Salvation South

“Hold tight to history,” Appalachian poet E.J. Wade writes, so we might be awakened.

The Great Recession forced more than a million Americans into nomad land, traveling in search of seasonal work. Bill Scott chose that life forty years ago.

Long ago, a pair of larger-than-life families—two couples with seven kids between them—rang in the new year together every year. Some bonds never break.

We discover our family is connected to this other one, and that friend to another one, until we all learn how we are woven into the great sweep of Southern history.

With otherworldly clarity, a New Orleans poet details the depths of trying times.

The Buckleys were, you might say, entrepreneurial. Particularly on Fourth of July Eve in the Waffle House parking lot.

“There is love that walks in fallows,” this Louisville poet writes. Ain’t that the truth.

How music and blackberries nourish and knit us together.

This weekend’s reading plumbs the depths of Southern hearts through fiction and poetry.

From the mountains of Appalachia, the swamps of Florida, and the Pine Belt of Mississippi, a 21st century brand of Southern rock ’n’ roll has risen. And Carolina’s Wednesday are the ringleaders.

The painful love of being a dad, as it plays out on the basketball court.

We start the year with some new reasons to get excited about Southern rock and roll. One more time.