An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
The flight attendant stopped and pointed to the safety card’s picture of a woman cradling a child in her arms. “Do you understand? You will hold her like that, alright?” It seemed utterly useless, the fragile creature in my arms against the speed and heft of this giant metal bird throwing itself with such velocity back at earth.
Ray Stevens is a slippery one. He’ll don an endless succession of zany personas, then suddenly play it straight and savvy when you least expect it. In the music video for “The Streak” he’s all over the place, making his entrance as a voluble TV news reporter, chasing down the scoop on a flashing incident at the local Bi-Rite.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Touring is not for the faint of heart. Without a child, it is an animal exercise in mileage, calories, and sleep, which leaves me plagued with thoughts about what my karma must be that I have landed in a sickly-colored motel in this or that middle of nowhere. Touring with a child is more pleasurable, a true exploration, but frankly, tiring.
Gordon Tanner was seventeen when he found himself thrust before a microphone, fiddle in hand, at a makeshift Bluebird recording studio in San Antonio’s Texas Hotel. His father Gid—cofounder of the original Skillet Lickers—stood beside him, along with the blind guitarist and singer Riley Puckett, a prolific recording artist and bona fide hillbilly star.
A conversation with Guy Clark biographer Tamara Saviano.
“Guy was telling me for at least a year and a half before he died that he would not be here when the book came out.”
A Conversation with Joan Shelley and Nathan Salsburg
I understand that if you’re a record store, you have to sort things and folk is an easy category for us to fall into. But if you’re a music nerd and a music writer then you would not say folk; folk wouldn’t mean a confessional songwriter, which is what I am. Folk music should be communal, something like, “You guys know this one? Here, sing along.”
A conversation with the Georgia-bred, North Carolina-based singer and guitarist Jake Xerxes Fussell.
“It’s hard to say what a song is after a while, it’s been through so many lives and incarnations. Is it a gospel song? Is it a nursery rhyme? I don’t know. Alan Lomax talked about that, about how songs had these lives over many generations. There’s a lot of stuff that’s both and neither at the same time. I think this might be one of those songs.”
The Memphis Country Blues Festival had a shoestring start in 1966, organized by the Memphis Country Blues Society, an ad hoc group consisting of counterculture figures, musicians, and fans, including Robert Palmer, who would go on to write the seminal book Deep Blues. His daughter, Augusta Palmer, a Brooklyn filmmaker, is seeking to tell the story of the festival in a documentary called The Blues Society.
Highlights from the Oxford American’s 18th Music Issue: “Visions of the Blues.”
Across the 160-page magazine and 23-song CD compilation, we’re celebrating one of the South’s greatest cultural exports: blues music.
Announcing the Oxford American’s 19th Music Issue.
In 2017, we are returning to the state series. And we are thrilled to announce that it’s your turn, Kentucky.
