Seth Martin and The Dish Boys – Please Be Good To Each Other
My father's father visited the Grand Ol' Opry back when it was in the Ryman Auditorium, sat through the entire Saturday night performance without clapping or commenting, then turned to Mamaw and said Is that it? I don't know much more about the man because Dad rarely...
Piglett – LA, TN
And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began. -- Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again The large marble ball was centered delicately atop the courthouse spire for sixty...
Wormbag – Ooo Baby Baby
This feature first appeared in 2014. And I am going to keep reprinting it until someone recognizes the genius of Wormbag. --- I have seen post-grunge alt-folk country dream pop future and its name is Wormbag. Wormbag slammed into the Portland music scene in 2012. The...
Tyrone from Mississippi
There are two types of men in this world: those who wear a shirt pretty much all the time, and those who hardly ever wear a shirt. Tyrone lived within the latter category. Tyrone was from Mississippi and he was the Genuine Article. He had a flattop, close on the...
Mance Lipscomb – Farmer and Songster
I worked so hard in my lifetime, look like I dreams about it now. And I wake up in the morning, thinking I got to go to the field.-- Mance Lipscomb, I Say Me for a Parable I. The CottonThe southern extremity of Brazos County, Texas is covered by a broad expanse of...
Furry Lewis – Judge Harsh Blues
The Mississippi Delta is a great wedge of alluvial floodplain — the dirt that’s laid down when a river comes out of its banks — that begins just below Memphis, reaches 90 miles across at its widest, then tips out at Vicksburg where the Yazoo River joins the...
My Dad – and His Typewriter – Fought in the War on Poverty
And this administration today here and now declares unconditional war on poverty in America... The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it. -- Lyndon Johnson, 1964 This is the richest country on Earth and we have 40 million in...
Stories Hidden in a Baseball Box Score
I never knew my father’s father. He was a lineman for the county, and got himself fried long before I arrived. No one wanted to talk about him. I know him best through a paper bag full of newspaper clippings that he cut from the Nashville Tennessean. He was a baseball...
Leon Russell and the Allman Brothers – Captain Marvel Jones
Captain Marvel, the latest expansion of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU to those in the know), is exploding in a theater near you and I can't wait for it to light up the screen of our local Studio Movie Grill. The traditional Friday dinner-and-a-movie date night...
New Riders of the Purple Sage – Dead Flowers (Live)
The marriage of rock and country looks like a good idea when the wedding invitation arrives in the US Mail. The patriarch of each family enters the ceremony bearing calloused hands, a bottle of whiskey tucked into the back pocket of his overalls, and tales of plowing...