Track 23 – “Resurrection” (Live) by Benny Starr feat. the FOUR20s
“Resurrection,” the first song on A Water Album, facilitates a kind of reconciliation between the Fitzgerald Wiggins of my youth and the man I aim to be. Seeing others come in contact with this music has been a staggeringly beautiful experience, with a profound, if unintended, result: apparently, I’ve empowered members of my community to chart their own pathways to redemption.
Concerned with inter-generational memory and trauma, photographer Adrian White has created a series of photographs documenting his family’s past and present, while imagining a better future.
Track 5 – “Bad Case of the Blues” by Linda Martell
“Bad Case of the Blues” shouldn’t be compelling, but it is—because of Martell, the way she guides, colors, and shades the song. She infuses it with the dissonance of self-knowledge, even as she takes her problems home to Mama in the country and deprecatingly calls herself “Miss Smarty.” The track shares a title with torch songs by greats Dinah Washington and Dusty Springfield and seems to warn of the perils of holding down-home values in the big city.
A Points South essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
All of Bill’s anecdotes about Diz played to this theme: here was a man, a titan of American music, whose genius helped revolutionize jazz in the forties, opening the door for its great modern period—the pre-birth of cool!—and yet who carried a “personality of warmth and openness and friendliness everywhere, with whoever he was dealing with,” Bill said. “That side of him was something that I remember as strongly as I remember his musical force and power and creativity.”
Track 21 – “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” by Alice Wine
“I know a different echo to that,” she said, and proceeded to sing a version of “Hold On,” delivered without accompaniment, in hushed intonations, the refrain “keep your hand on the plow, hold on” replaced, after one verse, by words that are not found in any transcriptions of the song previously cataloged by folklorists: “keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.”
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Though we already had two hundred miles under our belts, that morning felt like the first real leg, the leg with daylight and sights, with the fresh feeling of a Prius on an open road: snacks uneaten, podcasts not yet listened to, the journey still limitless. Of course, as experienced readers know, travel hubris is a dangerous thing.
An installment in our weekly photography series, Eyes on the South
Tamara Reynolds’s series, The Drake, documents with arresting clarity the community in and around the Drake Motel in Nashville, Tennessee, a city block populated by what she calls the “resentfully tolerated.”
A feature essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
There’s a high-achieving aptitude to it all, a certain polyglot prodigiousness. He knows how to hack and fuse genres, how to enter and exit. Part of his genius is that he’s an unrepentant copyist; for a time, his motto was a saying gleaned from Paul Rand, the graphic artist behind logos for companies like IBM and Enron: “don’t try to be original, just try to be good.”
A supplement to our South Carolina Music Issue
A rap IT octopus, Matt “DJ Wiz” Jones always kept a spare hand for taking pictures and his photo album from that era is an adhesive historic designation.
An installment in our weekly photography series, Eyes on the South
Eyes on the South curator Jeff Rich interviewed artist Alex Harris, whose series Our Strange New Land is the High Museum’s most recent Picturing the South commission. They were joined by the associate curator of photography at the museum, Gregory Harris, who worked closely with Alex on the exhibition.
A Points South essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
Before she was Catwoman on the television show Batman in the 1960s, before she spoke out against the Vietnam War and was exiled for it, before her redemption and the sold-out shows with a multicultural international repertoire at Café Carlyle in New York City in the 1990s, she was simply Eartha Mae Keith, a little girl who never knew her daddy and whose mama had given her away before she was school-aged because she couldn’t afford to keep her.
Track 17 – “My Father Is a Witness, Oh, Bless God” by the Plantation Echoes
Established in early 1933, the Plantation Echoes were made up of fifty Gullah field hands who enjoyed singing spirituals, most dating back to slavery. A handful of the singers were, in fact, former slaves themselves. Heyward’s praise of the Plantation Echoes was effusive. “The entertainment is not only highly unique but enlightening,” he later remarked. “There is an electrifying quality to the ‘shouting’ and the performers’ ability to shift from one time to another in perfect unison is a revelation.”
