Music
“Despite naming West Virginia,‘Country Roads’is placeless in the way that it draws upon a sense of mythical, imagined place-belonging and community.” Sometimes, I like to sidle up to a jukebox in a dive bar and select the iconic “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” What happens next tells me a lot about the other people in »
Music
In 1982, my cousin David “Hoss” Johnson was the last recruit Bear Bryant signed to the University of Alabama. He got his nickname at birth when he arrived on this earthly playing field at a whopping thirteen pounds, played in forty-eight games for Alabama, started in twenty-eight, and made the All-Decade ’80s Team. For five »
Music
“Riley’s continuous success in his lifetime . . . demonstrates that his musical talent and ambition transcended the marketing initiatives that ubiquitously upsold his disability.” A case study of Riley Puckett, a bestselling—yet largely forgotten—name in the fledgling country music industry of the early 1920s, starkly demonstrates how the genre’s century-long appeal to authenticity is »
Music
“Cowboy Carter has undeniably reignited mainstream conversations about Black contributions to country music and the banjo’s African diasporic origins.” In February 2024, during a Super Bowl 57 commercial, Beyoncé released a teaser hinting at what audiences speculated would be a country music album, released months later as Cowboy Carter. It featured Rhiannon Giddens performing a »
Music
I was nine years old when I heard country music for the first time. My favorite cousin, Ruthie, was watching my sister and me while my mom was away. I loved her because she never treated me like a kid. She had us learn the lyrics to some of her favorite CDs to keep us »
Music
“Country or hillbilly music and overalls are part of a modern vernacular; the music and garments evoke nostalgia for a ‘simpler’ past, while being the products of commercial enterprise and industrial modernity.” Westernwear is having a moment that’s bringing attention to the fashion of country artists past and present. It’s not the first time that »
Music
“By his own account, the model for the Grand Ole Opry radio show was a hoedown Hay attended ‘in a log cabin about a mile up a muddy road’ outside a little Arkansas burg called Mammoth Spring.” It’s a Monday in late August. I stand in the middle of a dirt road, flush on the »
Music
It’s a Tuesday afternoon at Southpoint Mall in Durham, North Carolina. As I window shop, I notice LeAnn Rimes’s “Nothin’ Better to Do” playing from the speakers. It’s followed by a pleasant but unassuming mix of songs from Kenny Chesney, Miranda Lambert, and Kacey Musgraves. This is a country music playlist. On my last two »
Music
Featuring some of the songs, artists, and movements mentioned in the issue, this collection brings you country music’s beating heart and storied soul: Heartaches and homecomings. Hip-hop and hoedowns. Heroes and heroines, penning hits and swinging hammers. Icons and up-and-comers. Fiddles and banjos. Boots and backroads and bulls. Ancestors and descendants from the hometowns and »
Music
“Future’s work offers a necessary reckoning with the limits of hope, the permanence of loss, and the urgent need to imagine new paradigms for Black liberation.” In April 2017, Future released “Mask Off,” the hypnotic, menacing anthem that would become one of his biggest hits and the centerpiece of his self-titled album, Future. Built around a »
Music
Regina N. Bradley: This is a milestone year for us in the Souf. I want to start off with an underappreciated question. What is your definition of southern hip-hop? Fredara Mareva Hadley: I like to think of it as this kind of Afrofuturist technology of people still trying to engage in the kind of cultural »
Essay
“As K.R.I.T. works to survive the mainstream, he marks what buoys him, leaving a record for viewers and listeners to consult when they, too, might need to survive a flooded zone.” The unknown underground artist. The Afrofuturist who transcends place and time. The brief skit at the end of the eponymous second track on Big »