ON THE RECORD: Mississippi Music Issue Contributors Dish Their Favorites!
Sandra Beasley • LD Beghtol • Megan Mayhew Bergman • Pat Cochran • Frank Bill •
Greg Burgess • William Lusk Coppage • J.D. Daniels • Michael T. Fournier •
David Gates • Joey Goebel • Ben Greenman • Sheila Heti • Jessica Hopper •
Amorak Huey • David Kirby • Yusef Komunyakaa • Preston Lauterbach •
Tim Lee • Johannes Lichtman • Allen Lowe • Rachael Maddux • Collin Makamson •
Barry Mazor • Tom Nolan • Kevin Nutt • Benjamin Percy • Alison Powell •
Mike Powell • Megan Pugh • Jamie Quatro • Jonathan Rabb • John Ridley •
David Ritz • Nicholas Rombes • Nikil Saval • Kate Schatz • Cynthia Shearer •
Betsy Shepherd • David Shirley • Roger Stolle • Jay Varner • Elijah Wald •
Oliver Wang • Thomas Chatterton Williams • Lois Wilson •
Mark Winegardner • David Yaffe •
Sandra Beasley is the author of I Was the Jukebox, which won the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize; Theories of Falling, which won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize; and Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a memoir and cultural history of food allergies. She lives in Washington, D.C., except for when she's drinking scotch and/or dancing in the vicinity of Oxford, Miss. Which might be more often than you would expect.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
I believe in the ongoing value of the concept album, and for that reason I'm going to say Cee Lo Green's The Lady Killer, in all its cheeky self-aware tromboned glory. It's badass driving music.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
In terms of sheer sound-lyric momentum, echoed in the urgency of the song itself—I vote for Chuck Berry's "Downbound Train." As a poet, I'm slightly in awe of any phrase that insists on stressing all three of its syllables.
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
While at the beach with my family one summer, my teenage self was convinced to step up to the stage with the house guitarist and cover Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" for an audience of bored and sunburned vacationers who were probably on their third daiquiri by lunch. I'm mildly tuneful. It was nonetheless ill-advised.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Did anyone else ever make getting lost sound so tempting as Chet Baker? Everything right about him was so right. Everything wrong about him is what I tend to have crushes on regardless.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
Oh, Sam Cooke, Sam Cooke. In the title poem from I Was The Jukebox, the jukebox tries to prove her devotion by declaring "I played Sam Cooke for you." Not just because of "A Change Is Gonna Come," either—epic a song as that is—or because of his tragic life story. What I appreciate of this Clarksdale-born man is his phrasing: the finesse of "Falling in Love," the playfulness of "Another Saturday Night." He is truly one of our great vocalists.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
I don't understand why people don't consistently rank Patty Griffin up there with Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, and Gillian Welch in the pantheon of our great contemporary singer-songwriters. I dare you to listen to her first album, Living With Ghosts, and not be moved; that's acoustic fire right there. She's a brilliant lyricist whose work is versatile, exact, and rebellious.
What song do you want people to dance to at your funeral?
B.B. King's "Better Not Look Down": "Put the hammer down/And keep it full speed ahead." Seems like a good philosophy to have through the day I die. Plus, who could cry when he's talking like the Queen of England?
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
He never should have told her about the llamas.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
"If there's a light at the end of the tunnel, you're it."
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
Along the stretch of Highway 7 between Oxford and Holly Springs, the Foxfire Ranch's open-air Sunday evening concerts are my joy, my refuge, and my reminder of everything I love about Mississippi. Marquee acts play three casual sets for a diverse crowd that includes little kids running with their dogs and college girls with their hula hoops. Ms. Annie cooks up barbecue, doesn't mind the BYOB, and gets everyone on the dance floor sooner or later. Go.
LD Beghtol, a displaced Southerner currently in exile in the Bushwick sector of Brooklyn, is a musician, writer, and art director. The Midtown Manhattan office tower in which he works has a giant tilted globe in its marble art deco lobby, which is often overrun with schoolchildren and tourists. Big Top/Encore—the latest album by his band Flare Acoustic Arts League—features loud guitars, liner notes by Daniel Handler, and a low (for him) body count; it was released by Affairs of the Heart in November. When not archiving his collection of Victorian postmortem photography, he...oh never mind.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
The Real Tuesday Weld's astounding soundtrack album for Glen Duncan's new novel, The Last Werewolf (Knopf, 2011).
What is your favorite song title of all time?
Impossible to pick just ONE, so here are four:
Pop song: "You're the Only Star (In My Blue Heaven)" by Gene Autry.
Folk song: "The Butcher Boy."
Spiritual: "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need" by Isaac Watts.
Classical: "The Silver Swan" by Orlando Gibbons.
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
The few I've had were all comprehensively humiliating.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Jon Natchez: musician extraordinaire, bon vivant, gentleman, and scholar. Note: He's a nice Jewish boy from Boston; his impossible surname was assigned to some immigrant relative a century or so ago at Ellis Island, apparently.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Bobbie Gentry, of course. Van Dyke Parks is first runner-up, but strictly as an arranger.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Musician: a Spanish troubadour named Remate.
Band: Wire.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
Some endless Italo-disco minor-key remix of Heaven 17's "Crushed by the Wheels of Industry"—which, sadly, doesn't seem to exist, except in my fevered brain.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
Just before he went utterly and irrevocably deaf, LD....
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
Chris Xefos once told me: "Just play it yourself. Why let someone else have all the fun?"
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
Sacred Harp singing!
Megan Mayhew Bergman lives on a small farm in Vt. Radiohead is followed by Raffi in her iPod artist list. Scribner will publish her first collection of stories, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, in March 2012.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
The Incomparable Brook Benton or The Four Tops–Greatest Hits. I have a real Levi Stubbs thing. I heard those songs all my life, then I sort of "re-heard" them as an adult, and was awestruck by the urgency, all that complex masculinity and melody. Despite the exuberance, there is a lot of gloom and hurt there.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
Loretta Lynn: "I Chased You Till You Caught Me." Or Phil Collins's "Sussudio," only because I named one of my hens after it.
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
The time I drove three hours to a reading in Cambridge and sang so enthusiastically to the radio that I nearly lost my voice. I remember doing a particularly fine job with "Easy Lover" by Phil Collins and Philip Bailey and OutKast's "ATLiens."
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Jack White. Tina Turner circa ’71. Olivia Newton-John in the "Magic"/Xanadu era.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
Archie Brownlee and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. "Take Your Burdens to Jesus" guts me.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
The Funk Brothers—the studio musicians who played on almost every hit Motown track before Berry Gordy moved his studio to L.A. in the ’70s.
What song do you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"Last Christmas" by Wham!. (The opening bars house such easy joy, and the video is like cracking a 1984 JCPenney catalog.) Family and friends will understand. It's how we've marked the onslaught of the Christmas season for the last ten years. Here's how the "Last Christmas Competition" works: A player (there are about fifty now) must call me immediately upon hearing the song—no covers allowed. We track to third place. I once had a friend send me a frantic email after hearing it in an Internet café in Africa in July. It's serious business.
Raised within the farming fields of Walnut Valley, Frank Bill grew up corning cars, building fires, smoking weed, sneaking beers, and hunting rabbit and squirrel. He later took a factory job on the nightshift where he taught himself how to string sentences together and started writing about the survival of the working class. He writes and lives in Corydon, Ind., with his beautiful wife and champion canine. He's published his words in Granta, Playboy, Plots with Guns, Thuglit, and many others. His first book of connected short stories, Crimes in Southern Indiana, was released by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in September 2011.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
That's really tough considering how much music I listen to. I'd say either Scott H. Biram's Bad Ingredients or Patterson Hood's Murdering Oscar.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"She Left Me for Jesus" by Hayes Carll.
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
When my grandfather got remarried the reception was held at our local VFW. The locals were having their normal Friday-night karaoke till I took the microphone and drunkenly started screaming the words "Kill the poor, kill the poor" by The Dead Kennedys, blowing all of the fuses within the karaoke system. The owner ripped the microphone from my hands while the locals, a large group of blue hairs and disgruntled military vets, were angered and horrified and got up to leave. My family and friends were wet-faced with laughter.
Who is your biggest music crush?
Another tough one; either Norah Jones or Shonna Tucker of The Drive-By Truckers.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
R.L. Burnside or Fred McDowell.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
There are way too many, but Ray Wylie Hubbard and Chris Knight are two of my favorite singer/songwriters, and they should be well-known worldwide. They pen the best damn stories and put a rhythm to them like nobody else. Or as Ray calls it, "Grit and groove."
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"Alabama High-Test" by Old Crow Medicine Show.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
Ellis McCloud could pick the strings of any guitar and resurrect Lightnin' Hopkins from the dead, but he couldn't pick a good woman to save his ass.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
William Elliott Whitmore once sent me a postcard while on tour after reading my short story "The Penance of Scoot McCutchen," telling me how much he dug it and thought it'd make a good song.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
After his passing, I was blown away listening to author Larry Brown pick his guitar and sing "Don't Let the Door."
