Music
“In the business of surviving, it is easy to forget that almost half of our lives is spent dreaming.” The pandemic came to stay for awhile and settled us down, grounded like teenagers in some enduring season beyond the usual markers of weather and time. Southern Cultures, at the beginning of the stay-at-home orders, invited some »
Fiction
Welcome to our virtual book tour. Since so many literary events have been canceled or postponed during the pandemic, we’re bringing authors with new books directly to you. We hope you’ll get to know an author or book to add to your reading list. We also encourage you to support your local bookshop. Set in »
Art
In a moment when we’re encouraged to stay home and shelter-in-place, we’ve asked many of our illustrator friends to document what home now means to them. Print them out, color them in, and create your own to share with us online using the hashtag #SCatHome. You can also download a full printable PDF at the »
Memoir
1. When I was five and my brother Jason was three, we lived in an old white farmhouse near the James River in Varina, Virginia. I was too young to believe in the idea of ghosts; otherwise, I’m sure I would have been convinced I was seeing them in every dusk-dim corner of the property—by »
Music
“From the heyday of swing through the dawn of bop, wherever there was jazz, there was some piece of Birmingham.” This is the story of jazz in Birmingham, and of Birmingham in jazz—of how Alabama’s “Magic City” helped create some of the nation’s most swinging and celestial sounds, and of how that city, in the »
Art
“Appalachia and Wales share many folk tales and traditions, such as those of the granny women. These sisters made tinctures and potions and had remedies for every kind of ailment, though not of the hubble-bubble kind.” In May 2019, a group of illustrators, filmmakers, photographers, book artists, and folk artists from West Wales exhibited their »
Essay
In January 1941, literati tastemaker Carl van Vechten wrote in mock reproach to Gertrude Stein in Paris—whom he addressed as “Baby Woojums”—chastising her and her partner Alice B. Toklas for their absence when simply everyone else who mattered was there in Manhattan. To further pique the envy of author and art aficionado Stein, he noted »
Essay
At elegant gatherings and august meetings, I often scan the room and wonder aloud why I am, as people like myself are often given to ask, the Only Negro in the Room, or ONR, as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Natasha Trethewey have been known to note. Surely black intellectuals are central to these types of inquiries, »
Music
The earliest documented exploration of a deep cave in eastern North America occurred roughly five thousand years ago, in the limestone-rich hills of the Upper Cumberland Plateau along what is now the border between Kentucky and Tennessee. Carrying torches lit with charcoal made from river cane, one or two small groups of hunter-gatherers entered a »
Music
As a teenager in 1940s Fort Worth, Ornette Coleman supported his family playing tenor saxophone on the radio and in regional clubs, honing woozy gutbucket rhythm and blues suitable for partying and abandon. “I was in the South when minorities were oppressed, and I identified with them through music,” Coleman told the philosopher Jacques Derrida »
Music
Jackie Shane is not an easy person to interview. She was one of the greatest soul artists of the 1960s. (“The greatest singer who ever lived,” says Skippy White, dean of the Boston soul scene over the last half century or so.) Designated male at birth in Nashville in 1940, she openly began to identify »
Music
Hazel Dickens wrote “They’ll Never Keep Us Down” in 1976 for the soundtrack to Barbara Kopple’s Oscar-winning documentary Harlan County, USA. In Dickens’s lyrics, “they” are the rich men who prioritize profits over people, who “rob, steal, and kill” to maintain their power. Songs of protest have been around as long as humans have made »