Corinne Manning

When you feed pimento cheese to someone in Seattle there’s something at stake: communicating the South—what it is, what it feels like, what it sounds like. It’s what The Wandering Goose is doing with little effort, simply sharing this thing that they love with other people.

They played their single “Birmingham,” about musicians fleeing their hometown for New York, but while they are gone they make peace with their departure. As expected, things had gotten downright emotional in front of the stage. Two Tennessee girls to my left were giving each other knowing looks, the kind that indicated “no one gets this like we get this.”