Rivers flood broad expanses of the Southern imagination. The mythic Mississippi rolls through literature, our watery national spine, by turns torpid and apocalyptic. But there are countless intimate tributaries and every Southerner knows one. Flowing water provides blessed relief in […]
“… common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” – Nabokov The ghosts are there, when we can bear to look. We inhabit the past, or, more properly, the […]
“Ballads lead their life in the mouths and ears of men by hear-say like bluebirds and flickers in the nest of hollow trees.” – Robert Frost Ballads are consequential music. Something happens, often something dark or violent, and effects are […]
The brightest lights of Brooklyn’s bluegrass scene are coming together on Sunday, September 23 to help restore an historic, landmark Park Slope church, the “Old First.” The number of players and pairings makes this Brooklyn Bluegrass Bash historic in its […]
If you could conjure a future past, a time both technologically advanced and bucolic, would passionate data shepherds and their inamoratas still prove digitally-rendered pleasures of valleys, groves, hills and fields while gamboling on beds of roses? You may fetch […]
You might picture the “Rockabilly Highway” as a yellow-brick road stretching between Buddy Hollyland and Bill Monroeville. But it really exists, in McNairy County, TN, where it’s also known as Route 45 South. Not only did Elvis meet Carl Perkins […]
You might encounter Jesus here and there. Invoked from the pulpit or Facebook. In pro forma political pieties. Credited or blamed for events big and small. You probably didn’t encounter him in a roughneck Motel 6 as you were poised […]
Sydney Wayser and I spoke periodically over the past two years about what kind of record she would make next. Her third release needed to be a clear step forward, a departure. I knew what record Iwanted to hear: focus […]
You sneak up on Session Americana. Oh, not literally, as you can discover them in an ever-widening circle of clubs and festivals, three studio records and one live set, and on a new, as-yet-untitled 10-song release due this spring (listen […]
Let’s agree that most YouTube videos of cover songs by high-school students are meant to entertain a small circle of friends and earn derisive snorts much beyond the school grounds. Few are so pure in intention and strikingly beautiful in […]
