About music he was rarely wrong, our old master, Barry Hannah, Mississippi boy who sometimes flew too close to the sun. He made me a mixtape, one time when I was faltering in life. Technically, it's not a true mixtape, the kind someone labors long over, casting repeatedly to haul in your soul like a hooked fish. It's just an average, old, scuffed Memorex, with "Songs That Got Us Through World War II—for Cynthia," scribbled on the spine in his stork-legged scrawl, a straight rip of the Rhino remaster of 1992, with some extra Harry James tacked on.

A review of two music books by Rachael Maddux: "Ellen Willis and Courtney E. Smith are both women who have written about being women and loving music and being women who love music. In this, they are rarities together, two female voices calling out in a field still, though less and less, dominated by male writers. They are also both fond of The Beatles. And that is just about where the similarities end." 

From The OA's Mississippi Music Issue, 2011.

From The OA's Mississippi Music Issue, 2011.

From Marc Smirnoff's editorial in The OA's Mississippi Music Issue, 2011: "Another reason The Oxford American approaches the state of Mississippi with trepidation is that we were birthed there and the pressure of meeting the standards of the can't-be-fooled hometown crowd is fearsome." 

From The OA's Mississippi Music Issue: "Food and family, it is said, were the only sanctioned topics of conversation in the Polite South of myth and memory; anything else—politics, race, religion, most aspects of sex—was a sure cure for sanity, if not a shortcut to utter social ruin."

From The OA's Mississippi Music Issue, 2011: "The Billboard charts are filthy with people who've helped themselves to tiny pieces of the Syl Johnson songbook. Public Enemy. Ice Cube. De La Soul. Marky Mark & The Funky Bunch. Both The Beastie and The Geto Boys. Michael Jackson. And every conceivable branch of The Wu-Tang Clan."

From The OA's Mississippi Music Issue, 2011: "The Hilltops, still in their early twenties, are riding the crest of Oxford’s Golden Age. The town has become a creative Mecca of sorts—“The Vatican City of Southern Letters,” according to Pat Conroy. The literary Big Dogs are in plain sight: Hannah, Brown, Grisham, Morris. The music scene is thriving. Fat Possum Records is recording hill-country bluesmen R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough; bands like Mud Boy & The Neutrons and The Grifters come through Oxford to perform. The Memphis photographer William Eggleston can sometimes be seen lurking around The Square, which is still the locus of business in Oxford."

From The OA's Mississippi Music Issue, 2011: "This brings me to some remarks that must be made about the exterior of Tyler Keith's head: it is the hardest, most indestructible one ever. Someone at NASA, or NASCAR, needs to analyze it."

Track list for The Oxford American's 13th annual Southern Music CD.

From The OA's Missississippi Music Issue, 2011:

The Swinging Rays become The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, advertised as a band "in whose veins flow the blood of many races." The Sweethearts have one bus in which they sleep, and another in which they learn. Eighteen bunks for eighteen virgins, most of whom have never left Mississippi.