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
Creating Dangerously in The Land Where the Blues Began “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 »
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 »
Music
Attendees at the 1970 Country Music Association awards were startled when Roy Clark announced that Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” beat out Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee” for Song of the Year. Amid applause and some gasps, a dazed, disheveled, long-haired Kristofferson stumbled up the steps of the Ryman Auditorium, looking an awful lot »
Music
This article has been condensed from a longer essay that first appeared in the Winter 2018 Issue. Access the entire essay via Project Muse (link below). It was W. C. Handy, as much as anybody, who was responsible for gifting us with the mythology of Mississippi as ground zero for the blues. Virtually every blues »
Music
“‘We rock whatever hats we want.’” In the past decade, Charlotte’s Latinx rock musicians have moved from a politics of acknowledgement to a politics of engagement with the larger music scene and the city itself. A recent article about Latinx musicians on Charlotte’s Spanish-language news website Hola Noticias noted, “It’s been almost a decade since »
Interview
“I’m in my fifty-second year as an organizer—civil rights, environment, labor, community. You know, if it moves, I try to organize it.” I’m walking down the hall in the Library of Congress, wondering what I’m going to do, and I see a sign that says, “Archive of Folk Music.” I went in the really raggedy-ass »
Music
The earliest documented exploration of a deep cave in eastern North America occurred roughly five thousand years ago, in the limestone-rich hills of the Upper Cumberland Plateau along what is now the border between Kentucky and Tennessee. Carrying torches lit with charcoal made from river cane, one or two small groups of hunter-gatherers entered a »
Music
As a teenager in 1940s Fort Worth, Ornette Coleman supported his family playing tenor saxophone on the radio and in regional clubs, honing woozy gutbucket rhythm and blues suitable for partying and abandon. “I was in the South when minorities were oppressed, and I identified with them through music,” Coleman told the philosopher Jacques Derrida »
Music
“‘The problem right now is we have no anthem.’” Reflecting on her induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, folk icon Joan Baez was underwhelmed by the resurgence of protest music. “There needs to be more. It’s terribly important, because that’s what keeps the spirit,” she told Rolling Stone. “Carping and »