Originally published in our Tennessee Music Issue  There is a remarkable story tucked halfway through Bessie, Chris Albertson’s biography of the blues singer Bessie Smith, in which Smith approaches a circle of robed North Carolina Klansmen, places one hand on her hip,… by Amanda Petrusich | Nov, 2020

Everybody Knows You When You’re…

Playlists curated by your favorite musicians and writers. by Brittany Howard, Kiese Laymon, Rosanne Cash, Kelsey Waldon, & others | Nov, 2020

Greatest Hits Music issue: Playlists

An introduction to the Music Issue’s Icons Section Beyond my eye, beyond the death and decay of matters left behind and unsettled, the music ringing up above my head told a thousand stories of bounty and belonging, and it glimmered… by Danielle A. Jackson | Nov, 2020

Up Above My Head

Originally published in our 2007 Music Issue  In a remarkable 1963 appearance with Juilliard professor and friend, Hall Overton, at the New School in New York, Monk demonstrated his technique of “bending” or “curving” notes on the piano, the most… by Sam Stephenson | Nov, 2020

Is This Home?

Originally published in our North Carolina Music Issue.  I wanted to start with the wild weeds and the creaking wood on the front porch, walking up to Nina Simone’s childhood home in Tryon, North Carolina. I wanted to start where… by Tiana Clark | Nov, 2020

Nina Is Everywhere I Go

An essay from the Greatest Hits Music Issue The first songs that I listened to by Talibah Safiya had this soft, sweet, plaintive quality. There is something else underneath if you listen a bit closer: a little loneliness. The knowledge… by Jamey Hatley | Nov, 2020

Talibah Safiya: Oracle of Castalia

An introduction to the Greatest Hits Music Issue How does the South inform my music? How do I describe the sound that your bare feet make when they pat the cool, packed red dust under them? How do I describe… by Brittany Howard | Oct, 2020

The South Just Has a…

 A Letter from the Editor, Food Issue. Quiet as it is kept, and widely as it has become forgotten, those who do the cooking and the farming know that those who only eat what is cooked for them and served… by Alice Randall | Mar, 2021

Food Is Us

Maxwell George

Maxwell George is the Oxford American’s deputy editor. He is from Charlotte, North Carolina, and lives in New York City.

Beale Street pawn shop, 1939. Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott © Library of Congress
Notebook

Capturing the Chaos

April 20, 2015

This month, Omnivore Recordings reissued a forgotten Memphis classic, a kind of conceptual compilation called Beale Street Saturday Night, produced by Jim Dickinson in 1979. To celebrate the rerelease of this masterpiece, the Oxford American is pleased to present Dickinson’s “The Search for Blind Lemon,” from our 2013 Tennessee Music Issue.

Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, 1940. Courtesy of Estate of Bob Wills/Oklahoma Historical Society/OKPOP Museum
Web Feature

The Texas Playboys’ Taxonomy of Farts

January 28, 2015

As a Texas Playboy, it seems, you were one of an exclusive brotherhood, and Bob Wills, the king of Western swing, was much more than a personality and a paycheck. But you had to earn your membership.

Jim McGuire's 1972 portrait of Travis Rivers, manager and friend to many Texas musicians, and the man who drove Janis Joplin from Port Arthur to San Francisco
Notebook

McGuire’s Texas Nashville Portraits

February 13, 2015

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.

Review

W-W-Joe-D?

October 16, 2012
Joe Bageant’s book Deer Hunting with Jesus, a rural Virginia native’s emic look—and deft analysis—of the political mindset, faithfully Republican as it is, of working-class America, came out in 2007. Back in those days this country was in the late-afternoon—not quite twilight, mind you—of George W. Bush’s eight years in office, and had still another year of unbridled prosperity ahead before the economic tidal shift we now call the Great Recession. Shoot, cousin, things are a whole lot different now.
A Buzz Displaced
Web Feature

A Buzz Displaced

April 02, 2013
Despite Michael Jordan's outsize influence, the Charlotte Hornets provided the definitive iconography of my youth.
Hands In Bleach
Interview

Hands In Bleach

June 09, 2014

An interview with the OA's new poetry editor, Rebecca Gayle Howell. "For me," Howell says, "the writing life is much like any trade work: one part apprenticeship and one part practice. My days rock back and forth between these two modes."

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