The Villages, a planned retirement community, lies about an hour’s drive northwest of Orlando in the lake-studded landscape of central Florida. Imagine one of its community members—a Villager—enjoying a stroll on a warm day in Lake Sumter Landing, one of three distinct downtowns that cater to approximately 90,000 residents.
Just off Interstate 65 south of Nashville, a small private park bedecked with Confederate flags surrounds a nearly thirty-foot-tall statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest astride his horse and waving a pistol. “He’s crying, ‘Follow me!’” explained the sculptor of the controversial artwork, Jack Kershaw, who would later brush off criticism about the piece by asserting that “Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery.”
Datil peppers sun on five bushes by the pool in Mary Ellen Masters’s backyard next to Faver Dykes State Park—a wild, scrubby preserve in south St. Johns County, Florida. Masters, whose family has lived in the area for nearly six generations, is renowned for her seemingly masochistic love of the spicy, heirloom peppers (a variety of Capsicum chinense similar in heat to the habanero) that are endemic to St. Augustine, Florida. Each year, she cooks 130 gallons of Datil-infused Minor-can clam chowder for the St. Ambrose Catholic Church Fair in Elkton, Florida, garnering her the undisputed title “Queen of Chowder.”
I first met musician-organizer Guy Carawan in the early 1970s at a gathering at Highlander Center, when it was located for a time in Knoxville, Tennessee (its current home is in the country, in New Market). Guy was in his mid-forties and I was in my early-twenties. For the rest of my life until now, I have been listening to, learning from, and drawing inspiration from Guy, and indeed from his whole artistic family, including his wife and singing and song-gathering partner Candie, and their two children Evan and Heather.
"The strumming of stringed instruments booms out through the PA, elaborate fiddle melodies erupt, followed by the soaring voice of the poet-practitioner, embracing those present, scanning the scene before him . . . drifting, shaping, moving verses that elicit a chorus of gritos."
"'I think that everyone who lives here and plays music feels honored in some way, you know. It's a real privilege to be able to live in New Orleans and play music.'"
In 1993, after a day spent at an academic conference in Oxford, Mississippi, a group of southern historians decided to go out for drinks at a funky, let-it-all-hang-out beer hall near the campus. One elderly and elegant member of the group, however, attracted the attention of the young waiter, who asked: “Who’s the dude in the suit?”
The old saying “f/8 and be there” applies to these photos. In the early to mid 1980s, I was doing street photography in downtown Durham. Especially compelling was the warehouse district, home of the muscular, oversized tobacco auction warehouses and their supporting businesses.
“[T]his more complex tale of the origins of ‘Tar Heel’ shows that it is rooted in hard work by poor people, work that dirtied the bodies of both enslaved Africans and poor whites in the Piney Woods.”