Articles tagged with "mississippi"

The sleepy little Mississippi town that produced Faulkner now features a loud and rocking array of power-poppers, new-wave revivalists, garage-rockers, and other genre-bending experiments that can’t be ignored. 

Plenty has already been written about the sublime music of the mighty Reigning Sound, once of Memphis, lately of Asheville, North Carolina. Critical accolades and rabid fan-raving about the band have never been in short supply. So, it may be somewhat of an exercise in futility to rant on here at length about the particulars of their sound, how bandleader and songwriter Greg Cartwright and his band may be the best torchbearers for the empyrean spirit of rock & roll. But, in fact, they are all that. 

Cool and cocksure, Bass Drum of Death listened to the old cryptic story and started connecting the dots (or wires, as it were). Just picking up that receiver made them cooler than most rock bands out there. I first saw Bass Drum of Death about three or four years ago at a dark, dank, and nasty lounge attached to what may very well have been a hooker-and-crackhead hotel in Jackson, Mississippi.

On a kitchen wall in Oxford, Mississippi, there is a growth chart—a skinny ladder of pencil marks and names recording the heights of dozens of random family and friends. The highest notch, off the wood molding and onto the plaster, is marked “Dave Bastard” for Dave Colvin, the giant drummer for The Heartless Bastards. The lowest notch, at 3'10", reads, “Higgins 1/7/06.” James Tolliver Higgins made that mark himself. Not even average height on his feet, this is how short he was in his wheelchair, and how darkly funny he could be. He died May 24, 2009, leaving behind piles of photographs, letters, and friends who saw him as a kind of folk hero.

Our Mississippi-related Q&A. 

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.

It keeps coming back to me. 

Choice selections from the boss man himself. 

The peculiar history of a Southern art form in a Southern state.

I first met David Gates—former editor at Newsweek, Pulitzer Prize finalist for fiction, contributor to OA’s music issue—in the mid-aughts, when I was a graduate student studying writing at The New School MFA program in New York City. We shared an enthusiasm for country and old-time music, though it became clear quickly enough that Gates was a layman scholar of these traditions, whereas I was just fumbling around. He turned me onto the New Lost City Ramblers, Joseph Spence, Tommy Jarrell and Fred Cockerham, George Jones and Gene Pitney. I admired and envied the seemingly superhuman scope of his musical knowledge, and also the fact that he didn’t just listen: He played.

For lack of a better term. 

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." 

Wadada Leo Smith's Ten Freedom Summers.

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."

The mystery of memories from a burnt-out blue-collar America.

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."

From The OA's 11th Annual Music Issue: "Here's a band from Mississippi, basically in my own backyard, whose jangly guitars sonically related to everything I loved about early R.E.M. and, at times, The Connells. How did a band this good—who could hold their own against early Stipe and Mills—fly so far under my radar?"

Movin'-and-a-groovin' adolescent ruminations.

Why the rockabilly artist Luke McDaniel isn't more famous. 

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

Making a scene in Jackson, Mississippi. 

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.

Channeling the Singing Brakeman. 

Mattie Delaney's two perfect songs. 

Thelonious Monk's "Bright Mississippi." 

Swaying in the pews. 

Mississippi Goddamn. 

Crunk and infectious. 

Oxford, Miss. producer/engineer Clay Jones introduces The Cats Purring Collective and the best of the new century of Mississsippi music.

My first contact with the Mississippi Grammys came during a trip to Tunica. An area casino had recently hosted the event—an annual spring occurrence since the spring I moved to Mississippi (2007). Didn't I know? Hadn't I heard? 

I hadn't. Which shamed me, I admit, a little. Then again, the official Grammy Awards come and go each spring without my knowing, either. As a kid, I followed the Grammys. But they descended into circuitous industry curio around 1989, when Jethro Tull beat Metallica's ...And Justice for All for Best Hard Rock/Metal album. A dozen years later, after Steely Dan vaulted Kid A by Radiohead and Beck's Midnight Vultures (not to mention You're the One and The Marshall Mathers LP) for Album of the Year, I waved my TV remote in surrender.

Besides, Grammy live performances always felt like CliffsNotes of the songs they honored: digestible, meant to be palmed. How can music be palmed?

In Southword's first episode, NPR's Debbie Elliott and The OA's Dave Anderson explore issues of appetite and health in Holmes County, the most obese county in Mississippi.

A few years before Barry Hannah's death, he and John Oliver Hodges took a drive around Tuscaloosa talking love, motorcycles, and writing. "Barry read 'Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa,' at the Bama Theatre," recalls Hodges. "While in town we tooled around a bit, and I made this video, even though I could barely press the gas pedal due to a mysterious and sudden arthritic condition. On the drive back to Oxford we had planned to empty the guns into the Black Warrior River. That never happened, but 'Dr. Hannah' did give me one of his neuropathy pills, which of itself was quite the remarkable experience." 

phStyle">Barry Hannah in the World

Barry would ring me up and I’d haul ass over to his house, sometimes on my bicycle, sometimes driving, and help him get the TV to work right, play a little music with him, or search for his keys that he swore had to be within twelve feet of his person—oh, look here, the key is in the front pocket of your vest, right over where your heart is. That particular key started his silver Kawasaki Eliminator, a 125 that looked to me like a shrunken Harley. He bought it after plowing his Vulcan Classic into a street sign at ninety miles per hour one drizzling afternoon. Due to a malfunction, the throttle opened up full bore and stuck. Barry and his bike took off like bats out of hell, no doubt about it. He and his portable oxygen unit flew high and wide and he was battered in the fall, but the black eye and the scrapes were just “war scars, baby.” The 1500 was totaled. I drove the new bike home from the motorcycle store. Barry followed in his Jeep Grand Cherokee, and we parked the thing behind my house on Jackson Avenue, where it stayed for about a month until his wife found out.

In honor of Barry Hannah, whose writing appeared in the first issue of The Oxford American and in many subsequent issues of the magazine, we reprint this interview conducted with him just after the publication of his novel Yonder Stands Your Orphan in 2001.

An Afro-Mississippi literary movement with the potential to change people's lives.

This selection of poems (audio files and printed versions) by Afro-Mississippi writers is a special supplement to “Penning the Revolution” by C. Liegh McInnis.

In 1995, when the late Larry Brown first published the essay "Billy Ray's Farm" in THE OXFORD AMERICAN about his son's farm in Lafayette County, Mississippi, he was both realistic and optimistic about the challenges of farm life. He could not have known that one day his friend, the renowned chef John Currence, would open Big Bad Breakfast, a new kind of diner featuring local ingredients, including dairy products from Billy Ray's heifers. John T. Edge recently visited Billy Ray and his milking cows at the Brown Family Dairy.