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Subjects: Interviews

Music

Jackie Shane

It’s Just, “Yes Ma’am, No Ma’am”

by Douglas Mcgowan

Jackie Shane is not an easy person to interview. She was one of the greatest soul artists of the 1960s. (“The greatest singer who ever lived,” says Skippy White, dean of the Boston soul scene over the last half century or so.) Designated male at birth in Nashville in 1940, she openly began to identify »

Interview

Studio Visit: Phil Freelon and Pierce Freelon

by Southern Cultures

This feature is part of a series collaboration with the “50 for 50” project, an initiative of the North Carolina Arts Council in celebration of their 50th anniversary. Phil Freelon, best known for leading the design team of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and his son Pierce Freelon, Durham-based hip-hop artist »

Interview

“We’ve Got to Be Awful Careful or We’re Going to Lose It”

Documenting Life Along Florida's Matanzas River

by Anna Hamilton

“‘Dealing directly with nature is a very chancy proposition. She’s a sort of a jealous thing.’” My Florida childhood was muddy, awash in alligators, salt spray, and briny oysters. I grew up on—and in—northeast Florida’s Matanzas River, a marshy estuary snaking from St. Augustine in St. Johns County southward into Flagler County. Layers of history »

Interview

Building a Broom by Feel: Jim Shaffer

by Emily Hilliard

Jim Shaffer’s shop is dusty and smells like a horse stable—a comforting olfactory association that I suddenly realize has less to do with horses than with the rolled and bundled straw I see stacked high along the walls. Though the pole barn that houses Shaffer’s Charleston Broom and Mop Company is just a few miles »

Interview

“My Idol Was Langston Hughes”

The Poet, the Renaissance, and Their Enduring Influence

by William R. Ferris, Margaret Alexander Walker

I met Margaret Walker Alexander in the fall of 1970 when I taught my first class at Jackson State University. She and I both taught in the English Department, and I will never forget a lecture that Margaret gave to my students on Zora Neale Hurston. She and Zora had traveled similar roads as southern »

Interview

Mountain Feminist

Helen Matthews Lewis, Appalachian Studies, and the Long Women’s Movement

by David P. Cline, Jessica Wilkerson

A 1966 photograph of the Appalachian historian and activist Helen Matthews Lewis captures much about a woman who has been studying, writing about, and fighting for the people of Appalachia for three-quarters of a century. In the photo, Lewis sits outside of a mine entrance, hair emerging beneath a hard hat, with a big smile »

Interview

Southern Voices

by Southern Cultures

Meet the Southern Oral History Program, our colleagues at the Center for the Study of the American South, UNC-Chapel Hill. From its founding in 1973, the Southern Oral History Program has explored the history and culture of the American South by talking to its activists, politicians, educators, laborers, innovators, business leaders, and more. After more »

Interview

Clark and Pritchett

A Comparison of Two Notorious Southern Lawmen

by James Reston Jr.

“‘That night, they blew up King’s motel, and every police car they had in Birmingham got torn up. I left. I didn’t have anything in common with Bull Connor.’” Early in the Hollywood movie Selma, a pivotal scene depicts a 1965 conversation between Martin Luther King Jr. and a young John Lewis. The leaders of »

The Necessity of a Show Like This

by Trevor Schoonmaker, Stacy Lynn Waddell, Jeff Whetstone

“Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art” was co-curated by Trevor Schoonmaker (Nasher Museum of Art) and Miranda Lash (Speed Art Museum). Before the show opened in September, we sat down with Schoonmaker and artists Stacy Lynn Waddell and Jeff Whetstone, both featured in the exhibition. “We have no idea what it truly »

“Those little color snapshots”

William Christenberry

by William R. Ferris

Honoring William Christenberry (1936–2016) Bill Christenberry was like a spiritual brother who explored his homeland in Hale County, Alabama, with a keen eye. Each summer he returned to document and photograph these familiar worlds. With his meticulous eye, he showed the weight of time on this landscape, tracking change as paint faded and peeled on »

I Never Believed in the Perfect Mother

by Dorothy Allison

In the summer of 2015, we filmed a short interview with Dorothy Allison, discussing the idea of southern mothers in conjunction with Keira V. Williams’s essay, “‘Between Creation and Devouring’: Southern Women Writers and the Politics of Motherhood.” Today, in collaboration with our 21c Fiction Issue, we bring you excerpts of our conversation. “Life constructs or mitigates »