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Subjects: Music

Southern Roots and Branches

Forty Years of the New Lost City Ramblers

by Philip F. Gura

“Mike Seeger, a conscientious objector during the Korean War, was fulfilling his alternative national service as a dishwasher in a tuberculosis hospital.” In the early spring of 1999 I drove out of Lexington, Virginia, and halfway up a mountain turned onto the private drive that led to Mike Seeger’s home. Soon enough John Cohen arrived »

Letters to the Editor: Is Britney Beloved in ‘Bama?

by Kelly M. Bruce

“‘I just didn’t know that the slutty Catholic schoolgirl has been a staple of pornography for lo these many years! If only I had realized . . .’” Congratulations on another fine issue of Southern Cultures [Winter 2001]. I did not know what to expect from a publication featuring on its cover Britney Spears, bare midriff and »

Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Review)

by Patrick Huber

University of Illinois Press, 2002. Hank Williams once remarked on the important connections between so-called hillbilly music and the hardscrabble rural backgrounds of its singers. “He sings more sincere than most entertainers,” Williams explained, “because the hillbilly was raised rougher than most entertainers. You got to know a lot about hard work. You got to »

Music

To the Land I Am Bound

A Journey Into Sacred Harp

by David L. Carlton

“As I found myself climbing over clay and gravel, negotiating switchbacks and sudden steep upgrades, I found myself thanking God for the weather and myself for my brand new transmission.” One Saturday before the fourth Sunday in August, as such things are reckoned, I arose early in the morning and drove south from my hometown »

Graveyard Blues

by Rob Golan

“The soundtrack for my Revelation was a simple three-cord ditty.” John Jackson, one of the last remaining Depression-era bluesmen, passed away in Virginia on January 20, 2002. Born in 1924 to Virginia farmers who played music at parties on the weekends, Jackson learned to play guitar at age four and was accompanying his parents by »

Charline Arthur

The Unmaking of a Honky-Tonk Star

by Emily Neely

“Charline’s use of sexual innuendo clearly confused the country music media.” Like most honky-tonk musicians, Charline Arthur came from modest origins. She was born Charline Highsmith in 1929, the daughter of a Pentecostal, relatively poor couple in Henrietta, Texas. Her parents were both amateur musicians, and from an early age music and performance were central »

Racial Violence, “Primitive” Music, and the Blues Entrepreneur

W. C. Handy's Mississippi Problem

by Adam Gussow

“‘My idea of what constitutes music was changed by the sight of that silver money cascading around the splay feet of a Mississippi string band.’” Composer of the best-selling “Memphis Blues” and “St. Louis Blues,” author of an autobiography titled Father of the Blues (1941), W. C. Handy (1873-1958) has a curious place in the »

Up Beat Down South: “The Death of Emma Hartsell”

by Bruce E. Baker

“One December afternoon, he finished off a running argument with his younger brother-in-law with both barrels of a shotgun.” “In eighteen-hundred and ninety-eight,” as the song tells us, “Sweet Emma met with an awful fate.” Sweet Emma was Emma Hartsell, the twelve-year-old daughter of a farmer in Cabarrus County, North Carolina, and the awful fate »

“Lord, Have Mercy on My Soul”

Sin, Salvation, and Southern Rock

by J. Michael Butler

“The band delighted in sharing their bottle of Jack Daniels with a chimpanzee.” In 1971 the five-member rock-and-roll group Black Oak Arkansas released their debut album. The songs on the record illuminated themes addressed by Black Oak and the larger “southern rock movement.” Most southern rock lyrics glorified such stereotypically male values as fighting, gambling, »

Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel by James R. Goff (Review)

by James Parris

University of North Carolina Press, 2002 Every now and then my good friend Rodney and I will launch into “Jubilee (jubilee), Jubilee (jubilee). You’re invited to this gospel jubilee” in two-part harmony and wind up in a fit of laughter at the memory. If you grew up in the South, you’re probably like us and »

The Grand Ole Opry and the Urban South

by Louis M. Kyriakoudes

“‘Lord, Lord, you ought to take a ride, get in a Ford with a donnie by your side.’” One Saturday evening in 1927, George D. Hay, the program director of Nashville radio station WSM, was preparing to introduce the evening’s local program, the WSM Barn Dance. Not really a barn dance at all, the program’s »

Hopes for John Henry Park

by John Douglas

Today, the community of Talcott, West Virginia, bases its fledgling tourism industry on John Henry. Today, the community of Talcott, West Virginia, bases its fledgling tourism industry on John Henry. “We really believe the contest with the steam drill happened here,” says John “Bill” Dillon, a retired Talcott postmaster and local historian. In 1972 the »