A Musical Week

I write one, Rob writes one, and we welcome a new poet into the Salvation South fold.

By Chuck Reece

Jun 10, 2023

Music we listen to as each day goes by is great. Music we listen to repeatedly over the years is wonderful. Music we listen to because we must is critical.

My job most days is to find amazing stories for Salvation South (with the help of Andy Fogle, our poetry editor) and to edit them. But sometimes, I have to write. That was the case when it came time to write about Iris DeMent. If you don’t know her music, lordy mercy, I don’t know how you’ve managed to miss it. When her first album came out thirty-one years ago, it penetrated my soul and stayed there. It became critical to me. Her life and mine have some eerie parallels, which I explain to you in my story and interview with her—and which I explained in brief during my Friday commentary for Georgia Public Broadcast on Mother’s Day Weekend.

A few weeks ago, we explored the cooking of chefs in the South whose roots lie elsewhere—and food writer Carrie Honaker explained how their cooking reflects their adopted home and helps what we think of as “Southern food” evolve. The same dynamic plays out in our culture warrior Rob Rushin-Knopf’s visit with Wu Fei, whose career brought her from her birth home of China to Nashville. These days, she’s picking a 2,000-year-old Chinese instrument, the guhzeng, right alongside master banjo pickers like Abigail Washburn.

Read Rob’s story to hear the tunes and figure out exactly what a guhzeng is.

We round out the week with poems from new contributor Spencer K. M. Brown that take a lyrical look at something Southerners are prone to do: dig up bones.

Y’all have a great week.

Chuck Reece

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Chuck Reece is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Salvation South, the weekly web magazine you're reading right now. He was the founding editor of The Bitter Southerner. He grew up in the north Georgia mountains in a little town called Ellijay.