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Subjects: Music

Negro Work Songs and Calls (Music Review)

by Gavin James Campbell

Rounder, 1999 African American song has permeated the southern air for centuries. From earliest times, whites marveled at the skill with which slaves combined rhythm and work. By 1943 when this recording was originally issued, that centuries-old worksong tradition was slowly dying out. This CD preserves the vestiges of African American musical creativity designed to »

Benjamin Lloyd’s Hymnbook; The Pleasant Hill Singers Songs of the Shaker West (Music Review)

by Gavin James Campbell

The Alabama Center for Traditional Culture, 1999; Verdant Groves Music Foundation, 1999 In 1841 a backwoods Alabama Baptist preacher named Benjamin Lloyd published a words-only hymnal adapted, as he wrote, “to singing on all occasions.” As was customary in Lloyd’s day—and in true Baptist fashion—the tunes to accompany the texts were left up to individual »

George Jones: The Cold Hard Truth (Music Review)

by Gavin James Campbell

Asylum, 1999 For quite some time George Jones has blasted commercial country stations for preferring tight butts and slick packaging over proven, if older, talent. Of course he’s right, but then again he hasn’t done anything in quite some time that really stands out. Well, Shania and Garth, move over, ’cause The Possum’s back. In »

“The Outer Limits of Probability”

A Janis Joplin Retrospective

by Gavin James Campbell

“Man, I’d rather have ten years of superhypermost than live to be seventy by sitting in some goddamn chair watching TV,” Janis Joplin said in 1969. A little more than a year later on October 4, 1970, her superhypermost life came to a heroin- and alcohol-induced end in a Lost Angeles hotel room. She was »

Back to Branson

Normalcy and Nostalgia in the Ozarks

by Jerome L. Rodnitzky

“Even Elvis promoted himself as just a simple country boy with rural, small-town virtues.” In 1920 Warren Harding won the presidency after an early campaign speech advocating, among other things, a nostalgic and undefined return to “normalcy,” a reference to the McKinley administration of 1900 that Harding felt looked like his America. The intervening twenty years of »

From Memphis to Nashville

The Odyssey of Jerry Lee Lewis

by Mark Royden Winchell

“‘This old boy wanted to kill me a while back because I married his daughter, but we’re friends again now.’” I first saw Jerry Lee Lewis in the Vanderbilt University football stadium on Labor Day 1973. The opening act that night was Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. Although political incorrectness was not yet in »

Love Songs; Music From the Zydeco Kingdom; Let’s Go!; Sam’s Big Rooster (Review)

by Gavin James Campbell

Columbia Legacy, 2000; Rounder, 2000; Rounder, 2000; Arhoolie, 2000 To honor the one hundredth anniversary of Louis Armstrong’s birth, Columbia’s Legacy division is launching a number of projects. The first of these is a delightful collection of Armstrong’s love songs. Six of the fifteen tracks cover the period from 1929 and 1930 when he worked »

Is It True What They Sing About Dixie?

by Stephen J. Whitfield

“‘Won’t-cha come with me to Alabammy, Back to the arms of my dear ol’ Mammy, Her cookin’s lousy and her hands are clammy, But what the hell, it’s home.’” To succeed in the New World, Jewish songwriters adopted a southern strategy. Immigrants or the sons of immigrants, these men found their vocation in the era »

Southern Roots and Branches

Forty Years of the New Lost City Ramblers

by Philip F. Gura

“Mike Seeger, a conscientious objector during the Korean War, was fulfilling his alternative national service as a dishwasher in a tuberculosis hospital.” In the early spring of 1999 I drove out of Lexington, Virginia, and halfway up a mountain turned onto the private drive that led to Mike Seeger’s home. Soon enough John Cohen arrived »

Letters to the Editor: Is Britney Beloved in ‘Bama?

by Kelly M. Bruce

“‘I just didn’t know that the slutty Catholic schoolgirl has been a staple of pornography for lo these many years! If only I had realized . . .’” Congratulations on another fine issue of Southern Cultures [Winter 2001]. I did not know what to expect from a publication featuring on its cover Britney Spears, bare midriff and »

Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class (Review)

by Patrick Huber

University of Illinois Press, 2002. Hank Williams once remarked on the important connections between so-called hillbilly music and the hardscrabble rural backgrounds of its singers. “He sings more sincere than most entertainers,” Williams explained, “because the hillbilly was raised rougher than most entertainers. You got to know a lot about hard work. You got to »