from the forthcoming novel Nashville Chrome by Rick Bass The mid-1950s in popular music resembled the Wild West. New sounds, new styles, and new business models collided with a teenage audience that had unprecedented buying power. As those forces converged, popular music entered about a half-decade of uncharted territory where shady businessmen exploited ambitious but »
“There’s a gang that would travel if you get on a freight train and couldn’t get off. If I’d stayed on there I’d been getting killed.” A faint odor of bedpan greeted me as I entered the room in the rehabilitation unit of Beverly Hospital in Beverly, Massachusetts. In bed lay the stocky figure of »
“The backstage Dylan—dutifully practicing with harmonica and guitar—wouldn’t have predicted a portfolio that would include forty-five more albums.” Dylan has a backstage smoke in ’63. Mississippi John Hurt sits with guitar case in hand the year before his death. Pete Seeger listens to a young Phil Ochs in ’64. Reverend Gary Davis sleeps on his »
“Pete thumbed his way all over that triangle from Maryland to Florida to Texas. Whenever he saw someone carrying a banjo or guitar, he would cotton up to them. And if they knew anything he didn’t know, he’d just find out what it was, learn to do it, and then go on to the next.” »
“For most of us, roots music is not something we absorbed with our first breaths, but something we looked for and seized on, hoping to fill a void that other music could not plumb.” This edition of Southern Cultures’s music issue deals with “roots” music, a label that grew especially well known and popular after »
Simon & Schuster, 2008
University of North Carolina Press, 2011
Wiley, 2009
Essay
“[S]uch fiddling and dancing nobody ever before saw in this world. I thought they were the true ‘heaven-borns.’ Black and white, white and Black, all hugemsnug together; happy as lords and ladies, sitting sometimes round in a ring, with a jug of liquor between them . . .” —Davy Crockett (1834) “There ain’t nothing like »
“After two pricey tickets for speeding on Highways 17 and 43, their endless billboards screaming like previews of a coronary, I had to slow down.” After two pricey tickets for speeding on Highways 17 and 43, their endless billboards screaming like previews of a coronary, I had to slow down.
“We can place the South into three categories: ‘southern to the core,’ ‘pretty darn southern,’ and ‘sorta southern.’” Some states just don’t feel all that southern anymore. Take Virginia as an example. Virginia is the birthplace of Robert E. Lee and the capital of the Confederacy. Two hundred years ago there was little doubt that »
“In the deep peripheral ravines settled by the descendants of local sharecroppers, The Home of the Double-Headed Eagle shoots up from a long row of kudzu-covered shotgun shacks and cracked pavement to entangle passerby.” The Gibraltar of the Confederacy erupts gloriously from the southern tip-edge of the flat Delta flood plain to guard the lush »