A Points South essay from the Spring 2019 issue

Listen to the first two notes Raphael plays on his solo on Nelson’s “Georgia on My Mind” and it’s impossible not to hear Mickey singing the word “Georgia” through the instrument, the second syllable bending upward, just the way Willie sings it. Raphael’s harmonica grounds the song in its call-and-response gospel impulse: one voice means little without the other’s ghostly affirmation.

“They were brothers in music,” Ursula Covay said. “They wrote together, hung out together, traveled together, fought together, loved together, and made deals together.” That’s the word most of the children of the Soul Clan use today to describe their fathers’ bond. Brothers.

A conversation with Guy Clark biographer Tamara Saviano.

“Guy was telling me for at least a year and a half before he died that he would not be here when the book came out.”

Dave Prater played a quietly essential role in Sam & Dave, and it takes only a slightly closer listen to their discography to hear the vital contributions of the duo’s soft-spoken half.

From the beginning of Sam & Dave’s career, Sam’s otherworldly high tenor overshadowed Dave’s low harmony, and for a variety of reasons—some personal, some practical, some musical—the history of the duo has been rewritten in the nearly thirty years since Prater’s death so as to diminish Dave’s contributions.

Peter Guralnick on his new book, the nature of biography, and the endless complexities of Sam Phillips.

Whether it was with The Band or, in the last decade of his life, the Levon Helm Band, Helm was always happy out of the spotlight, off to the side and out of the way, grinning, laughing, dancing, and drumming away behind his kit. American Son shows off a different Levon: Levon as front man, star, singer.

The Bravest Man In The Universe, Bobby Womack’s first album of original material since 1994, is already being heralded as a late-career triumph, a classic comeback tale of aging soul singer being rejuvenated by a younger producer.

Like many of Foster’s compositions, “Oh! Susanna” was a black-face minstrel song. It was his breakthrough hit as a songwriter, a song that surely would have been a number one single if such a measurement had existed in the mid-nineteenth-century. The song quickly spread all over the country through its many publications and permutations on sheet music and as traveling minstrel troupes all over the country thrilled crowds with the tale of long-distance, lost, confused love, others began adapting Foster’s irresistible melody for their own purposes.

So it was a summer night in Manhattan, and the City Winery, an upscale sit-down club that seats no more than three hundred, was hardly full. Moore sang the first verse from backstage, as if his tenor, now fragile and weathered but still unmistakably, shockingly powerful, was the legend, not Moore himself. When he finally did take the stage, the seventy-six-year-old took his time snatching the show back from his voice, from the idea of another era, a time long past.