Greg Burgess is a soul music enthusiast raised in South London where his predilection for all things vinyl was assuaged by record-hunting forays across the capital city. At the age of ten, Greg discovered soul music and began a musical voyage of serendipity and a deep passion for African-American music. Although he has spent his family's wealth on his obsession, he has remained married to his other passion, Lucienne, for twenty-three years, and they live with their three children in the English countryside outside London. Greg has had published over sixty articles on soul music in journals that include Record Collector, Juke Blues, and In The Basement. His work can also be found on various websites and in sleeve notes for reissue companies.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
The best new album I have heard this year is Soul Time by Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings. My current favourite old school record is Call Me by Etta James—just re-released on CD.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"Stay in My Corner" by The Dells—the later version.
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Best and probably worst was an evening in a pub in an industrial part of the English midlands. We were only there because the football match we'd gone to see had been called off so you had about one hundred supporters descending unexpectedly on a bar man who had been expecting a quiet night. I sang a version of the Irish ballad "The Fields of Athenry" and got booed offstage.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
So many, but for musicality and charisma, I'll go with Bobby Womack.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
It would have to be Tommy Tate. He barely cut a bad record, and why he isn't a treasured Magnolia State institution is a bit of a mystery to me.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Cissy Houston is one of the greatest singers that has ever breathed, but she is always described as Whitney's mum.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"How Sweet It Is (To be Loved By You)," gospel version by Cissy Houston. It would be more a gentle sway, really. At the wake afterward I'd suggest "This Old Heart of Mine" by The Isley Brothers.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
Hines knew, before he had been in New Orleans a day that he was finally at peace. He knew they intended to kill him, but here in the city where Jelly Roll Morton played out his life, he felt a homecoming and a moment of reconciliation. He was jolted out of contemplation by a loud thud on the door. "I hear you knocking," he mumbled as he groped for his revolver and moved silently away from the window. He heard a woman's voice—it was Mary Jane—and in that instance he felt his life was nearing its end. It was time to start his final performance.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
I once had a conversation with the great Irish singer Tommy Makem who'd clearly confused me with one of his cousins of which he had many. I didn't want to offend the great man, so I inquired after other relatives who may or may not have existed by saying "How is Mary [substitute Patrick, Sean, Dierdre] doing?" We had a pretty good conversation at the end of which Tommy told me to check him out in New York and sent love to my mother. Years later, I worked with his niece Louise Makem who told me that it was typical of Tommy, and he was probably trying not to offend me!
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
I remember I felt a real sense of loss when I'd heard that Muddy Waters had died in 1983. I spent the afternoon listening to beauties like "Rollin' Stone," "Country Boy," and, of course, "Baby, Please Don't Go." Sadly, it's a feeling that I've experienced many times since.
"Come along, wild flower child," from "Starkville City Jail" (Johnny Cash).
Pat Cochran is a writer and sommelier who when not drinking wine and pontificating on grapes is drinking wine and pontificating about music. He lives in Jackson, Miss. with his wife, Mary Elizabeth, and their precocious young son, Jack. Though he'd rather live in France, he's in the process of moving back to his favorite town, Oxford, Miss. He's currently obsessed with his wife's garage-punk band, Wild Emotions.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
The thing I listened to most obsessively this year was the three-CD custom reissue of The Kinks' The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, released in the U.K. on the Castle label. I think I probably listened to that reissue the most last year, too. Best new album of the year: Castle Face Records Presents: Group Flex Vol. 1, a five Flexi Disc compilation with tracks from Bare Wires, Thee Oh Sees, Blasted Canyons, The Fresh & Onlys, Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin, and Here Comes the Here Comes. Currently digging the new Red Fang and the Mike Rep & The Quotas reissue.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
A tie between "She Got the Gold Mine (I Got The Shaft)" by Jerry Reed, or "Livin' the High Life (With My Low Life Friends)" by Tyler Keith & The Preacher's Kids. (Disclaimer: I used to play in a band with Tyler Keith....)
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Worst karaoke experience: All of them. I'm a singing failure. If I were able to have a good one it would be with a version of Harry Nilsson's "One (Is The Loneliest Number)."
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Probably the whole of The Pleasure Seekers, or the hot chick from Paramore, Hayley Williams.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
Ike Turner.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
1990s Norwegian death-metal stalwarts Burzum. Englebert Humperdinck's 1960s sides for the Parrot label. Turkish psychedelic music from the 1970s. A million French bands.
What song do you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"I Think I See the Light" by Cat Stevens.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
"Man, you guys are fucking cursed!" —Mitch Easter. "It's a pleasure to meet you." —Ahmet Ertegun.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
Trolling through Marshall County blues juke joints in the late-1980s before R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough became huge international stars!
William Lusk Coppage is a Greenville, Miss., native who, even though is a vegan, still loves to shoot guns and track (but not kill) wildlife. After serving in the United States Air Force, he completed his MFA in poetry from McNeese State University. He now teaches English in Wilmington, N.C., at Cape Fear Community College. When not writing, he enjoys making music. Coppage is the former guitarist for the Miss.-based band, Willie and Me, and is now the guitarist/singer for My Heart Belongs to Buffalo. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Greensboro Review, Cream City Review, Blue Earth Review, and Mikrokosmos.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
2011 was a blues year for me, lots of Burnside, T-Model, and McDowell. Two albums that stay in my rotation while writing are Townes Van Zandt's Live at the Old Quarter and John Prine's self-titled album. Speaking of Prine, his tribute album, Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows, has a stellar line-up (Deer Tick, Conor Oberst, My Morning Jacket, The Avett Brothers). All of these newer bands are creating amazing sonic layers while staying true to strong lyrics and storytelling. I have to mention David Berman of The Silver Jews. He is an amazing songwriter and poet. Listen to the album Bright Flight.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly" by Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty.
"Let Me Play with Your Poodle" by Lightnin' Hopkins.
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
I lived in Okinawa, Japan, for two years while I served in the Air Force. They take karaoke seriously over there. I usually have horrible anxiety and avoid karaoke at all costs. One night after a few rounds of habu sake (made from pickling habu vipers in sake), some locals dragged me into a karaoke parlor, which was very similar to the scene in Lost in Translation. We had our own room with a big "phone book" of songs to choose from. I ended up on top of a table singing Van Halen's "Jump." For my encore I went for The Carpenters' "Superstar." It was that kind of night.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
When I was a kid learning to play the guitar, I read all those guitar magazines. They always had a page or two of posters you could buy. I was always drawn to the ones of Lita Ford. Maybe, Susanna Hoffs. Do those count? I definitely had a crush on them.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Eden Brent. She is a Greenville, Mississippi, native also. She was the 2010 Pinetop Perkins Piano Player of the year. Her mentor/teacher was Boogaloo Ames. Brent keeps a great tradition alive.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
I miss Big Ass Truck. They were out of Memphis. They were so funky and groove oriented. I hope by the end of 2012 everyone will have heard of Cary Anne Hearst. She claims Mississippi (though she lives now in Charleston, South Carolina). Her and her husband, Michael Trent, have this country/rock duet that is killer. Not that many people know about Ron Etheridge. This man can write a damn song. He's been touring around the South for years. He's just another Delta boy.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"Short People" by Randy Newman. Well, maybe not. What about "Brokedown Palace" by The Grateful Dead?
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
No one knew what possessed Guitar Charlie to get a tattoo of GG Allin shoving a microphone up his ass, but Charlie proudly showed off his right forearm, glittering under the stage lights from Vaseline to protect the ink, with every chord he strummed.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
Well, it would have to be from my father. He is a musician. His band used to support acts like Black Oak Arkansas and Gregg Allman when they would come through the Delta. He would often tell me when I first started playing, even if you are better than someone, you can always learn something from him.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
Growing up Greenville, I remember it was a big deal to be able to go without your parents to the Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage Festival. I think I was sixteen the first time I got to go with just my friends. Before that, my father would take me. I had always heard stories about when they held the festival at Freedom Village, which is outside of Greenville. Dad would tell me about Stevie Ray Vaughan playing there. I think the first year I went I saw Little Feat, Dr. John, Albert King, Bobby Rush. Don't hold me to all those acts. It's been awhile.
J.D. Daniels spent May and June of 2011 on a forty-three-foot ketch in the Mediterranean with an otherwise all-Israeli crew. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, n+1, AGNI, Paper Monument, and elsewhere.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"A Carrot Is as Close as a Rabbit Gets to a Diamond."
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
Lester Young.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
"With utmost emphasis I wish to assert that it is not out of any desire to thrust my own person into the foreground that I offer a few words about myself and my circumstances in preface to this account of the life of the late Adrian Leverkühn, to this first and certainly very provisional biography of a musical genius, a revered man sorely tried by fate, which both raised him up and cast him down."
