While Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown sat in prison, my sisters and I went on school trips to the Biltmore House and Six Flags; we took family trips to Blowing Rock, Chimney Rock, Sliding Rock, Callaway Gardens. By the time I memorized the counties of North Carolina for Mrs. Eddington’s sixth grade class, Brown and his stepbrother had been on death row a couple years.
Memories, particularly with loved ones, are a curious phenomenon. The good ones often do not fully announce themselves as anything close to “good” when they are happening. It’s only after the event, when a new perspective is gained, that they become an accepted—or funny, or weird, or sweet—episode in family history.
In “Slow Process,” Cait Kovac photographs scenes that expose how nature is reclaiming the landscape across the South. Many of her photos have an improvised feel, as Kovac often makes them while wandering down dirt roads and exploring old parks, churches, and other abandonments.
The year before Paul MacLeod, the owner of Graceland Too, died of natural causes on his porch just two days after he shot and killed a local house painter, I drove my partner, Mesha, down South so that she could experience Paul’s museum firsthand.
The sun is going down in New Orleans. A man turns onto Frenchman Street, putting out a cigarette on the old brick sidewalk. He hears laughter coming from inside a bar. Nearby, a local bookstore owner closes up for the night.
I think the best that we can do as songwriters is try to document and try to record something about the time that we’re living in. If you want to connect with people who are alive now—unless you’re singing to ghosts—you better talk about things that are happening in the present.
At some point in the late Gilded Age of America, rich white people decided winter would no longer be tolerated. The impertinence of cold, the incommodiousness of ice, the dirt of the coal fire, the gray of the sky—these were for ordinary people, not the titans who controlled the banks and the steel mills and the oil fields and the railroads and the bootlegging. They went to Florida.
We sat cross-legged on the cement floor of a warehouse in the Upper Ninth Ward, not far from the train tracks. In the center was a small wooden house with singing pipes built into its walls. This was Chateau Poulet, a musical shanty about to perform for all of us.
Aaron Hardin’s work focuses on the human condition in rural Southern communities. In his series “Jackson,” he studies the residents of Jackson, Tennessee, where he’s lived for the past ten years.
Selling fireworks has traditionally been the province of carny types and college kids, though lately there’s been a change in this small Mississippi slice of the industry. I had driven up from New Orleans, where I live, to join a group of twenty-going-on-thirty-somethings from Lawrence, Kansas, led by my friend Cyrus, to sell fireworks in these hinterlands.
The first time I admitted that yes, I was related to Francis Scott Key, it came as a shock, even to me, because, of course, I was lying. While my other college friends experimented with drugs and God, I experimented with genealogy.
Letters from Little Rock
We are shaped by the era and the family into which we are born, but what can be a greater act of self-definition than making you my wife, my chosen family?
