Featured // Vol. 31, No. 4
“There’s a Place Down by the Mall”
essay by Amanda Marie Martínez
Our Past
Browse past issues and articles from the last 30 years
Music
It Just Means More
SEC Football in Country Music
by Sarah CarterIn 1982, my cousin David “Hoss” Johnson was the last recruit Bear Bryant signed to the University of Alabama. He got his nickname at birth when he arrived on this earthly playing field at a whopping thirteen pounds, played in forty-eight games for Alabama, started in twenty-eight, and made the All-Decade ’80s Team. For five »
Interview
Making Our Own Ecosystem
by Frankie Staton, Rissi Palmer, Holly G, Amanda Marie MartínezReflecting on a century of country music, I could think of no one better to talk to than Frankie Staton, Rissi Palmer, and Holly G to get a finger on the pulse of the country music industry. Although the history of the country music business is a story of impressive commercial success, its growth has »
Music
A Fading Caricature
Riley Puckett and Country Music's Silencing Power
by Cameron Knowler“Riley’s continuous success in his lifetime . . . demonstrates that his musical talent and ambition transcended the marketing initiatives that ubiquitously upsold his disability.” A case study of Riley Puckett, a bestselling—yet largely forgotten—name in the fledgling country music industry of the early 1920s, starkly demonstrates how the genre’s century-long appeal to authenticity is »
Music
This Ain’t Texas No More!
Beyoncé and the Black Banjo Renaissance
by Joe Z. Johnson“Cowboy Carter has undeniably reignited mainstream conversations about Black contributions to country music and the banjo’s African diasporic origins.” In February 2024, during a Super Bowl 57 commercial, Beyoncé released a teaser hinting at what audiences speculated would be a country music album, released months later as Cowboy Carter. It featured Rhiannon Giddens performing a »
Music
This Is Country Music
by Amanda López“I quickly learned that not only were there other artists of color making country music, but the genre itselfwouldn’t exist without the contributions of Black musicians and the West African roots of the banjo.” I was nine years old when I heard country music for the first time. My favorite cousin, Ruthie, was watching my »
Music
Hillbilly Overalls
Dressing a Modern Vernacular
by Sonya Abrego“Country or hillbilly music and overalls are part of a modern vernacular; the music and garments evoke nostalgia for a ‘simpler’ past, while being the products of commercial enterprise and industrial modernity.” Westernwear is having a moment that’s bringing attention to the fashion of country artists past and present. It’s not the first time that »
Music
The Log Cabin that Never Was
by Brooks Blevins“By his own account, the model for the Grand Ole Opry radio show was a hoedown Hay attended ‘in a log cabin about a mile up a muddy road’ outside a little Arkansas burg called Mammoth Spring.” It’s a Monday in late August. I stand in the middle of a dirt road, flush on the »
Music
“There’s a Place Down by the Mall”
Locating Country Music's Modern Landscape
by Amanda Marie MartínezIt’s a Tuesday afternoon at Southpoint Mall in Durham, North Carolina. As I window shop, I notice LeAnn Rimes’s “Nothin’ Better to Do” playing from the speakers. It’s followed by a pleasant but unassuming mix of songs from Kenny Chesney, Miranda Lambert, and Kacey Musgraves. This is a country music playlist. On my last two »
Poetry
After 96 Years of Business, Brown’s Diner Begins Serving Impossible Burgers
by Lou TurnerBut I always had a bit of an authenticity complex,plus, D the waitress whispers, that’s not real Brown’s.and when my town has built an empiric tourism industryaround “authenticity”—something they stole to begin with—it’s hard to smell the stakes through mouthfuls of fake blood.Even Brown’s changed ownership recently and began renovation. I do wish to do »
Music
Country Is All in Your Heart
by Emily Jack, Aaron SmithersFeaturing some of the songs, artists, and movements mentioned in the issue, this collection brings you country music’s beating heart and storied soul: Heartaches and homecomings. Hip-hop and hoedowns. Heroes and heroines, penning hits and swinging hammers. Icons and up-and-comers. Fiddles and banjos. Boots and backroads and bulls. Ancestors and descendants from the hometowns and »
Food
Fig by Fig
by April McGreger, illustrations by Phil BlankMy mother loves to tell the story of how I came into the world “bellering like a bull” and continued throughout my childhood to produce cries that rattled the walls, matched by an equally big laugh. This is proof, she implies, that I’ve always been more fire than she can handle. But life has a »
Art
MONUMENTS
by Grace Elizabeth HaleThis is a review of MONUMENTS at The Museum of Contemporary Art and The Brick at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, California, on view through May 6, 2026. MONUMENTS does something powerful and all too rare in recent group exhibitions of contemporary art. It does not tell us what to think and then »
