The South has diversified over the last twenty years. And so has my palate.
Though hot chicken is not peculiar to Nashville, the city is uniquely obsessed with the dish.
From the time he began recording regularly with electric instruments, Dylan, his palette enlarged, fixated on reproducing the sounds inside his mind with minimal editing artifice. The making of Blonde on Blonde combined perfectionism with spontaneous improvisation to capture what Dylan heard but could not completely articulate in words.
The origins of the pedal steel guitar.
The author reflects on his all-consuming obsession with the White Stripes: "But now—a husband and father of two young boys, a mortgage holder soon to be bushwhacked by forty? Is it not shameful, obsession in this strata of life? Shameful because irresponsible. Irresponsible because every real obsession is an expensive, fatiguing time-suck. How does a grown man come to obsess over a rock band unless something fundamental is lacking in his psyche and soul?"
A Points South essay from the Fall 2018 issue
For the past year, five Vanderbilt researchers and historians, myself included, have collected oral histories related to this site—a Union fort largely built by enslaved and free African Americans, many of whom died during its construction. We’d gathered the stories of descendants of the laborers who built the fort and the soldiers who protected it. That Saturday, we’d unveil our work, though unveil felt like a grand word for what we’d amassed—largely two fifteen-minute video interviews. But there it was, printed just beside our project’s name on the event poster. FORT NEGLEY DESCENDENTS PROJECT: NASHVILLE'S BLACK LEGACIES OF THE CIVIL WAR. The name is clunky, a little wordy. But it has to hold so much.
An essay originally published in the Oxford American’s Spring 2010 Southern Food issue, guest edited by John T. Edge.
On making “hit” chocolate in Nashville.
Matraca Berg has written hits for Patty Loveless, Trisha Yearwood, Martina McBride, and Deana Carter. Now, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee is taking her own turn in the spotlight.
Since many of the best musicians working in Nashville over the years are Texans, a good portion of Jim McGuire’s ongoing Nashville Portraits series features the iconic natives of the Lone Star state, including the stunning 1975 image of Guy and Susanna Clark that graces the cover of our Texas music issue.
A conversation with Sturgill Simpson the day after his performance on David Letterman. Of his album, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, Simpson says, "I made my psychedelic record at the most sober point in my life."
