A sneak preview of the forty artists featured in the Visual South issue.
Do Looks Still Matter?
About music he was rarely wrong, our old master, Barry Hannah, Mississippi boy who sometimes flew too close to the sun. He made me a mixtape, one time when I was faltering in life.
Women writing about music.
An Ode to Ten Sexy Boots
Mixing with an Obscure Soul Goddess
A Points South essay from the North Carolina Music Issue.
Growing up, Taj encountered a music that sounded like it was “disappearing.” “It was black music, but it was also country music. It turned out to be this fingerpicking that gave me a feeling of being connected to an older style of music that I assumed was African, though I didn’t know.” I said that might be the truest definition of the Piedmont blues I’d ever heard. “It was that little . . . somethin’-somethin’,” Taj said. “I didn’t have no ‘ethnomusicological’ term for it. My name for it was stumblepicking.” Stumblepicking? “Meaning,” he said, “you’re kinda stumbling over the notes to make them. That chord of Etta Baker’s on ‘Railroad Bill,’ it was like an E7 going into an F but it doesn’t stay there. It moves. It jars you. I found something close to it by accident once, and I could probably spend my whole life trying to find it again.”
Braggadocious Soul Man.
Paying the Rent, One Guitar at a Time.
Crushing on Tyler Keith.
Girl Band on the Run.