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
"Keep your day job, keep your day job. You're going to want to keep your day job."
Michael T. Fournier's debut novel, Hidden Wheel, has just been released by Three Rooms Press. He's also the author of a book-length rumination on The Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime, the 45th installment of Continuum Press's 33 1/3 series. His writing has appeared in Fluke, Chunklet, Barrelhouse, Stolen Island Review, Pennsylvania English, and Boston Phoenix, and his weekly record reviews—more often than not about mid-’90s rustbelt emo albums—appear every Monday on 365 Albums A Year (www.365aay.com). He's the drummer and main songwriter of Dead Trend, a hardcore band from 1986. He has taught punk rock history at Tufts University and Emerson College. He lives in Western Mass. with his wife Rebecca and their cat, where he teaches English at Middlesex and Holyoke Community Colleges.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
I had never spent any substantial time with the recorded output of Wipers before this year. My wife and I listened to Youth of America, their sophomore album, for months at a time, and played it for pretty much anyone who would listen. As far as newer stuff goes, I listened to both the Red Album and (especially) the Blue Record by Baroness a zillion times in 2011.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
Don Caballero are the kings of amazing song titles. It's hard to pick just one. With that said, I'll go with "You Drink a Lot of Coffee for a Teenager."
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Every Tuesday for like three years me and a bunch of friends did karaoke at Charlie's Kitchen in Harvard Square (tell Rory Stark and TJ I sent you!). There's a few songs I have dialed—Devo's "Whip It," Men Without Hats' "Safety Dance"—but the real fun came in learning something new every week. I remember having fun with Gordon Lightfoot's "Sundown," Gary Puckett's "Young Girl," and especially Rush's "Subdivisions."
Who is your biggest musician crush?
I don't have any active musician crushes right now, but I used to be totally crushed out on Kim Coletta from Jawbox.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
The Staple Singers.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Every time I get asked about my favorite bands I forget to mention Samiam, who have been writing stunning, perfect gruff pop-punk gems for more than twenty years. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Lungfish. Unfold the leg!
What song do you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"The Anchor" by The Minutemen is a tearjerker. Unwound's "Corpse Pose" is probably too inappropriate.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
The Taser hurt much less during practice.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
Mike Watt told me that many of the songs he wrote on Double Nickels on the Dime were written under the influence of James Joyce's Ulysses.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
The only time I ever spent in Miss. was one evening of a cross-country drive. My friends and I were tailgated for upwards of ten miles after buying firewood at a Gauthier convenience store. No one in the car mentioned that we were being followed, but we were, and we all knew it: The brights behind were hard to ignore. When we pulled into our campsite, the follower/tailgater kept driving—it was a cop, trying to get us to speed (I'm sure our Massachusetts plates didn't help things, either). The experience was the embodiment of every "I hate the cops" punk song I ever listened to.
David Gates is the author of the novels Jernigan and Preston Falls and a collection of stories, The Wonders of the Invisible World. He's written nonfiction for Newsweek, where he was a longtime writer and editor, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, GQ, and Rolling Stone. He teaches at the University of Montana and in the Bennington Writing Seminars, where he plays with The Dog House Band. You can neither find him on Facebook nor follow him on Twitter.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
The two box sets of The Stanley Brothers on King and Starday, if this qualifies as an album.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
Just today it's probably "Take Your Foot Out of the Mud And Stick It in the Sand." To save you a Google search, it's by Dr. Humphrey Bate & His Possum Hunters. Second choice: "Ham Beats All Meat," also by Dr. Humphrey Bate.
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
I've yet to have one.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Is it trite to say Keith Richards? Of course it is. So I won't. Why don't I say Lloyd Green?
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
Is it trite to say Charlie Patton? I will anyway.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Obviously The Dog House Band, except we've never been rated.
What song do you want people to dance to at your funeral?
An old song by The Kinks, "Who'll Be the Next in Line?"
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
"The man who built this house—Royall Brown, 1750–1797—is buried in the graveyard up across the road, along with his wife, his son, and his son's wife and children." That's an in-joke, son.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
Bob Dylan once told me in an interview that when his inspiration deserted him, he had to teach himself to write Bob Dylan songs.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
Maybe Jimmie Rodgers's "Mississippi Moon"—"the whippoorwills are flitting in its mellow light." Second place: Rube Lacey's "Mississippi Jailhouse Groan," whose lyric is just what the title suggests. Give me points for not citing Dylan's "Mississippi," which might actually be my favorite, however marginally it might be about Miss.
Joey Goebel is the author of The Anomalies, Torture the Artist, and Commonwealth, which have been translated into thirteen languages. Goebel's novels have earned him fame in the German-speaking countries; several Americans have read them as well. He is a former musician and resides in Henderson, Kent., with his wife, Micah, and his son, Joe.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
The Queen Is Dead by The Smiths.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"Everybody's Got Nice Stuff But Me" by The Dead Milkmen.
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
N/A (Never have. Germy microphones.)
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Minnie Pearl.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
Jimmie Lunceford.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Sparks.
What song do you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"Is That All There Is?" by Peggy Lee.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
Though no one would ever hear a single note of his music, he was the single greatest musician to have ever lived.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
"I'm gonna fuckin' piss in this condom!" —A punk-rock musician in the bathroom at a shelter house show that I was putting on. (I had to talk him out of it.)
Ben Greenman is an editor at The New Yorker and the author of several books of fiction, including Superbad, Please Step Back, and What He's Poised to Do. He has been known to listen to the radio ceaselessly, and once he placed his foot in the open mouth of a dead bear.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
The Duke Ellington Centennial box set. It took almost all year.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
Maybe Hüsker Dü's "I Apologize." Maybe Prince's "Gett Off." Maybe John Prine's "Everybody Wants to Feel Like You."
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
My best and worst is that once I went out in Koreatown with some visiting authors. There was a tremendous amount of drunkery. That is my only experience with it.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Maybe Bernadette Cooper?
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
Mose Allison.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Kid Creole & The Coconuts.
What song do you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"Que Sera, Sera," but the Sly Stone version, not the Doris Day version.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
"He was born in a crossfire hurricane."
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
I love Todd Snider's story about playing when he was young in a nightclub with swings and the woman, drunk, who smashed into the lead singer of his band. It's the KK Rider story, and it's on record, too, but I heard it from him.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
I like when Jelly Roll Morton talks about traveling from Yazoo to Clarksdale. It's not really a lyric. It's stories told, on the Library of Congress set.
Sheila Heti edits interviews for The Believer and has published five books, most recently an illustrated book for children called We Need a Horse. She is also the co-author, with Misha Glouberman, of The Chairs Are Where the People Go, which is partly about music improvisation, and partly about charades, which The New Yorker called "a triumph of what might be called conversational philosophy." She lives in Toronto.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Miranda July's spoken album from 1997, 10 Million Hours a Mile. It gives me an illicit, excited, electric feeling, like waking up next to someone I love and hearing them talk in their sleep.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"You're Never Fully Dressed without a Smile."
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
I had a terrible one last year. A woman who slagged my best friend turned out to be the best singer there. Naturally, I was impressed, but I had to hate her.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
I'm not attracted to musicians.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
Sam Cooke.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
I don't think it's grievous to be underrated.
What song do you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"Ding dong the witch is dead...."
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
"That duck owes me fifty livers but is there a honest day's work he's ever done?!"
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
I had written a story in which a car smacks into a bird while driving, and the bird dies on the windshield. A certain musician (whose band I was touring with) told me that's never happened and never could happen. I'm not a driver, so I half-believed him. I half-believed him all the way to the page, but when I saw the line sitting there, I kept it anyway, because I liked the way it sounded, something he'd surely understand? I'll never forget that he said it, though.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
"The Mississippi Delta was shining/Like a National guitar."
Jessica Hopper is a music and culture critic based in Chicago. Her book, The Girls' Guide to Rocking, was published in 2009.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Probably the new tUnE-YarDs?
What is your favorite song title of all time?
I am horrible at remembering song titles of anything I listened to past the time I was twenty.
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Never have, never will.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
My husband. Running a distant second, Neil Young circa ’69, when he still had a bit of a baby face.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
Big K.R.I.T. and Nate Dogg (R.I.P.).
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
The world isn't ready for the bands I love to be popular. I don't wish popularity or proper rating on anyone making art.
What song do you want people to dance to at your funeral?
I don't want a funeral, I just want someone to play Bill Evans "Peace Piece" on a boom box and have that be it.
Amorak Huey grew up a transplanted Midwesterner living in Ala. Now he's a transplanted Southerner living in Mich., where he teaches creative and professional writing at Grand Valley State University. He has published poems in The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, Crab Orchard Review, and many other journals. This is his second appearance in the OA music issue. More information can be found at www.amorakhuey.net.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Mission Bell by Amos Lee.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
Three-way tie: "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," "If I Had My Way I'd Tear the Building Down," and "Evidently Chickentown."
