“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, »
“It’s a southern tall tale, the story of a confidence man, of a treasure hunt, of a man trying to prove himself to his children and estranged wife, of a political campaign, of three buddies on the road, of the quest for home.” I was born in 1950 and so did not live through 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 »
Essay
“‘I need a monkey driving a car, one hen laying eggs, two cuckoos, a fairy with a flower, one climbing panda, one cock crowing at dawn, and whatever we’ve got in the way of a Jupiter’s fire or a thunder blast or a big bear.’” This condensed excerpt first appeared in Vol. 10, No. 1 »
“This is a world in complete turmoil — a civilization falling to pieces — and one seldom so strongly presented in Civil War films. And yet, in the end, there is a regeneration of southern family and community.” In 1961 the Library of Congress published a filmography of nearly nine hundred motion pictures produced since »
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 »
University of North Carolina Press, 2004 Soon after the Civil War—and long before the current interest in “historical memory”—Americans understood that the way they remembered the Civil War would define their nation. For nearly a century and a half, commemoration of the Civil War has served as a sort of national Rorschach test, exposing divisions »
“‘There were a lot of Scarletts in Vietnam after 1975.’” On his tour through modern Georgia in search of memories of the Old South, Tony Horwitz marveled at Japanese tourists’ fascination with Gone With the Wind and observed the exchanges between them and a busy Vivien Leigh–Scarlett O’ Hara impersonator, Melly Meadows. Meadows had taken her act »
“They lit out over the bad roads, and the family car broke down in the middle of a stream.” The Carters started small, singing in churches . . . Alvin Pleasant Carter, born in 1891, sang in a quartet with two uncles and a sister in churches around Clinch Mountain in southwest Virginia. People called »
“Presley faced criticism from ministers about his lewd performances.” In December 1956 Elvis Presley dropped in at Sun Studios in Memphis, just as a Carl Perkins recording session was ending. Presley was now a national star, having transcended earlier that year his previous status as a regional rockabilly performer. That special day became known as »
“We got the feel of the blues, the togetherness of funk music, the conviction of gospel music, the energy of rock, and the improvisation of jazz.” By the summer of 1995, the Atlanta-based rap group OutKast had watched their first album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, achieve platinum sales of over one million. This feat earned them an award »
“Does love have the power to heal our blues?” Where is the Love?” is the title of a memorably wistful duet recorded in the early seventies by Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway; a lament for the way in which Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of redemptive interracial brotherhood or “beloved community,” which animated the Civil »