Music
“The blues won’t solve Clarksdale’s problems, but . . . it will keep you going another day and give you hope for something better.” If you are not from Mississippi and you have heard of Clarks-dale, then it is probably because of blues music. Perhaps no other American city is as singularly linked to its »
Music
“‘I’m that queen that’ll make ya bounce!’” “Release your wiggle!” Big Freedia chants as a crowd of college-aged fans encircles the stage, responding to her call with dance. Freedia’s command to “release” is part of her larger mission to take the world by storm, one bounce at a time. Through her music, television show, and »
Music
This Bike is a Pipe Bomb rattled the basement windows of our rental house. High frequencies slipped through masonry cracks into the Athens, Georgia night, as amps fritzed from shorting wires. Guitar strings curled from frontman Rymodee’s tuning pegs like rooster sickle feathers. He stood stiff when he sang, a slight figure whose mutton chops »
Music
This essay is excerpted from the Winter 2017 issue (vol. 23, no. 4). To read the essay in full, access via Project Muse (link at bottom). Nothing much would have been stirring in the sleepy little hamlet of Bethel Springs as Carl Perkins passed through. The bustling McNairy County seat, five miles farther south, was »
Photo Essay
Down in the valley,Valley so lowHang your head overHear the wind blow Down in the valley,Walking between,Telling our storyHere’s what it sings. ”Down in the Valley,” ballad collected by Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (1927) Reflective, mysterious moments of pause punctuate portraits of musicians and artists in the Cumberland Plateau, highlighting the vacuum of time »
Art
Loy Bowlin’s bejeweled dentures—a different color rhinestone on each tooth, two front teeth framed in gold—were a prelude to his creative output. Born on a cattle ranch in Franklin County, Mississippi, in 1909, Bowlin was a shade-tree mechanic and former used car salesman, who, upon retiring, took on a persona as McComb, Mississippi’s “Original Rhinestone »
Music
UNC University Libraries’ Southern Folklife Collection (SFC) is an archival resource dedicated to collecting, preserving, and disseminating traditional and vernacular music, art, and culture related to the American South. The SFC is one of the nation’s foremost archival resources for the study of American folk music and popular culture. Its holdings extensively document all forms »
Music
“I’d like to say it’s nobody’s fault, but it is. It’s James Dickey’s fault. Or John Boorman’s. Or both.” I’m what you might call a “closeted” banjo player, so this may well be my coming-out paper. My parents were hippie folkies, and I grew up in the Appalachian region marinating in so much old-time string »
Music
“Dolly, where I come from would I have called you a hillbilly?” asked Barbara Walters in 1977. “If you had, it would have probably been very natural, but I’d have probably kicked your shins,” replied Dolly Parton, continuing, “We’re the ones you would consider the Li’l Abner people, Daisy Mae, and that sort of thing—they »
Music
“The singing school may not have been a southern creation, but its proliferation in the post–Civil War years was largely a phenomenon of the South. Its survival, and revival, in the twenty-first century is almost exclusively a southern story.” He looks like he should be in pads and a helmet, protecting a quarterback on some »
Even in a nation inclined to “constantly form associations,” as de Tocqueville observed in 1831, residents of New Orleans excelled in organizing lodges, religious groups, literary societies, charitable organizations, sporting clubs, social clubs, and, most of all, benevolent associations, the most popular—and practical—organizations to which New Orleans’ polyglot population flocked. By 1880, these organizations (also »
1/2-inch video, 28 minutes, color. Appalshop Inc., 306 Madison Street, Whitesburg, KY 41858. Step Back Cindy takes the viewer to places in southwestern Virginia where mountain communities still gather to dance: a school gymnasium in Fancy Gap, the fire station in Dante, a Lion’s Club in Chilhowie, and an outdoor rally in St. Paul sponsored »