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Only. My only experience. As part of a group, I sang "You Give Love a Bad Name" at a rehearsal dinner. That was many beers into a long evening. It's hard to imagine the amount of alcohol or extortion it would take to get me to sing solo karaoke in front of anyone.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Grace Potter.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Mississippi John Hurt.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Hayes Carll.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
My six-year-old son says I should say "Macarena," and since I can't think of anything else, I'll go with that.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
They don't tell you what happens after your fingers stop bleeding.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
It's something Jani Lane of Warrant told the crowd at a concert once, but it's not really appropriate to repeat here. That was when I was about twenty-one. Clearly I need to hang out with more musicians so they can tell me more memorable things.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
"You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way/Only one thing I did wrong/Stayed in Mississippi a day too long." —Bob Dylan. This choice sounds anti-Miss., but I promise I don't mean it to be. I just like that song.
David Kirby is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll, which Booklist named as one of its Top Ten Black History Non-Fiction Books of 2010. Even better, the Times Literary Supplement of London called it a "hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense," which Kirby says is the nicest thing anyone has ever said about him.
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
I never have a bad karaoke experience, because I always do the one artist I can handle, Otis Redding. Actually, if I've had a few too many cherry colas, I'll tackle anything in the key of G. But I do Otis best.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
I wrote the book on Little Richard because no one is more important than he is, nor has any one song changed the world more than "Tutti Frutti." But as far as crushes go, it's a tie between Otis Redding and Sam Cooke. Both of them send me, honest they do.
What song do you want people to dance to at your funeral?
The Rolling Stones' version of "Not Fade Away."
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
I've never been able to get that European twenty-four-hour time thing right, and once in Paris I went to a concert scheduled for 1400 hours at 4:00 o'clock when I should have gone at 2:00. The musicians were packing up, and as I stood there so blatantly flap-jawed and disappointed, a lute player named Chris walked up to me and said, "The lyrics don't have to go with the music." I said, "Huh?" and he said, "People think the lyrics have to go with the music, but they don't. I just thought you might want to know that." I think he was giving me a gift to make up for my disappointment. And he's right: Think of Willie Nelson's "Blue Skies," peppy lyrics sung like a suicide note. Or The Sex Pistols' version of "God Save The Queen."
Yusef Komunyakaa is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently The Chameleon Couch. He has been the recipient of fellowships and awards including the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award. In addition to poetry, Komunyakaa is the author of several plays, performance literature, and libretti. He is currently the Distinguished Senior Poet in New York University's graduate creative writing program. He lives in New York.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
New: Tomas Doncker, Power of The Trinity. Old: Miles Davis, Ballads & Blues.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"The Blues and the Abstract Truth" by Oliver Nelson.
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
I've never been brave enough to participate. I've witnessed it through the glass wall at The Apple Restaurant, New York City.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Aretha Franklin.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
Son House.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Jackie Wilson.
What song do you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"Sentimental Journey," by Billy Eckstine.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
He loved his guitar more than three women, but here he was standing under the neon lights of the hock shop, and he hadn't eaten for four days.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
"Don't hang around musicians."
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
"Ode to Billie Joe," by Bobbie Gentry.
Preston Lauterbach is author of The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock ’n’ Roll. He's at work on a hustlers' history of Beale Street. Though set in Memphis, it's almost entirely about people from Miss.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Esquerita's Esquerita!
What is your favorite song title of all time?
The Falcons' "I Found a Love."
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Best: avoiding the medium entirely as a performer and mostly as a listener.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
I'm too old for musician crushes.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Right now, son of Itawamba County, Jimmie Lunceford.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Louis Jordan is the most misunderstood, important entertainer in American cultural history.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"Dude (Looks Like a Lady)." That shit's in the will.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
In a Walmart parking lot in Biloxi, the late Sir Lattimore Brown described stabbing his rival so graphically that my goosebumps got goosebumps and the hairs on the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
One night in Macon at Betty's Place listening to the late Willie King might have been the most fun I have ever had.
Tim Lee once taught fifth grade and made his students dance to Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica for extra credit. A Miss. native who now resides in Knoxville, these days he edits a magazine about dirt-track racing, studies the Zen of slow-smoked pork, and plays guitar in The Tim Lee 3.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Maggot Brain by Funkadelic.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"Love Me Like a Reptile" by Motörhead.
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Our band played at Toots Little Honky Tonk, one of the better-known karaoke joints in Knoxville, so we learned some familiar cover songs and offered lyric sheets to anyone who wanted to sing with the band (since karaoke wasn't going on that night).
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Suzi Quatro.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Men With No I.Q.'s (Jackson), R.L. Burnside.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Eddie Hazel, the late Funkadelic guitarist.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"Cool" by Pylon or "Snake Drive" by R.L. Burnside.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
Despite his obvious lack of pigment, he was born a poor black child in a wealthy subdivision of one of the region's largest cities.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
Kenny Brown once told me the best socks to wear with cowboy boots. Sadly, I don't remember the brand.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
Being part of a musical tribute to the author Larry Brown at Proud Larry's in Oxford that involved Robert Earl Keen, Alejandro Escovedo, Vic Chesnutt, Ben Weaver, and others. Watching Larry's family sing along to Keen's "The Road Goes On Forever" (which is the inscription on Larry's tombstone) was a beautiful thing.
Johannes Lichtman's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Barrelhouse, REAL, Word Riot, and elsewhere. He played in bands for eight years before discovering he has no sense of rhythm. He is currently finishing up an MFA. at UNC-Wilmington. He is also finishing a novel about plagiarism and OxyContin. He is now finishing up this bio.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Cursive's The Ugly Organ (2003).
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"Sorry, I'm a Pushover" by The Kinison.
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
I'm not allowed to talk about it.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Conor Oberst; I dig sad girls.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
This is a fascist question. My favorite non-Elvis Miss. artist is Elvis.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Johannes Lichtman.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"To Awake and Avenge the Dead." (I'm assuming I was murdered).
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
I made several attempts at a clever response to this question, but they all somehow ended up sounding, well, let's say "angry." How about instead I steal this opening line from one of the funniest stories ever written about a musician: "So it's somewhere between Saturday night and Sunday morning clockwise, and I'm in a cinder-block roadhouse called The Last Chance, and I'm playing 'Free Bird' for the fifth time tonight but I'm not thinking about Ronnie Van Zant but an artist dredged up from my former life, Willie Yeats, and his line surely some revelation is at hand" (from Ron Rash's "Waiting for the End of the World" [from OA #54!]).
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
"I'm too drunk to drive you home."—Nathan Gray, lead singer of Boysetsfire.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
"When you come home you can eat pork and beans/I eat tofu because I'm a vegan, motherfucker." —Howlin' Wolf, "Backdoor Man" (rare, original version).
Allen Lowe is a writer, historian, saxophonist and guitarist whose latest CD is Blues and the Empirical Truth. His main historical claims to fame are purely happenstance: He stood next to Jean Genet in a New York City jazz club in 1970, attended The Grateful Dead's first Central Park concert in 1967, played in a high school jazz band that opened for Eubie Blake the night he made his musical comeback, and wandered, accidentally, into a British jazz club in 1969 where Dudu Pukwana and Mongezi Feza (the two most important South African Jazz musicians of the twentieth century) happened to be playing. Consequently, he thinks that history is largely an accident.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Dogon A.D. by Julius Hemphill.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"Me So Horny."
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
I avoid these at all costs.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Geeshie Wiley.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Lester Young.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Arizona Dranes.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
No dancing allowed. They may, however, listen to Yoko Ono screaming.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
It was storm and darkie night.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
Hank Jones witnessed Arthur Miller slapping Marilyn Monroe in an elevator at Madison Square Garden after she had just sung happy birthday to JFK.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
Phil Ochs: "Here's to the land you've torn out the heart of/Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of." No offense, but if you pass that "life starts" amendment, this will feel very current.
Rachael Maddux has written about music for Pitchfork, eMusic, and Design*Sponge, and in 2010 was nominated for a National Magazine Award in reviews & criticism for three album reviews written for Paste Magazine, where she was on staff for four years. She lives in Decatur, Ga., with her husband and a rotating cast of stray cats perpetually vying for sexual dominance on her front porch.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
tUnE-YarDs, Whokill.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow)" is pretty high up there.
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Would you believe I've never karaoke'd? My husband thinks I do a pretty mean Alanis Morissette impression, though.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
1965 Bob Dylan and/or 1997 Taylor Hanson.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Among contemporary folks, I like the first album by Dent May, who looks like a John Hughes movie nerd and plays ukulele and croons about academic conferences and dance parties.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
I will never not give The Everybodyfields as the answer to this question.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
Van Morrison, "Everyone."
