the unquestioned giants of twentieth-century southern culture. Poet, novelist, and reporter, he emerged as a younger »
“Some people were just nuts about them. And they also have a mystique around extraterrestrial stuff.” The Moon Pie is an icon in the American South, where both its image and its taste evoke memories of country stores and their agrarian worlds. If we Google Moon Pies, 3,060,000 (currently the number is 40,500,000) references appear »
Food
“‘That’s all I wants to do . . . to find something to can. I can stay in the kitchen from morning ’til night canning—’if I can find something to can, and have the jars, and the tops—’good tops, and lids. I loves to can.’” In a 2008 ethnographic celebration of American county fairs, Drake »