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Ernest Tubb: The Texas Troubadour, and Go Cat Go!: Rockabilly Music and Its Makers (Review)

by Bill C. Malone

Duke University Press, 1996. University of Illinois Press, 1996. Ronnie Pugh’s biography of Ernest Tubb and Craig Morrison’s study of the rockabillies are more than worthy additions to the growing list of books on southern musicians; they are also contributions to the history of the southern working class. Although they chronicle the lives and careers »

Japanese Industry in the American South (Review)

by W. Miles Fletcher III

Routledge, 1995. In this concise book, the first to focus on Japanese firms in the South, anthropologist Choong Soon Kim provides many useful insights into a timely topic. As he notes, the sharp rise in Japanese investment in the United States during the 1980s and early 1990s has attracted much attention and has produced sharply »

Preserving Charleston’s Past, Shaping its Future: The Life and Times of Susan Pringle Frost (Review)

by W. Fitzhugh Brundage

Greenwood Press, 1994. Susan Pringle Frost’s legacy is pervasive in Charleston, South Carolina. Millions of tourists have strolled through the city’ preserved neighborhoods, admiring their elegance and charm. As a founder of and force in the early preservation movement, Frost contributed mightily to making Charleston what it is today. Sidney R. Bland’s biography of Frost »

North Carolina Yeoman: The Diary of Basil Armstrong Thomasson, 1853-1862 (Review)

by S. Charles Bolton

University of Georgia Press, 1996. Basil Armstrong Thomasson, known as Strong to his family, was a remarkable man whose diary is immensely valuable for what it tells us about the lifestyle of southern yeomen and equally interesting for what it reveals about Thomasson himself. He spent all his life in western North Carolina and his »

The Times Were Strange and Stirring: Methodist Preachers and the Crisis of Emancipation by Reginald F. Hildebrand (Review)

by Joseph M. Flora

Duke University Press, 1995 In God’s Trombones (1927) James Weldon Johnson pays eloquent tribute to the sustaining presence of black ministers for their parishioners, both during slavery and following it. William Faulkner concludes The Sound and the Fury (1929) by reaffirming the spiritual presence of the black preacher, showing the black church as the last bastion of Christianity in »

The Landscapes of Louis Rémy Mignot: A Southern Painter Abroad by Katherine E. Manthorne and John W. Coffey (Review)

by Peter H. Wood

Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996 Who is Louis Rémy Mignot? In 1983, when the Virginia Museum in Richmond launched the comprehensive exhibition “Painting in the South, 1564-1980,” this Charleston-born artist was not represented. The exhibition included Florida sunsets by Vermonter William Morris Hunt and by the Pennsylvania luminist Martin Johnson Heade, who took up residence at »

Slavery in North Carolina, 1748-1775 by Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary (Review)

by Timothy J. Lockley

University of North Carolina Press, 1995 Marvin Kay and Lorin Cary’s new book is an important study of the system of slavery in colonial North Carolina. As the authors correctly point out, most monographs on slavery concentrate on the antebellum period, often focusing exclusively on the last twenty years of southern slavery. This bias in »

Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 the Present, and exhibit curated and a catalog edited by Alice Rae Yelen (Review)

by Anne L. McClanan

New Orleans Museum of Art, 1993 The exhibition catalog Passionate Visions of the American South embraces a diverse and engaging assemblage of contemporary plain artists. From 1993 to 1995 the exhibition traveled to New Orleans, Berkeley, San Diego, Washington, D.C., and finally to Raleigh; the accompanying catalog is a substantial volume. Although it relies too heavily on »