“A firsthand look at the artisitc and business records of south Louisiana’s Goldband enterprises.” In spring 1995 the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill acquired a rich group of archival records from Goldband Recording Corporation, a small but important recording studio that has operated out of Lake Charles, Louisiana, »
“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, »
Peering out from every supermarket’s shelves, between the Pop-Tarts and maple syrup, is a smiling riddle. Aunt Jemima brand pancake mix has been a part of American life for more than a century now, an overwhelmingly popular choice of consumers. The woman on the box has undergone numerous makeovers, but she remains the same in »
“‘No shirt, no sleeves, no service. . . . No guns.’” My buddy Floyd is a native of Wisconsin. He’s half Minnesotan and half Wisconsinite, which makes him half German and half Norwegian and about six-feet nine-inches of Aryan genetics. It’s impossible not to attract attention when traveling with Floyd. I’m going to have a »
“It will surprise no one to see that the two big stories of the twentieth-century South are the transition from an agricultural to an urban society and the transformation effected by the Civil Rights movement.” Spring 2001’s South Polls unveiled our list of “The Twenty Most Influential Southerners of the Twentieth Century.” Mike Burg, president »
“‘Now, Miss Daisy, somebody done bomb that temple back yonder, and you know it.’” The release of the film Driving Miss Daisy in 1989 made American moviegoers aware of the ongoing presence of southern Jewishness. 1 Alfred Uhry wrote the film’s screenplay from his 1987 autobiographically informed Pulitzer prize-winning play, the story of the relationship »
“Freezing time is a tricky science.” “Death suffuses all these pictures.” So says former fashion photographer Charlie Curtis, who has been working late on his time machine again. Readers of Southern Cultures will remember his “Signs of the South” photographic essay, which we published in our Summer 2000 issue. But unlike “Signs of the South,” »