“The chances for great deeds are not limited to the dead. As often with a wisecrack as a bugle, they call us from the present life as well.” In some circles, the Confederate dead get short shrift these days, when they get remembered at all. It was not always thus. Once upon a time, the »
“In the 1913 South the novelty of a white jury convicting a white man largely on the word of a black man was enormous. Yet even so, it was only in the trial’s aftermath that the deeper and more volatile issues came to the fore.” On April 26, 1913, a thirteen-year-old child laborer named Mary »
“In 1965 Braniff introduced the ‘air strip,’ in which a flight attendant disrobed bit-by-bit during the flight. Delta preferred coquetry to crudity.” Delta Air Lines played an important role in the development of the modern South, and for much of the airline’s history, a strong regional identity was the foundation of its corporate image. “Born »
“Lynching and mayhem are not the only dimensions of southern history worth preserving.” I spoke once at a dinner meeting of the Military Order of Stars and Bars (MOSB), a Confederate heritage society that gathers every once in a while at a nearby Steak ‘n’ Ale restaurant. Most of the time, neo-Confederates and I leave »
“They lit out over the bad roads, and the family car broke down in the middle of a stream.” The Carters started small, singing in churches . . . Alvin Pleasant Carter, born in 1891, sang in a quartet with two uncles and a sister in churches around Clinch Mountain in southwest Virginia. People called »
“I proudly sent the lyrics off to a friend with connections in the country-music business, asking him if he didn’t agree that it was a natural-born hit.” Like many country songs, I suspect, “My Tears Spoiled My Aim” grew out of a title—in this case, one that came to me in a blinding flash of »
Music
“Songwriter and singer Dorsey Dixon was never supposed to live.” Carolina Piedmont singer and songwriter Dorsey Dixon was never supposed to live. At his birth in 1897, in Darlington, South Carolina, he was a puny, oxygen-starved baby weighing only three pounds. “I heard [my parents] tell friends and neighbors many times that I was a »
“He left the shop stunned and went back and wrote in his diary: ‘Robbed in a New York barbershop—$7.50!’” David Harrison Macon was born at Smart Station near McMinnville on the Highland Rim of Tennessee in 1870. As long as anyone could remember, he was “nuts about a banjo.” When Dave was thirteen, his father, »
South Polls
Southerners have every right to be proud of the music we have produced and bequeathed to the entire globe. American popular culture would be unimaginable without the music—blues and rock ‘n’ roll, jazz and country, gospel and bluegrass, salsa and zydeco—created by the South’s disfranchised, impoverished, and forgotten peoples, Black, Brown, and white. Toe-tapping, feet-shuffling, »
“I wish they’d get tired of tuning and play.” They seem to think they have something to say,those locusts high in your circle of pines.I wish they’d get tired of tuning and play.
“The Blue Yodeler’s first royalty came out to $27.” James Charles Rodgers was born in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1897. His mother, Eliza, died when he was four years old. After that, he was off riding the rods with his father, a foreman on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. By the time he reached fourteen, Jimmie »
“Presley faced criticism from ministers about his lewd performances.” In December 1956 Elvis Presley dropped in at Sun Studios in Memphis, just as a Carl Perkins recording session was ending. Presley was now a national star, having transcended earlier that year his previous status as a regional rockabilly performer. That special day became known as »