Music
“The music is a gift; it makes room for us.” As a young Black queer male growing up in South Carolina, I was fascinated by marching bands at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Involved in music programs at an early age, many of my music directors were HBCU alumni—South Carolina State, Savannah State, Fayetteville »
Interview
In advance of two special issues, Regina N. Bradley and Charles Hughes caught up to discuss the hip-hop South and the many ways that their varied interests intersect—from hip-hop histories and futures to riffing and representation. Those issues are now available: The Sonic South (Spring 2022), guest edited by Bradley, and Disability (Spring 2023), guest »
Music
My first exposure to the concept of love was memorizing 1 Corinthians 13 in Sunday school. Even as a little girl, the idea of a love that was patient, kind, selfless, and unconditional sounded like something I wanted to be a part of. Later on, Disney movies and fairy tales filled my tiny head with »
Essay
“‘Rhythm is who we are—if we didn’t have that, how could we make it?’” The question is: How do I render sound visible? For me, the answer is ethnopoetics, a mode of presenting performance, ritual, and cultural expression through the tools of poetry. In its possibilities for mirroring moments, and reflecting the spaciousness and impact »
Essay
On July 4, 1867, Augusta, Georgia’s newspaper, the Daily Constitutionalist, published the words to a new song that seemed to reflect the bitterness felt by many white southerners following the Confederate defeat. The paper printed the song’s title as “O! I’m a Good Old Rebel” above a spiteful dedication to Thaddeus Stevens, the abolitionist congressman »
Music
On a sticky June Sunday in 1959, two people meet each other outside an eastern Kentucky hamlet called Daisy. A twenty-seven-year-old college grad living in New York City, the grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants, wants to experience the Great Depression, and he is listening for music that might work like time travel. The other man, »
Music
“In the business of surviving, it is easy to forget that almost half of our lives is spent dreaming.” The pandemic came to stay for awhile and settled us down, grounded like teenagers in some enduring season beyond the usual markers of weather and time. Southern Cultures, at the beginning of the stay-at-home orders, invited some »
Photo Essay
“The following portraits show a few of the new faces of tradition in North Carolina, revealing the range of who they are, what they do, and how they commit to their artistic practice.” Since 1977, the Folklife Program of the North Carolina Arts Council has identified and documented traditional artists and their communities in order »
Photo Essay
New Orleans Second Line Parades “Sunday Second Lines nod to the past but embrace the present, dancing along that thin line where tradition thrives, four hours of unbridled jubilation at a time.” On roughly forty Sundays a year, the hardworking members of New Orleans Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs take turns celebrating the everyday joy »
Essay
“Worth Long’s lifelong quest to preserve the creativity of those who sang, hollered, prayed, played, and lived the blues, dangerously, was one of his greatest contributions as an activist.” In the fall of 1967, folk music columnist Israel “Izzy” Young expressed his enthusiasm for the emergence of more black folklorists who snatched “out of incorporeal »
Music
“From the heyday of swing through the dawn of bop, wherever there was jazz, there was some piece of Birmingham.” This is the story of jazz in Birmingham, and of Birmingham in jazz—of how Alabama’s “Magic City” helped create some of the nation’s most swinging and celestial sounds, and of how that city, in the »
Photo Essay
Join us (rain, Hurricane Dorian, or shine) TONIGHT, Thursday, September 5 at 5:30 PM, for the opening reception of “New Orleans Second Line Parades,” on view through December 2019 at the Center for the Study of the American South. On roughly forty Sundays a year, the hardworking members of New Orleans Social Aid and Pleasure »