“‘I like to boogie-woogie,’ Madonna proclaimed. ‘It’s like riding on the wind and it never goes away.’” I like to boogie-woogie,” Madonna proclaimed in the title track of her 2000 release, Music: “it’s like riding on the wind and it never goes away.” The boogie-woogie—or justboogie for short—born one hundred years before Madonna sang its »
“‘I’m just here for the beer.’” It was in 1978 that “Redneck Riviera” first appeared in print. Probably. And in the New York Times no less. That was when Times reporter Howell Raines published a piece that told of how former University of Alabama and then pro-football quarterbacks Richard Todd and Kenny Stabler spent the »
“The backstage Dylan—dutifully practicing with harmonica and guitar—wouldn’t have predicted a portfolio that would include forty-five more albums.” Dylan has a backstage smoke in ’63. Mississippi John Hurt sits with guitar case in hand the year before his death. Pete Seeger listens to a young Phil Ochs in ’64. Reverend Gary Davis sleeps on his »
“He was a verbal bully with a bully pulpit, more entertainer than sly persuader; in terms of reach and impact, a modern equivalent would be someone like Rush Limbaugh, although Mencken’s demographic share was predominantly young and intelligent while Limbaugh’s is old and stupid.” Forgive me if I date myself by exhuming H. L. Mencken. »
“One of the realities of American life is that certain features of African American performance style will remain strange and alluring to those outside the culture. Not least among such features is the making of hard social commentary on recurring problems of life, often through cutting and breaking techniques—contentious interactions continually calling for a change »
“Jimmy ‘Catfish’ Hunter pitched for the Oakland Athletics and the New York Yankees and in 1987 was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame – all the while maintaining his small-town farming roots. He played every game with the shotgun pellets from a childhood hunting accident lodged in his foot, and natives imagined he held »
“The last time I kissed him he only had on half a shirt. He has a wonderful chest. I am really crazy about him now + have the funniest feeling in me, all over.” Along with talent and energy, Elvis brought a sexual charisma into the music business that his colleagues did not possess. Certainly »
“The country store survives. The survivors—and there are more of them than you might imagine—are models of adaptation.” There’s nothing quite like going back home. If, like me, you’re a child of the rural South, you’ll know that feeling, see and smell and hear and feel that feeling. The smell of tilled earth or freshly »
“‘There’s no choosing. It isn’t choice. Are you the daughter of somebody who was somebody who was somebody? And if you are, and you’re not a heroin addict, you are there.’” The grand staircase fronting the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston leads to large, wooden, locked double doors and instructions to ring the bell »
“The outlandish stories of the antics of early stock car racers immediately attracted me. Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall hauling liquor from Dawsonville to Atlanta one night and winning races the next day in the same car; Fonty Flock winning the Southern 500 wearing Bermuda shorts and argyle socks; his brother Tim racing with a »
“This was an anxious time for American Jews, stung by the anti-Semitic quotas and discrimination of the interwar years and the growing horror regarding the fate of European Jewry as the Holocaust came to light in the 1940s.” My first experience at a southern Jewish summer camp was not easy. I felt out of place. »
“It is about the aesthetic of Bourbon drinking in general and in particular of knocking it back neat . . . The joy of Bourbon drinking is not the pharmacological effect of C2H5OH on the cortex but rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in »