“Little about the South has meant more to southerners than their tunes.” Spirituals, blues, Dixieland, jazz. Ballads, old-time, hillbilly, bluegrass. Country, Cajun, zydeco. Sacred Harp, gospel, Christian rock. R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, rockabilly, “southern rock.” Nashville, honky-tonk, alt-country, progressive country. The list of southern musical varieties and hybrids goes on and on. It’s hard to »
Viking Penguin, 2003 In the summer of 1861, just a few months into the Civil War, Mary Boykin Chesnut wondered in her journal if anyone could say that they knew Robert E. Lee. “I doubt it,” she answered her own question. “He looks so cold and quiet and grand.” He looks cold and quiet and »
Louisiana State University Press, 2005 Hal Crowther is an award-winning journalist whose column in the Raleigh Spectator used to evoke angry letters from that weekly’s conservative readers. When he moved across the Triangle to Durham’s Independent his column evoked angry letters from the readers of that left-leaning publication. He might be described as politically liberal »
“‘Hi, my name is Don Lee Keith, and you don’t know me, but you ought to.’” Don Lee Keith was journalist-in-residence at the University of New Orleans for seven years, until his death in July 2003. Keith was about the brightest literary star that under-funded college could probably afford, and in this role he played »
University of North Carolina Press, 2007 If you think you understand how religion and race work in the South, then obviously no one has explained it to you properly. Lillian Smith tried to explain it in her 1949 Killers of the Dream: “We were taught . . . to love God, to love our white »
Harvard University Press, 2008 Fitzhugh Brundage’s excellent book takes up the subject of public forms of remembering and commemoration in the South since the Civil War. He sees well that the region’s collective memory was implicated in a wider political struggle for power and identity that would favor whites over blacks. The inevitable clash of »
Duke University Press, 2005 It’s remarkable how often the national poetry establishment fails to celebrate the many fine southern poets writing today. Our poets win an oddly small number of major literary awards, and they appear in far too few anthologies of national scope. No informed person could seriously argue that contemporary southern poetry is »
“We just said, ‘Whoa, what was that?’ and later saw this bullet hole.” Julian Bond has been on the cutting edge of social change since his days as a leader in the Atlanta sit-in movement in 1960. I had the opportunity to interview Bond in the fall of 1999 while I was an undergraduate at »
University Press of Florida, 2008 A glum paradox is embedded in the recent history of Florida. “I spent thirty years of my life trying to get people to move down there,” the former mayor of Orlando has recalled. “And then they all did.” In dreams begin responsibilities, which can lead to repercussions. The glad hand »
“My people rolled over twice in a Pontiac one dark night, but survived. . .” Who are your people, she asked, when she heard that I too am from Arkansas. Who are my people?
University of North Carolina Press, 2010 Growing up in East Tennessee I hardly knew any Jews, or hardly knew I knew any. Lacking the usual stereotypes, I didn’t know, for example, that the owner of the nicest men’s clothing store had both a name and an occupation that were most likely Jewish. When we spent »
“Now we were about to premiere, for an audience suspecting more anemic halftime show standards, the hottest jam of the Black Moses, Mr. Hot Buttered Soul himself.” Butterball Thompson’s the one forgot to pivot right that fateful night, wedging our lameass squad right up into the foursome of skinny flutists stopped in front of us »