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.”

John Elkington moved to Memphis, Tennessee, to start law school in 1970, a year after urban clearance claimed its first building on Beale Street. The twenty-two-year-old student walked down Beale Street trying to imagine what it was like in its heyday, before the crumbling buildings and bulldozers. In the first half of the twentieth century, Beale Street was a popular destination for African American southerners who came there to support the musicians and shop owners located on the segregated strip.

"Emmylou Harris's post-Parsons work is a celebration of complicated grief, casting about for ways to both 'move on' and stay faithful to the past."