“Like zydeco and Cajun music, swamp pop is vital to the cultural identity of Cajun and Creole country.” Swamp pop music is a rhythm and blues idiom that combines elements of New Orleans rhythm and blues, country and western, and Cajun and black Creole music. Highly emotional, colorful lyrics, tripleting honky-tonk pianos, bellowing horn sections, »
On 17 August 1844, a Tennessee schoolteacher named Jason Niles joined a large crowd of spectators to watch the raising of a “Clay pole” celebrating the Whig party’s presidential ticket of Henry Clay and Theodore Frelinghuysen. Local party organizers were undoubtedly embarrassed when the pole fractured and had to be sent to the local blacksmith’s »
“By the last tune, singers have indeed made ‘heaven’s portals ring.’” In 1921 Herbert McNeill Poteat, professor of Latin at Wake Forest University, had heard enough: the abominable condition of southern hymnody must be corrected. Despite the large number of edifying denominational hymnals, he complained, the singing public seemed bent on supporting a horde of »
Although songs of social protest had deep roots in the American South, the Gastonia strike marked one of the first labor conflicts in the region that produced a large repertoire of protest songs written specifically for the occasion. On 25 August 1929 Margaret Larkin attended an outdoor strike rally near Mount Holly, a textile-mill town »