It was the second week of December 1973, and I had been summoned to come and play bass on a new Elvis album. This was not the first time I had received a summons from the King, and I knew not to take it lightly.
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.
I first wrote Charlie Engle a letter because I was fascinated by his life. It gave me a sense of vertigo to know that when we’d met, in the hills of Tennessee, he’d had no idea what was about to happen, how everything was going to change. I wondered what incarceration was like for him.
In 2008, a massive retention pond at a Tennessee Valley Authority coal-fired power plant burst open, spilling more than a billion gallons of coal ash into the Emory and Clinch rivers, burying about 400 acres of land under six feet of ash. The spill was one hundred times greater in volume than the Exxon Valdez spill and by far the largest coal ash disaster in U.S. history. When TVA decided to send the ash by train to a small, poor, rural, mostly black community outside Uniontown, Alabama, the EPA approved the decision. That same day, the first train of eighty cars clicked down the tracks to Alabama.
Every state in the South has contributed to the grand narrative of American music, but few can match Tennessee’s deep roots in the blues and jazz, gospel, soul and r&b, rockabilly, rock & roll, and country—or its tremendous concentration of historic record labels and music industry visionaries.
In a lovely paean to her home state, a feature essay from our Tennessee Music Issue, Rosanne Cash details the memories that inspired her multiple Grammy Award–winning album The River & the Thread.
My twin brother saw me as myself—the person I was before the accident.
Daddy’s truck was one of those places—like a grandmother’s house, a real and actual soul food restaurant, or a barbershop owned by an older black man who guards the radio by silent threat of the revolver in his drawer next to the good clippers—where one could reliably expect to hear either (and only) 1070 WDIA or 1340 WLOK. It was the other side of sound, the other side of Southern blackness, a steady if muffled undercurrent that persisted and quietly buoyed new generations.
A pilgrimage to the ruins of the shuttered Highlander Folk School, the grassroots education center where the likes of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. planned the civil rights movement.