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
He smelled even worse than he played guitar.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
Once Nellie McKay said to me, "Oh my god, white people can be scary." Later we talked about cat ranches.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
Witnessing a five-piece white blues band cover The Black Eyed Peas "I Gotta Feeling" at the Horseshoe Casino in Tunica while my in-laws gambled and I recovered from the bottomless seafood buffet.
Collin Makamson interprets apocrypha, collects dust, leads with his chin, writes checks with his mouth, drinks bourbon, and lives alone with a small dog named Foo Foo Fancy Pants in an uptown neighborhood of New Orleans, La. A native of Pascagoula, Miss.—birthplace of Jimmy Buffett and little else—Collin's chances of growing up well-adjusted went from slim to none upon having his world irrevocably shattered sophomore year by Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars. A period in women's clothing and talking with an English accent followed. Somehow he survived high school and college and today works (professionally) as a historian. (Unprofessionally) Collin spends the majority of his free time amassing the types of records no one else wants and attempting to convince others how utterly incomplete their lives are without them.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Vacation To Nowhere by The Normals.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"My Old Man's A Fatso" by Angry Samoans.
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
"Hot Child In The City" by Nick Gilder (killed it).
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Wendy Norton of Ramma Lamma.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
BO DIDDLEY!
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Mad River.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"Dark End of the Street."
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
As he stared up from beneath the bar-stool—rubber-limbed—in a helpless style possessed only by small infants or those bearing post-graduate liberal-arts degrees, Johnny Danger wondered if his aging barfly cafeteria plan would cover this, his latest run-in with insobriety, and if he still looked cool in his vintage denim vest.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
"Everybody's gettin' laid tonight!" (Vince Neil, you told a lie.)
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
"T for Texas, T for Tennessee, T for Thelma, that gal who made a wreck outta me."
Barry Mazor, based in Nashville, has been writing about American music since the ’70s—currently, for the Wall Street Journal and Engine 145.com. He's the chief researcher and writer for the Mississippi Country Music Trail, which has reached eighteen historic markers in place now, and counting. His award-winning 2009 book Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, comes out in a paperback edition in March 2012, and he's at work on his next book, the first biography of prototypical A&R man and global music publisher Ralph Peer, scheduled to be published by Chicago Review Press in 2014. In his spare time he listens to music and goes to shows with his wife.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Etta James: Heart & Soul, A Retrospective—a new box set.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
It's either "How Could You Believe Me When Said I Loved You, When You Know I've Been a Liar All My Life?" or "Let's Get Drunk and Truck."
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Avoiding karaoke experiences.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
What, you've got something against small people?
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Well, that's Jimmie Rodgers some days, Howlin' Wolf others, Sam Cooke, and with a shout-out to Tammy Wynette.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Bobbie Gentry; if she'd created the same ambitious, literate, broad swath of music she did and been a guy, rather than that girl in the two-piece, she'd be recognized and respected as a genius. (Another favorite Miss. musician.)
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"Swinging the Alphabet" by The Three Stooges.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
He'd promised her he'd be there....
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
It seems like one of them once told me that he'd always had too much credit for things, but I think maybe I imagined it.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
Truthfully, it's been working with people from the small towns all around the state that are home to the Country Trail markers; the Mississippians always are helpful, know about the musician (whether that's The Leake County Revelers from the '20s or, say, Marty Stuart) and always seem genuinely pleased for the recognition.
Tom Nolan, a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal's arts pages, is the author of the recently-published Artie Shaw, King of the Clarinet: His Life and Times and of Ross Macdonald: A Biography. In researching the latter, he went to Jackson, Miss., in 1990, to interview Eudora Welty.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Joni Mitchell, Travelogue.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most."
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
On a ship off the coast of Santa Monica, to the amazement of an audience of editors and writers, I sang "The Mighty Quinn": Manfred Mann arrangement, Dylan delivery. It was terrific.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Lee Wiley.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Lester Young.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Artie Shaw.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"Yesterdays," Artie Shaw & His Gramercy Five, recorded 1954.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
Gabriel was watching the best movie the President of the United States had ever made.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
"I pretended to be insane." —Jim Morrison, asked in 1968 how he'd stayed out of the Army.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
When Delta blues came to West Hollywood: seeing Muddy Waters at the Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard; and Son House and Bukka White at the Ash Grove on Melrose.
Kevin Nutt is the Folklife Archivist at the Archive of Alabama Folk Culture in Montgomery, Ala. He also runs the CaseQuarter record label and hosts the weekly vintage gospel program, Sinner's Crossroads, on WFMU. He is currently at work on a murder novel about 78-rpm record collectors. Nutt would like to succeed University of Mississippi's outgoing head football coach Houston Nutt in order to save the integrity of Kevin's surname.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Soul of Angola: Anthologie de la Musique Angolaise, 1965-1975 (Lusafrica, 2001); Opika Pende: Africa at 78rpm (Dust-to-Digital, 2011).
What is your favorite song title of all time?
T. Valentine's "Hello, Lucille...Are You A Lesbian?"
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
My ONLY experience: forgetting the lyrics to "Super Stupid" during WFMU's Hoof and Mouth Sinfonia in 2007.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Reverend Charlie Jackson.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
The Method Actors; Earl "Chinna" Smith, reggae guitarist.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
Funkadelic's "Get Off Your Ass and Jam."
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
"That's all the f***ing chords you know???!!!"
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
Driving round-trip to McComb, Miss., from Montgomery, Ala., for the Reverend Charlie Jackson's funeral in 2006 and making myself listen to Southern-style crunk hip-hop the entire trip.
Benjamin Percy is the author of two novels, Red Moon (forthcoming from Grand Central/Hachette) and The Wilding (now out in paperback), as well as two books of short stories, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk. His fiction and nonfiction has been published by Esquire, Outside, Men's Journal, GQ, the Wall Street Journal, and The Paris Review. He teaches in the MFA program at Iowa State University.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
I can't get enough of The Avett Brothers. Emotionalism is playing so regularly at my house that I have dreamt myself into the band. Even my five-year-old son knows all the lyrics. They're such big-hearted storytellers, the Avetts, and I'm haunted by their harmonies, the longing in their voices.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
Changes by the day. Today it might be "Furr" by Blitzen Trapper, which is going to be the epigraph of my next novel.
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
My voice is low. Freakishly so. Think drunk Darth Vader. So if the mic is right, I can belt out a mean Johnny Cash. But if the mic is off, if it doesn't pick up the bass, then you can't hear me. So my best and worst are both Cash, respectively "Hurt" and "Ring of Fire."
Who is your biggest musician crush?
I'm in love with Gillian Welch's voice. She breaks my heart over and over.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
Jimmie Rodgers.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
I don't know about underrated, but for sure under heard: Blitzen Trapper and Manchester Orchestra.
What song do you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"November Blue" by The Avett Brothers.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
He heard the world differently than others.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
That my stories sound like music.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
I'll be unoriginal and quote Dylan: "Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay/You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way/Only one thing I did wrong/Stayed in Mississippi a day too long."
Alison Powell has lived in a brownstone, lived in a ghetto, she's lived all over this town. She sleeps in the daytime, works in the nighttime, she might not ever get home. Oh, wait, that's Life During Wartime's bio. Alison Powell has lived in New York, London, Los Angeles, Berkeley and Irvine, Calif., Atlanta, Las Vegas, and now, Tampa, Fla. In the past she has been the music editor for Interview magazine and written about pop music for numerous publications here and in the U.K. In the present, she holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where she wrote a novel about John Coltrane and fell in love with the South. In the very near future she will be found wielding a sharpened pencil at a bookstore in Tampa called The Oxford Exchange (opening summer 2012), where she will be the Reader-in-Chief. She also wants to say, "Brian Wilson grabbed my big toe." He really did.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Gordon Lightfoot, Gord's Gold: Greatest Hits. "If You Could Read My Mind" gives me chills every time. "Beautiful" is an overlooked classic. Radiohead, OK Computer. Listening to "Let Down" as I crossed the Mojave Desert in a sandstorm felt like one of those lucky accidents that changes how you view just about everything.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"Thankfully Not Living in Yorkshire It Doesn't Apply," from Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, the first album by Dexys Midnight Runners (1980). I like that the title is a full sentence.
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Best: Singing "Born to Run" in a beer bar in L.A.'s Koreatown an hour after I (finally) took off my wedding ring in the era of my divorce. Worst: "California Dreamin’" in a karaoke bar in New York. It was 2 A.M., the place was filled with Japanese businessmen, and I had been drinking sake for six hours. I recall hitting the microphone with my forehead as I fell to the floor somewhere around the line, "I'd be safe and warm/If I was in L.A."
Who is your biggest musician crush?
John Coltrane. And Dan Fogelberg. But if I could BE anyone, it would be Tracey Thorn.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
Lester Young. Also, Bobbie Gentry.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
The Bee Gees. I'm sorry, but the songwriting over time is consistently high. Spirits Having Flown holds up. You see if it doesn't.
