“When Lee surrendered at Appomattox, there were already 1,800 Union dead from First Manassas buried in his wife’s rose garden.” As Robert E. Lee lay dying on the morning of October 12, 1870, some 16,000 Union soldiers moldered in their graves outside the front doors of Arlington House. The Lees’ beloved family home had been »
“‘Alcohol undermines the health, enfeebles the will, makes the mind coarse and the tongue vulgar, brings discord to the family, deprives children of their rights, lowers the standard of morals, corrupts politics, fills prisons and asylums with human wrecks, mocks religion and ruins immortal souls.’” On a recent trip to Pittsburgh, I was struck by »
“For years I had wanted to visit Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, that battlefield where the direction of the nation’s history changed, the center of more than a century of memorialization. Yet, no amount of reading prepared me for its effect.” When I was growing up in Lexington, Kentucky, one of the most powerful objects in that small, »
Photo Essay
This essay first appeared in vol. 15, no. 2009 (Summer 2009). Core Sound is a shallow body of water in eastern North Carolina that carries the Core Sound National Seashore on its eastern shoulder and the Carteret County peninsula on its west. Between Beaufort, the mainland town that has prettied itself up over recent decades, »
“I once listened attentively as a native New Yorker explained the South to some newcomers more recent than he. ‘What made this place possible was the invention of air conditioning,’ he pronounced. ‘Before that, nobody could live here.’” I once listened attentively as a native New Yorker explained the South to some newcomers more recent »
“Dylan linked Till’s innocent blood to a Mississippi downpour–so much blood shed from the brutal beatings; Till’s killers ‘rolled his body down a gulf of bloody red rain.’” The murder of Emmett Till has haunted the American imagination. Though Chicago born and bred, he will be forever linked to Mississippi and the South. While visiting »
Music
Because I know her name fromrock and roll biographiesand the legendary deathof her first husband, becauseI grew up hearing her voiceon my father’s folk records,because I love the mythsthat accompany musicalmost as much as I lovemusic, I should have goneto see her when she was bookedintro the coffeehouse runby a church whose articlesof faith have »
“Let’s be honest: Southern rock is a critically despised genre, a redneck sound draped in the Confederate flag and fueled by an oh-so-’70s mix of Jack Daniels and Quaaludes.” Let’s be honest: Southern rock is a critically despised genre, a redneck sound draped in the Confederate flag and fueled by an oh-so-’70s mix of Jack »
“Patsy Cline had a great big barrel of a voice that cut straight into the heart of everyone who heard her sing.” Tradition runs deep in country music. One of the hallmarks of the genre is that new generations of singers pay tribute to their predecessors by building on their legacies and adhering to the »
“A round of ‘chicken,’ or moonshine, was ordered, and Macavine and Whistlin’ Britches were one-upping each other with insults and dirty jokes. Captain Luke played it cool in the corner, sipping a can of Natural Light and smoking a cigar.” Captain Luke, Macavine Hayes, Whistlin’ Britches, and I settled down to a table in the »
“Ella May Wiggins, the ‘poet laureate’ of the Gastonia Textile Strike of 1929, was silenced by a mill thug’s bullet on September 14, 1929.” Woody Guthrie considered her one of our nation’s best songwriters. Alan Lomax published her stark union ballads in his acclaimed collections of American folksongs. Pete Seeger recorded a version of her »
“The true ‘Hootchie Kootchie Man,’ Muddy Waters summons all the powers of the voodoo doctor in his guttural, deep blues voice.” For over a century the blues has served as the musical anchor of American music. Muddy Waters aptly titled one of his songs “The Blues Had a Baby, and They Named it Rock and »