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 »
Music
“The local townsfolk do not like mountain music. They can’t stand to listen to it. They buy Benny Goodman, Guy Lombardo, etc.” The typewritten missive in my hand, dated September 8, 1937, location Harlan, Kentucky, described, with no small dose of disdain, the musical predilections of residents in the region. It was mid-August in Washington, »
“The baby boomers are having children (creating the so-called ‘baby boomlet’), returning to church in great numbers, and (not coincidentally) finding in country music (especially ‘suburban country’) a musical expression for their increasingly conservative tastes.” People magazine, that indispensable source for vital information on Americana, has once again sniffed out the Zeitgeist. In a recent »
“A firsthand look at the artisitc and business records of south Louisiana’s Goldband enterprises.” In spring 1995 the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill acquired a rich group of archival records from Goldband Recording Corporation, a small but important recording studio that has operated out of Lake Charles, Louisiana, »