Mississippi Music Love-A-Rama

Our Mississippi-related Q&A. 

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." 

Lamenting the Mississippi River. 

The first in a series of online-only Mississippi Music CDs, because if you're like us, one CD can't even begin to encompass the fantastic, soul-stirring riches of the Magnolia State. Here are thirty additional tracks by super-talented musicians, most of whom are underrated. Listen and rejoice! 

From Mississippi to Chicago to the stars. 

Greil Marcus debunks pretty much everything you've heard about the great Mississippi blues musician Robert Johnson—the guy who sold his soul to the devil, right?

Any kind of music you could ever want is on Bandcamp.com. The problem, of course, is finding what you like: There are so many artists on the page that it's hard to tell where to start.

If you're short on time, you might try these ten projects, which vary in scope from electronica to grindcore, but all have Mississippi origins in common.

Most photographs I've seen of Jimmy Donley look like he's being stretched from the inside. He seems to have more teeth in his mouth than one should ever, crammed into a wide and rugged jaw, framed under eyes that somehow want to either pop out of their sockets or become swallowed in his head. He looks uncomfortable, is what I'm saying, to be captured in his body on film, or even more so, to be anywhere at all, though there is also something in that capture that suggests a tide rolled unrelenting, as if of the way he lived his life there could have never been a choice. 

From The OA's Mississippi Music Issue, 2011.

Love the new Music Issue CD compilation? Here you can explore new songs and purchase the wares of OA-beloved Mississippi artists. 

Poe Ballantine on the true source of Clapton's immortality. 

From The OA's Mississippi Music Issue, 2011.

If you could've taken five hundred black Mississippians in 1937, showed them two dance halls, and told them they could either go see Robert Johnson perform in one or Walter Barnes perform in the other, Johnson would've ended up alone. Shit, Johnson would hightail it over to check Walter Barnes, too. Barnes was hot.

Choice selections from the boss man himself.