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 »
Music
“‘I’m that queen that’ll make ya bounce!’” “Release your wiggle!” Big Freedia chants as a crowd of college-aged fans encircles the stage, responding to her call with dance. Freedia’s command to “release” is part of her larger mission to take the world by storm, one bounce at a time. Through her music, television show, and »
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 »
Essay
In 1869, twenty-nine-year-old John Muir left his home in Indianapolis and began to walk south. With Florida as his goal, Muir botanized his way through Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia, before stopping in Savannah. There, he ran out of money and had to spend almost a week “camping among the tombs” in Bonaventure Cemetery, »
Essay
Country Queers in Central Appalachia Five years ago I moved home to the farm where I was raised in southeastern West Virginia. For a decade I had bought into the dominant narrative in LGBTQIA spaces that because I am queer I could never live back home. I was told—in not so many words—that I could »
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 »
Film
The most shocking moment in Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) looks at first like an abstract painting. An organic shape, small and shiny and pinkish white, sits on a dark, rough ground. Even after an enormous disembodied finger pokes into the frame, the visual alone remains indecipherable. Previous scenes have shown striking miner Lawrence Jones lying »
Interview
On the occasion of my retirement from the University of Mississippi in 2014, I knew I had to talk about the South, the topic I have spent my career studying, pondering, writing about, and teaching. The more I thought about what to present in a final, university-wide lecture, my personal journey seemed relevant, for I »
“The Rough South offers either the illusion of being clothed culturally, if one identifies with the characters of this literature, or an escape to the ‘real South’ . . . if one believes that the working class retains an authenticity that has been largely flattened in the middle and upper classes.” The past three decades »