What song do you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"Golden Lady" by Stevie Wonder. It is just so pretty and sunny. Or The Beatles' "Savoy Truffle." A Beatles song about candy must be the direct path to heaven.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
The tour from Detroit to Reno was not going to be an easy one, so I threw an extra cowbell and a case of Clark bars into the van and prayed my government teeth would hold out through the encore.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
Damon Albarn of Blur was the first person to put into the words for me the idea that adult life is inherently sad. I never forgot it. Secondary choices: This isn't a quote per se, but Patti Smith once sang the song "Frederick" to me over the phone. Jeff Buckley once called me in the middle of the night to talk about how Pakistani music was like Elvis to him.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
In 1997, I interviewed Nina Simone and I asked about her incendiary song, "Mississippi Goddam." She said that to her the song was prophetic, and that America was going to die, "die like flies, like the song says." Simone said that the rich were too rich and the poor were too poor. It was all going to cave in. Then she told me she'd been drinking Harvey's Bristol Cream. While talking to her, I sweat all the way through my shirt. I grew up during that interview.
Mike Powell lives, studies, freelances, teaches, bicycles, and worries in Tucson, Ariz., where he is receiving his MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona. His music writing has appeared in the OA, Pitchfork, Spin, The Village Voice, and other outlets both print and web.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Old was probably Randy Newman's Good Old Boys; new was probably The Beets' Let the Poison Out.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
Oof. Either the hymn "In The Garden" or Funkadelic's "Can You Get to That."
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Bub O'Malley's, Chapel Hill, N.C., sometime mid-2004. I collapsed in the corner singing "Crimson and Clover." Acquaintances still bring it up. I believe that this also doubles as my closest brush with immortality.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
If you crush big and long enough, isn't that love?
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
I'm happy playing the rube and saying Sam Cooke.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Oh gosh...well, the opera composer Robert Ashley seems properly rated, but by far too few people.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
Also, Funkadelic's "Can You Get to That." The funerals I've been to have been too dour considering they're supposed to be about life.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
"Put your pinky on the bow; you look like you're having a tea party."
Megan Pugh was born and raised in Memphis, but currently lives in Calif., where she's completing her PhD at U.C. Berkeley. Her writing has been published in Boston Review, The Believer, Web Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, and Entertainment Weekly online. She interned for the OA a decade ago, when it was in Miss., and still misses plate lunches at the Ajax Diner.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Sam Cooke, Live at the Harlem Square Club.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
Three-way tie between "Attention All Pickpockets," "New Chevrolet in Flames," and "Standard Bitter Love Song #1," all by The Mountain Goats.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Bruce Springsteen.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Mississippi John Hurt.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Paul Burch, though he's not underrated so much as under-heard. If you listen, you know: The man is masterful.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
Going to see Bobby Rush in Vaiden, Miss., with my sister and brother-in-law (who, incidentally, is also featured in this issue: Preston Lauterbach).
Jamie Quatro's debut story collection is forthcoming in 2013 from Grove/Atlantic. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, AGNI, The Cincinnati Review, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2011 American Short Fiction Story Contest (judged by Wells Tower), she is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She holds graduate degrees from the College of William and Mary and Bennington College, and lives with her husband and children in Lookout Mountain, Ga.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Wilco's self-produced album, The Whole Love, which came out in September. (I'm not just saying this because I interviewed Wilco's bassist John Stirratt-though finding him an intelligent, articulate, and generally nice guy didn't hurt.) The twelve-minute finale "One Sunday Morning" is mesmerizing—musically profound in its simplicity, with theologically rich lyrics.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
Dylan's titles come to mind—"Subterranean Homesick Blues," "Spirit on the Water," "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat," "Tangled Up in Blue." But Mumford & Sons' "White Blank Page" is one of my favorite titles because it reminds me of Barry Hannah's advice to young writers: "I don't advocate anything...except the loneliness with a pencil and a white sheet of paper."
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Are you kidding? My freshman year in college, I passed out when I had to sing in front of my extended family at my grandparents' 50th anniversary celebration. I won't be attempting karaoke any time soon.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
He'd have to be a mash-up of Sting, Bono, and mid-’80s Chris Isaak. A good dose of Hugh Jackman thrown in.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
My son has been listening to Bass Drum of Death, a garage rock duo out of Oxford. They're getting some comparisons to The Black Keys, but they're actually quite different-dirtier, more head-banging. They recorded their debut album in a basement, using USB microphones. I put the album's fuzzy, snarling opener "Heart Attack Kid" on my iPod; it helps me push myself when I'm out running hills.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
David Means already wrote it: "A pianist was beset with panic because his right hand had frozen up, grown heavy, during a Schubert sonata, missing several notes during the Andante, sending a soft murmur-accompanied by hard biting coughs from angry throats-through the audience." That's the opening line to "Petrouchka [With Omissions]," in his collection The Secret Goldfish. It's one of the great in medias res story openers-you just have to find out what happens to the guy, why his hand is frozen.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
Does something a musician told my husband (Scott) count? He's from a rock & roll family-’70s rocker Suzi Quatro is his aunt. When Scott was growing up in Detroit, Ted Nugent was a family friend. Scott called him Uncle Ted. Uncle Ted used to come over to their house and juggle apples to entertain Scott and his brother. When he'd finish with the apples, Ted would always toss one of them to Scott and say the same thing: "Eat that—and don't do drugs."
Jonathan Rabb's most recent novel is The Second Son. He teaches at Savannah College of Art and Design.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
The Best of James Bond 30th Anniversary Collection.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" by Dionne Warwick.
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
First date with my wife. Forced to sing "(They Long to Be) Close to You" in a duet. I guess it worked out.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Female: Annie Lennox; male: Nat King Cole.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Toss-up: Leontyne Price or Sam Cooke.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Donovan.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"Pure Imagination" (from Willy Wonka).
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
"Louder, Ruthie."
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
Breathe.
John Ridley is a an Englishman of a certain age whose passion for most forms of black music, especially soul and r&b, extends back over forty years. During that time he has amassed a record collection of around 25,000 items, bringing his family into the poorhouse in the process. He has contributed to a huge number of reissue LPs and CDs by way of info, record lending, and compilation work, and has annotated over four hundred of them. Now retired from his day job as CEO of a low-rent housing company, and officially a drain on his country's resources, he spends his time on his website at www.sirshambling.com, a treasure trove of deep and Southern soul.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
O.V. Wright: Treasured Moments box set (MCA Japan).
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"They Caught the Devil and Put Him in Jail in Eudora, Arkansas" by Tony Joe White.
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Never had the nerve to try karaoke!
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Roger Hawkins, the greatest drummer there has ever been. All music needs the right drum pattern-and he always delivered.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Tommy Tate, Tommy Tate, Tommy Tate.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Out of all the wonderful soul stars the world hasn't appreciated properly, I'd say Paul Kelly is the most gifted-a superb songwriter and possessor of the most intense "slow burn" vocals of them all.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
I don't know if you can dance to them but Bobby Harris's "Soul to Soul" and Charlie Rich's "I Feel Like Going Home" would fit the bill.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
When Otis arrived at the gig he was astonished to find his wife waiting for him....
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
When I was young and naive, a very nice man, whose name I'd better not reveal, told me that most of the record business was crooked, a front for the mob or tax write-offs, or a way of laundering drug money. I was shocked. But the longer I've been writing about the subject, the more I've found that this guy was pretty much right.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
J.J. Lewis's excellent "Mississippi Cotton Fields" (Motion 102) for a black view of the modern Delta experience.
David Ritz has collaborated with Ray Charles, Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Etta James, Grandmaster Flash, The Neville Brothers and others on their autobiographies. His most recent novel, Power and Beauty, was written with rapper T.I. Ritz's lyrics include "Sexual Healing," co-authored with Marvin Gaye.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Marvin Gaye's What's Going On.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"Body & Soul."
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Never done it.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Julie London.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
B.B. King.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Creed.
What song do you want people to dance to at your funeral?
R. Kelly, "Step in the Name of Love."
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
Clay blew hard.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
Al Green: "Save your receipts."
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
Riding with B.B. King in his bus through the Delta as he discussed his childhood.
When he's not at work on his cyclotronic novel about making things un-happen, Nicholas Rombes teaches American literature and curates several dark and strange film writing projects. Author of the 33 1/3 volume Ramones, his writing has also appeared in The Believer, berfrois, and Wigleaf.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
I've rediscovered the sad beauty of Camera Obscura's 2001 album Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"Gold Star for Robot Boy" by Guided by Voices.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Becky Stark.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
Elmore James.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
I always thought that Jim Basnight & The Moberlys was just a great band that somehow never made it.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
In April, Canteel un-stuck his axe from the wax myrtle and decided to put an end to the band.
Nikil Saval is an associate editor of n+1. His work has appeared in Slate, the New York Times, The London Review of Books, and elsewhere. He currently lives in exile from San Francisco in Philadelphia.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Baloji, Kinshasa Succursale.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"I've Been Down So Long (It Looks Like Up To Me)."
