MC Shy D brought hip-hop to Atlanta. Or anyway, he brought Atlanta to hip-hop—in the mid-eighties, he was the first rapper from the city to break out of it, to tour the country and make a name for himself. He became an object of adulation to the whole region.
For three over-warm days in late May, Allan Gurganus welcomed me to his home to hold forth on his life and art, and on the imminent publication of Local Souls, about the invented town of Falls, North Carolina, population 6,803. An ordinary place of extraordinary people, Falls appears in nearly all of Gurganus’s fiction—“an inexhaustible resource,” he calls it, a town he knows with such kissing intimacy he can amble in it block by block and tell you how many cracks the sidewalks have.
A conversation with Cynthia Shearer. I got trained as a fiction writer to shamble in like Moms Mabley asking that the house lights be turned back on because we are not done talking about this or that particular thing. In Fletcher Henderson’s case, we need to pull the camera back a little on that stock scene of the little boy locked in with the piano and get more in the frame.
The Rock*A*Teens came along in the early nineties, after a string of tragedies rocked the Cabbagetown community. As Atlanta-based journalist Doug Deloach told me: “To tell the story of the Rock*A*Teens is to also tell the story of Cabbagetown and all the bands that came before them.”
Yell If You Think You Might Be Sinking by Taylor Finke examines the homes of women—including Finke’s mother—with whom the photographer has lived. Never quite at home in these places, Finke uses the settings to examine her own ideas about space and domesticity.
It’s snowing in the South. A woman rises early, looks out her window at the sheets of ice, and then, smiling, falls back into bed. In an apartment down the hall, Stephen Curry highlights play on TV, and someone sings, They could have had him any day, they only let him slip away.
Johnny Mercer drew from the same black musical traditions as Elvis would a generation later and made, if not quite a billion dollars, certainly an inexhaustible fortune, and left behind a half-dozen of America’s most indelible melodies besides.
This was a real letter with real handwriting, but when I picked it up I felt a moment of confused dread. Next to my name and address was rubber-stamped DEATH ROW in black.
Johnathon Kelso’s series I Want to Die A-Shouting documents the shape-note singing tradition throughout the South. Work from this series was featured in our Georgia Music issue.
Everybody I met in Augusta had a James Brown story: the Godfather of Soul roaming around town in his baby-blue Rolls-Royce, showing up unbidden at parties and concerts, hanging around like he was anyone while making sure everyone remembered exactly who he was. Many people also had a Sharon Jones story.
Dusk falls in the city. In a small and dimly lit corner bar, a jazz collective tunes up their horns, preparing to combust rhythms into the night. A man, trying to find the club on Google Maps, stops for a passing group of black-dressed mourners. From his car window he sees a young woman leaving a used bookstore with a copy of C. D. Wright’s Cooling Time.
I don’t know if the term “Cosmic Southerner” is something I came up with or if I read it somewhere or heard someone say it, but it’s an idea I’ve carried with me for a long time. Pharoah Sanders, André 3000, and Benjamin from the band Smoke are true Cosmic Southerners. Atlanta’s Col. Bruce Hampton is another.
