An installment in our weekly photography series, Eyes on the South
Since its formation in 2012, the Bayou Corne sinkhole has become, as photographer Virginia Hanusik writes, “a symbol of industrial greed at the expense of the natural environment.”
A feature essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
The thing that they do, I hesitate to say that you have to be there, but—there is an intimacy and devilment to their live performance, a lift and crash, that has been hard to capture on record. So that their art, like the lives they have carved out for themselves, is a thing on the move, uncatchable as a storm. Home and the road and home on the road.
An installment in our weekly photography series, Eyes on the South
Shawne Brown’s project, Evening Land, features work that began over fifteen years ago as what the artist describes as an “apocryphal portrait” of the country from his home state of Tennessee and stretching across the American Bible Belt.
A Points South essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
Myrtle Beach has always capitalized on tourists’ desire to put a soundtrack to their vacations. Long before the days of the megachurch-style country music theaters, like the Carolina Opry and the Alabama Theatre, which would later dominate the north end of town, Myrtle Beach was a regular stop for the working musicians who toured the Southeast.
Track 23 – “Resurrection” (Live) by Benny Starr feat. the FOUR20s
“Resurrection,” the first song on A Water Album, facilitates a kind of reconciliation between the Fitzgerald Wiggins of my youth and the man I aim to be. Seeing others come in contact with this music has been a staggeringly beautiful experience, with a profound, if unintended, result: apparently, I’ve empowered members of my community to chart their own pathways to redemption.
Concerned with inter-generational memory and trauma, photographer Adrian White has created a series of photographs documenting his family’s past and present, while imagining a better future.
Track 5 – “Bad Case of the Blues” by Linda Martell
“Bad Case of the Blues” shouldn’t be compelling, but it is—because of Martell, the way she guides, colors, and shades the song. She infuses it with the dissonance of self-knowledge, even as she takes her problems home to Mama in the country and deprecatingly calls herself “Miss Smarty.” The track shares a title with torch songs by greats Dinah Washington and Dusty Springfield and seems to warn of the perils of holding down-home values in the big city.
A Points South essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
All of Bill’s anecdotes about Diz played to this theme: here was a man, a titan of American music, whose genius helped revolutionize jazz in the forties, opening the door for its great modern period—the pre-birth of cool!—and yet who carried a “personality of warmth and openness and friendliness everywhere, with whoever he was dealing with,” Bill said. “That side of him was something that I remember as strongly as I remember his musical force and power and creativity.”
Track 21 – “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” by Alice Wine
“I know a different echo to that,” she said, and proceeded to sing a version of “Hold On,” delivered without accompaniment, in hushed intonations, the refrain “keep your hand on the plow, hold on” replaced, after one verse, by words that are not found in any transcriptions of the song previously cataloged by folklorists: “keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.”
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Though we already had two hundred miles under our belts, that morning felt like the first real leg, the leg with daylight and sights, with the fresh feeling of a Prius on an open road: snacks uneaten, podcasts not yet listened to, the journey still limitless. Of course, as experienced readers know, travel hubris is a dangerous thing.
An installment in our weekly photography series, Eyes on the South
Tamara Reynolds’s series, The Drake, documents with arresting clarity the community in and around the Drake Motel in Nashville, Tennessee, a city block populated by what she calls the “resentfully tolerated.”
A feature essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
There’s a high-achieving aptitude to it all, a certain polyglot prodigiousness. He knows how to hack and fuse genres, how to enter and exit. Part of his genius is that he’s an unrepentant copyist; for a time, his motto was a saying gleaned from Paul Rand, the graphic artist behind logos for companies like IBM and Enron: “don’t try to be original, just try to be good.”
