“It’s hard to point to another region with so much musical variety and so much music with world-wide appeal.” Drumroll, please. This is Southern Cultures‘s second music issue, complete with another new CD full of ballads, blues, and bluegrass from great southern artists known and less known. While this is only our second version of »

“I first started learning about the world, and there was a place called the South. It was a distant, romantic place, like the Far West or the islands of the Caribbean.” Pete Seeger has long been my hero. As an undergraduate at Davidson College in the early sixties, I listened to his records and learned »

“In 1961 Bob Koester, a producer with Chicago-based Delmark Records, made an amazing discovery. Sleepy John Estes, a bluesman who had achieved fame on the race record labels during the interwar years, was found to be still alive and residing on the outskirts of the small western Tennessee town of Brownsville.” Just over one hundred »

“‘A Lonely Life Ends on Elvis Presley Boulevard,’ blared the headline of a late-summer special edition of the Memphis Press-Scimitar. ‘The King is Dead.'” A Lonely Life Ends on Elvis Presley Boulevard,” blared the headline of a late-summer special edition of the Memphis Press-Scimitar. “The King is Dead.” Much like his explosive ascent nearly a »

“One Cajun woman who grew up in the 1960s was convinced that the AM/FM options on her radio referred to the distinction between American Music and French Music.” Until the 1960s, southwest Louisianans did not categorize their music as Cajun, Creole, or zydeco. Instead, they referred to it as musique française, or French music, without »

“Lavishly illustrated ads told of broken love affairs, loneliness, violence, and jail, in concert with travel to and from the South–by train and boat, on foot and in memory.” In January of 1926, a record advertisement for Bessie Smith’s “Florida Bound Blues” appeared in the Chicago Defender‘s entertainment section, showing the blues queen wrapped in »

“He mounted to the bar with a pistol in his hand and he sent Judge Massie to the Promised Land . . .” He mounted to the barwith a pistol in his handand he sent Judge Massieto the Promised Land

“Bill Monroe had seen a lot of troubles in his days, but nothing could have prepared him for this. Whe he entered his home, he found his 1923 Gibson F-5 mandolin, built by craftsman Lloyd Loar, smashed into several pieces, a fireplace poker lying nearby.” Bill Monroe had seen a lot of troubles in his »

“Stories about Alan Lomax and his exploits are legendary. While doing research in the Library of Congress Music Division, Lomax was sitting at a table across from a student who was reading his classic Folksongs of North America. At one point the student looked across the table and asked, ‘Is Alan Lomax still alive?’ Lomax »