“One Cajun woman who grew up in the 1960s was convinced that the AM/FM options on her radio referred to the distinction between American Music and French Music.” Until the 1960s, southwest Louisianans did not categorize their music as Cajun, Creole, or zydeco. Instead, they referred to it as musique française, or French music, without »
“‘A Lonely Life Ends on Elvis Presley Boulevard,’ blared the headline of a late-summer special edition of the Memphis Press-Scimitar. ‘The King is Dead.’” A Lonely Life Ends on Elvis Presley Boulevard,” blared the headline of a late-summer special edition of the Memphis Press-Scimitar. “The King is Dead.” Much like his explosive ascent nearly a »
“In 1961 Bob Koester, a producer with Chicago-based Delmark Records, made an amazing discovery. Sleepy John Estes, a bluesman who had achieved fame on the race record labels during the interwar years, was found to be still alive and residing on the outskirts of the small western Tennessee town of Brownsville.” Just over one hundred »
“I first started learning about the world, and there was a place called the South. It was a distant, romantic place, like the Far West or the islands of the Caribbean.” Pete Seeger has long been my hero. As an undergraduate at Davidson College in the early sixties, I listened to his records and learned »
“Our publication is better for her suggestions, and it would be better still if we had been up to the job of taking more of them.” Among Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s many accomplishments was her record as a scholar of the antebellum South, one whose books should be know to most readers of this quarterly. Fruits of »
Pineapple Press, Inc., 2005 There aren’t all that many books I wish I’d written, but this is one of them. Wilber “Pete” Caldwell, who lives in Gilmer County, Georgia, and has written on subjects as diverse as public architecture and cynicism, turns his attention here to barbecue, and he obviously had a really good time »
“. . . someone picks up a snapshot and says, just before tossing it to oblivion, ‘My god, who are these quaint people?’” Stiffly posed before the forsythia bush, they wearcoats, ties, and bemused faces, as if their mother’sjust called them from the porch, “You boyshold your shoulders back and stand up straight.”
Louisiana State University Press, 2006 The cover art and title to Andrew Silver’s Minstrelsy and Murder are fair warning: this is a book about humor that will not let you smile. As Silver sees it, the late nineteenth century marked the end of a genial southern humor that obscured the injustices of class, gender, and race. Slowly, »
“I was living in Boston and Buffalo in those years, and no prison director in either of those states ever let me beyond the sally port without a guard watching me every moment and listening to every word I said or that anyone said to me. Neither of those states let me bring a camera »
“You’d better turn on CNN; looks like your house is on fire.” Photographer Thomas Neff entered the city in the first days after Katrina as a volunteer first responder. He soon began taking large-format black and white photographs and writing down the stories of natives he found marooned there, when the city was eighty percent »
University of Alabama Press, 2006 When I speak with New Englanders or Californians about religion, I soon realize that we are not talking about the same thing. They speak as if religion were an elective—one allegiance among many that a person might choose or decline—while I mean something as elemental as air. I am pretty »
“He wasn’t a professional photographer, but he was Kernersville’s unofficial documentarian, and the hundreds of images he left behind portray a small Piedmont North Carolina community in the 1930s and 1940s.” I came upon the pictures about fifteen years ago. I was searching for something in my parents’ guest room in High Point, North Carolina, »