Music
“As I found myself climbing over clay and gravel, negotiating switchbacks and sudden steep upgrades, I found myself thanking God for the weather and myself for my brand new transmission.” One Saturday before the fourth Sunday in August, as such things are reckoned, I arose early in the morning and drove south from my hometown »
“The soundtrack for my Revelation was a simple three-cord ditty.” John Jackson, one of the last remaining Depression-era bluesmen, passed away in Virginia on January 20, 2002. Born in 1924 to Virginia farmers who played music at parties on the weekends, Jackson learned to play guitar at age four and was accompanying his parents by »
“Charline’s use of sexual innuendo clearly confused the country music media.” Like most honky-tonk musicians, Charline Arthur came from modest origins. She was born Charline Highsmith in 1929, the daughter of a Pentecostal, relatively poor couple in Henrietta, Texas. Her parents were both amateur musicians, and from an early age music and performance were central »
“‘My idea of what constitutes music was changed by the sight of that silver money cascading around the splay feet of a Mississippi string band.’” Composer of the best-selling “Memphis Blues” and “St. Louis Blues,” author of an autobiography titled Father of the Blues (1941), W. C. Handy (1873-1958) has a curious place in the »
“One December afternoon, he finished off a running argument with his younger brother-in-law with both barrels of a shotgun.” “In eighteen-hundred and ninety-eight,” as the song tells us, “Sweet Emma met with an awful fate.” Sweet Emma was Emma Hartsell, the twelve-year-old daughter of a farmer in Cabarrus County, North Carolina, and the awful fate »
“The band delighted in sharing their bottle of Jack Daniels with a chimpanzee.” In 1971 the five-member rock-and-roll group Black Oak Arkansas released their debut album. The songs on the record illuminated themes addressed by Black Oak and the larger “southern rock movement.” Most southern rock lyrics glorified such stereotypically male values as fighting, gambling, »
University of North Carolina Press, 2002 Every now and then my good friend Rodney and I will launch into “Jubilee (jubilee), Jubilee (jubilee). You’re invited to this gospel jubilee” in two-part harmony and wind up in a fit of laughter at the memory. If you grew up in the South, you’re probably like us and »
“‘Lord, Lord, you ought to take a ride, get in a Ford with a donnie by your side.’” One Saturday evening in 1927, George D. Hay, the program director of Nashville radio station WSM, was preparing to introduce the evening’s local program, the WSM Barn Dance. Not really a barn dance at all, the program’s »
Today, the community of Talcott, West Virginia, bases its fledgling tourism industry on John Henry. Today, the community of Talcott, West Virginia, bases its fledgling tourism industry on John Henry. “We really believe the contest with the steam drill happened here,” says John “Bill” Dillon, a retired Talcott postmaster and local historian. In 1972 the »
It’s hard to believe, but one of the puzzles that early-twentieth-century folklorists spent time sorting out was whether John Henry and John Hardy were the same man. It’s hard to believe, but one of the puzzles that early-twentieth-century folklorists spent time sorting out was whether John Henry and John Hardy were the same man. John »
“Think of the tale of Bob Dylan going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and an enraged Alan Lomax trying to pin Dylan’s manager to the ground while Pete Seeger hunted for an ax to cut the cables.” After O Brother, Where Art Thou? spurred a surge of interest in all things folk, I got calls »
“On a sweaty Saturday morning in late October 2004, a jazz funeral was held in New Orleans. Lloyd Washington had performed off and on in the postwar period in one of the many groups known as the Ink Spots that grew out of the original 1930s group of that name.” No southern city—indeed, few cities »