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Available Now!
The Oxford American’s 21st Annual
Southern Music Issue & CD
Featuring
SOUTH CAROLINA
Order your copy today.
Featuring unforgettable songs and stories from South Carolina, the issue includes voices ranging from the Upstate to the Lowcountry, highlighting icons like Dizzy Gillespie and Eartha Kitt, as well as contemporary artists such as Shovels & Rope and Ranky Tanky.
Our cover star is NASA astronaut Ronald McNair, who became a physics (and music) pioneer when he brought a soprano sax into orbit in 1984. A native of Lake City, South Carolina, McNair died tragically in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster two years later. In a revelatory and thoughtful feature in the issue, Jon Kirby speaks with McNair’s family, friends, and colleagues, who remember him not only as a famous astronaut but also a devoted, one-of-a-kind musician.
Order the South Carolina Music Issue & Sampler today. The issue comes packaged with a CD compilation and digital download card.
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Oxford American
From the country blues to early jazz to gospel, soul, metal, rock & roll, hip-hop, and beyond—there isn’t a corner of American music the people of this state haven’t made their own.
We are pleased to announce that Eliza Borné is the new editor of the Oxford American, succeeding Roger D. Hodge, who left the magazine in June.
From now until December, we’re offering a series of special offers through PledgeMusic: limited-edition Georgia Music issue posters, t-shirts, and more.
This fall, two historic exhibitions—and a squirrel recount—have our attention.
“I find that people who live close to the earthly, fundamental things usually have more character in their faces,” said painter Marie Hull, whose work is on view at the Mississippi Museum of Art until January 10, 2016.
This issue includes “The Battle of and for the Black Face Boy,” a radical libretto by Nikky Finney; a profile of a transgender drug counselor who lives on the border of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, by Jonathan Blitzer; John T. Edge’s exploration of Southern theme restaurants; and more.
The sun’s shining through the windows in Georgia. A poet climbs into her attic and takes down a box of old photos, opens it, and tilts the images into the light. A page from an old notebook peeks out of the stack. Jimmy Rabbitt’s “Wheels’ Rollin’” starts skipping on the record player.
The sun is going down in New Orleans. A man turns onto Frenchman Street, putting out a cigarette on the old brick sidewalk. He hears laughter coming from inside a bar. Nearby, a local bookstore owner closes up for the night.
In May, Mary Steenburgen and Ted Danson loaded up a tour bus in Nashville with some of their songwriting friends and headed to Little Rock for a night of food and drink and music in the round.
The moon shines over the Delta. A poet wanders home in the dark, her shadow extended by a streetlamp that flickers on, then off again. Alone in a bar, a young detective scratches hasty notes. She thinks she can hear the bartender humming Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me.”
In August, Iris DeMent will release her sixth album, The Trackless Woods, a collection of songs based on eighteen poems written by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966). The album was recorded in five days last summer in DeMent’s living room and includes poetry from throughout Akhmatova’s life. In this short video, filmed in her home, DeMent reflects further on the writing and recording of the album.
