A feature story from the North Carolina Music Issue.
The Wrays had an old-world, Keatsian melancholy. It bloomed in the kitchen of their 6th Street home in Portsmouth, Virginia, where, from about 1951 to ’55, they recorded songs on a one-track, mostly originals written by Vernon. This was back when the music was fun, before it became a business. It’s the sort of thing that’s dashed off and then mislaid and vanishes somewhere. Sherry found the masters in a box of her dad’s stuff that, horrifyingly, was bound for the dump. She rescued them, and named the disc 6th Street Kitchen. The vibe is Elvis doing Dylan’s Great White Wonder: gushy, drunken ballads, some barely a minute long, and rapturous in the way that the smallest beginnings can express enormous feeling.
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
My burnt body hangs crisscross over Carolina beach dunes below where
family gathers children’s ringing sand splash toys tangled in teenage lust
the skin consciousness potential of everyone eyeing one another
in sunbursted bottoms there is nothing here but the bliss of this day
& so I think on death hanging out over the Atlantic so many dead
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
It’s not what you think, not a back-tease aerosol of a band
head-banging to a half-cracked amp nor the flame-decal of a beater
revving the gravel lot out back, hungry for a big-tiddied girl to stumble
out cork high and bottle deep.
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
Once, I trusted a hand pointing north;
once, I called for a wolf
and a man walked out of the night.
I walked Youngsville and marked myself down on a map
I was making.
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
It rises from dust, rakes in the populace,
feeds them fried Twinkies, fried trees if they could
put them on a stick and powder them in sugar.
Bodies bunch up: the perfumed, the balmy,
the whole way to watch the potter at his wheel,
the carver and his knife, the knee-high rope
around an old America.
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
When it snows, the entire post
shuts down like there is no war
going on. Perhaps the higher-ups
decide to let those left behind,
for the moment, savor the chance
to shape snowmen with their children
or lie beside another warm body.
Probably it is lack of preparedness.
Cole Caswell’s photography explores the lives of people who live off the conventional grid, such as a homeless DIY punk couch-surfing in Savannah and a retired stock trader/primitive-skills-master hiding out on a swampy homestead. Caswell develops his images, all tintypes, on the road in a hand-built portable darkroom.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
In the spring and summer, I make a habit of sitting on our deck in the mornings and as far into the afternoons as the Kentucky sun, heat, humidity, allergies, and mosquitoes allow. I also like to sit up in the treehouse in our yard that my husband built for our children—but he and I love and use it too—with my books and my fizzy strawberry pop.
A conversation with the Georgia-bred, North Carolina-based singer and guitarist Jake Xerxes Fussell.
“It’s hard to say what a song is after a while, it’s been through so many lives and incarnations. Is it a gospel song? Is it a nursery rhyme? I don’t know. Alan Lomax talked about that, about how songs had these lives over many generations. There’s a lot of stuff that’s both and neither at the same time. I think this might be one of those songs.”
The series Plateau by Aaron Canipe examines North Carolina’s Piedmont region. Inspiration for the series comes from Thomas Wolfe’s novella The Lost Boy: “ . . . the earth’s pivot, the granite core of changelessness, the eternal place where all things came and passed, and yet abode forever and would never change.”