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Singing Beyoncé's "Irreplaceable" in tight white Jagger jeans and a low baritone (something, I regret to report, that I've done multiple times).
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Maurizio Pollini-the dreamiest leftist Italian pianist alive.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
Mississippi Fred McDowell (though he was born in Tenn.).
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Ahmad Jamal.
What song do you want people to dance to at your funeral?
See answer to no. 3 above.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
He blew.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
"If a literary person puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong." (Richard Taruskin, quoting Aaron Copland)
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
"Mississippi man, I'm losin' my mind/Gotta have your lovin' one more time/I'm gonna jump in the river and here I go/Too bad alligator you swim too slow" —Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn, "Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man"
Kate Schatz writes/edits/teaches/parents/boxes in Oakland, Ca. She's the author of the 33 1/3 book Rid of Me: A Story, and is a co-editor of The Encyclopedia Project. Her writing, fiction and otherwise, has appeared in a bunch of awesome print and online publications, and her story "Folsom, Survivor" was included as a 2010 Notable Short Story in Best American Short Stories 2011. She enjoys weather when it's good and celebrities when they're bad.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
New: I love Gillian Welch's The Harrow & The Harvest and Raphael Saadiq's Stone Rollin'. Both are so rad in such different ways. Also Whokill by tUnE-YarDs is amazing. Old: Since I have a toddler, Free To Be...You and Me has been getting a lot of play.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
Favorite song title: "Mitch Better Have My Bunny" by Princess Superstar (for cleverness) and "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo" by A Tribe Called Quest (for straightforwardness).
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Many, many to choose from but one clear winner: Best karaoke experience of my life was walking into a shitty dive bar in Providence, R.I. and seeing my future husband jumping off a table, mic in hand, singing/screaming the epic Foreigner classic "Jukebox Hero." Four years later, and we were hitched. And yes, there was karaoke at the wedding.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Bjork. And my husband. Awww.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Aside from Britney Spears? I'M KIDDING. Music-wise, I really love Elmore James. And Sam Cooke. As for writers: Faulkner, Williams, Welty.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Present day: Electrelane. Past: Alice Coltrane.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
Is it too obvious to say Smog's "Dress Sexy At My Funeral"? Or maybe you want that to play before the funeral, like embedded in the evite. Dance-party-wise, I'm thinking Le Tigre "Keep On Livin'." Inspiring! Dance-y! Righteous!
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
He was a total fraud.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
"I love you."
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
He's not a Miss. musician, but the opening lines from Paul Simon's "Graceland" have been burned in my brain forever as one of the best images in music: "The Mississippi Delta was shining/Like a National guitar." Even before I knew what the Delta really was, or what a National guitar looked like, I could totally see it.
Cynthia Shearer is the author of two novels: The Wonder Book of the Air (Pantheon/Vintage 1996) and The Celestial Jukebox (Shoemaker & Hoard/Counterpoint 2005). It's a safe bet she will never have a sandwich or street named for her in Oxford, Miss. She lives and teaches writing in Fort Worth, Tex.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Townes Van Zandt, Live at the Old Quarter.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate."
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
"The Pledge of Allegiance."
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Howlin' Wolf.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Joe Callicott.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Joe Callicott.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
George Thorogood & the Destroyers, "Move It On Over."
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
Watching Bruce Watson record Blue Mountain at Fat Possum in Water Valley, Miss.
When not writing about Pentecostal steel-guitar players, Betsey Shepherd spends her time fighting the cold and getting thoroughly corn-fed in Bloomington, Ind. She blows off steam by playing in her imaginary punk band, The Suffragettes, who plan to release an album made up entirely of secret songs. She has worked at The OA and American Routes and is now studying digital journalism and ethnomusicology at Indiana University.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Them Changes by Buddy Miles and Stands For Decibels by The dBs.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"No Pussy Blues" because Nick Cave is too cool to bother with euphemisms.
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Falling in love with a lanky stranger crooning (maybe) the creepiest song of all time, Conway Twitty's "You've Never Been This Far Before."
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Poison Ivy from The Cramps.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
Charlie Feathers.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
The Clean. They sound like the sunshine reflected off of a defunct playground.
What song do you want people to dance to at your funeral?
A corny, wedding-style line dance to "This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)" by The Talking Heads.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
Her biggest career misstep was that she survived her twenties.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
"If I suck, then spread the rumor that I'm an outsider artist." —New Wave parlor musician Andrew Toups.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
Seeing Mose Allison slurp up collared greens in between Tai Chi poses while backstage at Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale.
David Shirley divides his heart (though, sadly, not his time) between the downtown square in Oxford, Miss., and the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. His writings on music and popular culture have appeared in Option, Spin, Rolling Stone, Chicago Review, Raygun, New York Press, and the Brooklyn Rail. He is the author of A Good Death (Addison-Wesley, 1992) and numerous books for children and young adults. He sings and plays mandolin in the hard-luck country band, Lonesome Skeeter & The Corndogs of Love.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
A tie between Mehdi Zannad, Fugue (Third Side Records, 2011) and P. J. Harvey, Let England Shake (Vagrant Records, 2011).
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"I Love You, You Big Dummy" by Captain Beefheart.
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Singing Hank Williams songs at a Korean karaoke club in midtown Manhattan.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Anne Briggs.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
Delaney Bramlett.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Bill Fay.
What song do you want people to dance to at your funeral?
Harry Nilsson's "Gotta Get Up."
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
Every time Scott Barretta staggered to the stage, the same thought possessed him: "What the hell am I doing here?"
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
"I want to make big magic in a real small place." Jeff Buckley (from an interview I did with him for Spin, January 1994).
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
Tyler Keith & The Preacher's Kids at the Longshot Bar & Grill, Oxford, Summer, 2001.
To the disbelief of his corporate employers, Roger Stolle quit a lucrative St. Louis marketing career a decade ago to open his eclectic Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art store in historic Clarksdale, Miss. "It's the store I always wanted to walk into but could never find," according to Stolle. "And it's home base for my other blues music projects." From cofounding events like Juke Joint Festival to co-producing films like M For Mississippi, from a weekly call-in on XM/Sirius radio to his new Hidden History of Mississippi Blues book, Stolle strives to "organize and promote Miss. blues from within-by all means necessary." Stolle's www.cathead.biz website also offers a window into today's Miss.-blues scene.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Mistakes Were Made: Five Years of Raw Blues, Damaged Livers & Questionable Business Decisions (2011). Full disclosure: This is on my buddy Jeff Konkel's Broke & Hungry Records label. But that doesn't change the fact that I listen to it once a day at my record store.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"Give Me Back My Wig" by Miss.-born Hound Dog Taylor. (Favorite album title: Most Things Haven't Worked Out by Junior Kimbrough.)
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Best: Eighty-two-year-old Miss. bluesman L.C. Ulmer complaining to me about how clubs booking "the okiedokie" is killing the live music scene here. Worst: Seeing former blues clubs start booking the okiedokie (a.k.a. karaoke) here.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Well, I loved the late David "Honeyboy" Edwards—though perhaps not in the way you mean. Wow, what an amazing blues life he led for ninety-six years.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Seventy-nine-year-old, Miss.-born Big George Brock. He's the first bluesman I traveled with (and he once served me a half-pound of fried bacon while he enjoyed a bowl of oatmeal). Standing in a Miss. cotton field while he showed me how to pick cotton; watching him captivate an audience of thousands in Cognac, France; I've been really lucky to share some amazing experiences with this genuine, honest-to-Muddy bluesman. I also love the fact that he isn't just a "bluesman" on stage; he's a bluesman 24/7; I mean, he's got forty-two kids after all (!).
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Anthony "Big A" Sherrod. He's just twenty-seven, but he's been playing with older bluesmen in Miss. juke joints since he was a little kid and is arguably the "future of Clarksdale blues." (Otherwise, pretty much all of the below-the-radar bluesmen featured in the movies M for Mississippi and We Juke Up in Here.)
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
Assuming there's not one called, "Wait! He's Still Alive!" then make it T-Model Ford's "She Asked Me, So I Told Her (and that is why, that I am here)."
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
Even with having to bury the body and buy another E string, he made it to the gig on time.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
An older Clarksdale bluesman once replied to my suggestion that one of his contemporaries could no longer play guitar due to a stroke by saying, "Stroke? Ha. He had that 'I fooled around with another man's woman and got thrown out a third-story window' kind of stroke. That's the kind of stroke he had!"
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
That's tough. I'd say two experiences. My first visit to Junior Kimbrough's otherworldly juke joint of the mid-’90s; it literally changed my path in life. Also, watching Howlin' Wolf's guitarist Hubert Sumlin record two songs with Big George Brock in a Miss. basement studio about five years ago; they hadn't seen each other in decades and laughed like little schoolgirls the whole damn time. Both experiences were as rich as the best story in the most classic novel.
Jay Varner is the author of Nothing Left to Burn (Algonquin Books, 2010). He earned his MFA from UNC-Wilmington and then moved to Charlottesville, Va., for no other reason than a love of mountains. He spent years trying to hide his country-music loving twanger youth though now feels no shame when he lists The Tractors' 1994 self-titled debut as one of his favorite albums. He unironically loves Christmas music. He cohosts Talus, Or Scree, a surreal and eclectic podcast that mixes commentary, music, humorous skits, interviews, and audio essays (talusorscree.com).
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Wolfroy Goes to Town by Bonnie "Prince" Billy.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"Put the O Back in Country" by Shooter Jennings.
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Singing Pearl Jam's "Alive" at a sushi bar in Charlottesville, Va., to an audience of...my wife.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Kathleen Edwards.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Tammy Wynette.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Blaze Foley.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" by Darlene Love.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
It had come to this: washing my feet in a bar bathroom.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
"Uh, Jeff's good," John Stirratt, outside the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., after I asked how Jeff Tweedy was feeling.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
"I was born to wander/I was born to roam/And mister and Mississippi made me feel at home" —Tennessee Ernie Ford.
Elijah Wald is a musician and writer who has played professionally with Howard Armstrong, Dave Van Ronk, and Eric Von Schmidt, toured on four continents, and written thousands of articles on music and other subjects. His books include Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues; How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music; biographies of Josh White and Dave Van Ronk, and Narcocorrido, about a hitchhiking trip through the world of Mexican drug ballads. He won a 2002 Grammy for liner notes, and his next book is The Dozens: A History of Rap's Mama, due from Oxford University Press in June 2012. For more info, check out www.elijahwald.com.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Goodie Mob's Soul Food.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"Does God Have Us by the Twat or What?" by Jo Carol Pierce.
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
A post-concert drunken blow-out someplace way north of Tokyo with Mikami Kan.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
My wife, Sandrine (she plays clarinet).
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Mississippi John Hurt.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
All musicians are grievously underrated, even the ones I don't like.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
"Pedro Navaja."
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
"Hell, we'll pay you ten times that," said the club owner.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
"If you are a performer, you are being paid to get up there and say, 'This is what I think about music.' You can't abdicate that responsibility" —Dave Van Ronk.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
Playing with Eugene Powell on his front porch and being accused of passing for white. (His neighbor asked my race; I said, "White." She said, "Naw, you're some kinda mix." I said, "Well, I'm Jewish...." She said, "Hell, I thought so. That ain't white.")
Oliver Wang is an assistant professor of sociology at CSU-Long Beach. He contributes regularly to National Public Radio, the Los Angeles Times, and his own audio blog, Soul-Sides.com. He fervently believes every street needs its own rhythm band.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Aretha circa 1964.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
Tough question; so many legends from the state but if I had to pick one native son, it's hard to pass up Sam Cooke.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Don Julian. Leader of The Larks in Los Angeles, founder of Money Records, and someone who had an amazing catalog in the ’60s and ’70s but continually seems under many people's radar.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
Cleaning the spit valve was always the worst part.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
James Brown once said he was looking forward to meeting me after we finished a phone interview. I think he was just being polite but it was still memorable.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
Ha—Nina Simone's "Mississippi, Goddamn." Not exactly a love poem to the state, though.
Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of the memoir, Losing My Cool: Love, Literature, and a Black Man's Escape from the Crowd. He was educated in his Pappy's study and holds a BA in philosophy from Georgetown University and a master's degree from the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, American Scholar, The Atlantic, the Root, and n+1, among other places. He lives in Paris.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
The English Riviera by Metronomy.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"Original Bedroom Rockers" by Kruder & Dorfmeister.
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
I literally scored zero points trying to sing Phoenix's "Everything Is Everything" on Karaoke Revolution in a head to head match-up with my friend, Julien.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
None now. But either Lil' Kim or Foxy Brown when I was growing up.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
Sam Cooke.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
It ain't Jay-Z.
What song do you want people to dance to at your funeral?
I don't know if I'd feel the same way tomorrow, but right now I wouldn't be mad at "Love Me Like This (Nonsense Dub)" by Floating Points.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
"We are not descended from the monkey, but we are returning to him in great haste." —Gobineau
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
DMX, whom I spoke to years ago in a flower shop in the Atlanta International Airport, pulled out a wad of hundred dollar bills as thick as a clenched fist-he was buying bouquets for his wife. He saw me staring at the wad, so he motioned to it and said with a shrug: "Yeah, you know, it's one of the MANY." He wasn't arrogant at all about it, though. In fact, it seemed as if he were just as detached and surprised about his circumstances as I was.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
"I was born by the river in a little tent/Oh, and just like the river, I've been running ever since." —Sam Cooke, "A Change Is Gonna Come."
Record collector, writer, DJ, Lois Wilson is a regular contributor to MOJO magazine, and has also been published in the Times, the Sunday Times, the Independent, and the short-story collection Punk Fiction. She has also compiled CDs and written sleeve notes for the Motown, Trojan, and Chess labels.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
New album was Booker T Jones's The Road From Memphis; old album Sonny Boy Williamson In Memoriam.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"Stoned Love."
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
I've never had a karaoke experience.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Jimmy Cliff in The Harder They Come.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Muddy Waters.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Luke McDaniel.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
The Supremes' "Stoned Love."
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
You are talking and I watch your mouth moving....
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
Bettye LaVette told me a great story about Diana Ross, but I'm not allowed to repeat it.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
Seeing Mavis Staples sing live, truly amazing.
Mark Winegardner's novels include Crooked River Burning (in which a seminal scene is a faithful rendition, from the point of view of Alan Freed, of the first true rock concert ever), The Godfather Returns and The Godfather's Revenge (which give a full rendering of Johnny Fontane in the Rat Pack era, including redeeming depictions of his greatness as a singer and performing) as well as the story collection That's True of Everybody and the somewhat Miss.-centric nonfiction book Elvis Presley Boulevard. He is the Burroway Chair of English & Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
Best reissue really was Syl Johnson's Complete Mythology. New: Dawes, Nothing Is Wrong; My Morning Jacket, Circuital; Raphael Saadiq, Stone Rollin'. And Charles Bradley's terrific No Time For Dreaming is a new album that would have been one of the best soul albums of 1970-or any year since.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"Howling at the Moon" (Sha-La-La), by The Ramones.
What is your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
Best: talk-singing "Ring of Fire" in a gay bar in New Orleans. Worst experience: every other one.
Who is your biggest musician crush?
Bobbie Gentry.
Who is your favorite non-Elvis, non-Robert Johnson musician from Miss.?
So many! I'll cop out and just say Big K.R.I.T.'s Return Of 4Eva is the best Miss. album of 2011.
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
Kyle Coronado, our drummer, kept a steady beat and had a steady girlfriend and an outlook on life that seemed to augur well for good fortune, both his and ours, so naturally we fired him and took up with Rowena Dillard.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
"There was supposed to be an eleventh Commandment: LET IT ROCK!" —Bruce Springsteen (who, in fairness, said this to the twenty thousand other people who were with me that night).
David Yaffe has written for The Nation (where his first editor was the late, great John Leonard), New York Magazine, Slate, the New York Times, The New Republic, and some dearly departed titles, including Mirabella and Lingua Franca. He is currently a professor of English at Syracuse University and the author of Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing (Princeton, 2006) and Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown (Yale, 2011). Future projects include Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, forthcoming). He and his wife Amy are now the proud parents of Julian Yaffe, whose current favorite song is his father's rendition of "Loving Cup" by The Rolling Stones.
What was the best album, new or old, that you listened to in 2011?
The most engrossing release of the year was Paul Simon, So Beautiful or So What. Too many "all-time" albums to mention.
What is your favorite song title of all time?
"Body & Soul," lyrics by Edward Heyman, Robert Sour and Frank Eyton; music by Johnny Green.
What has been your best (worst?) karaoke experience?
I sing and play piano every day, but I have never done karaoke, maybe because it would be redundant. I remember playing a gig in Westchester my sophomore year in college and clearing the room while I tried to imitate Johnny Hartman singing "Lush Life."
Who is your biggest musician crush?
I'll never tell.
Who is your favorite (non-Robert Johnson, non-Elvis) Miss. artist?
Many people will say Muddy Waters, so I will say Mose Allison.
What musician or band is grievously underrated?
Most jazz musicians are underrated! In rock & roll: Mark Eitzel.
What song would you want people to dance to at your funeral?
That's up to them!
What would be a great opening line of a short story about a musician?
Call me Joni.
What is the most memorable thing a musician has ever told you?
I have to save stuff for my writing, but talking poetry with Paul Simon was a revelation.
What is your favorite Miss.-music experience or lyric?
"Only one thing I did wrong/Stayed in Mississippi a day too long."
