Salvation South

Religious affiliation is falling, even in the God-haunted South. But chaplaincy is booming in hospitals, schools, prisons and other institutions. And it’s teaching us how to reach across barriers of faith.

In Arkansas’ Salem Cemetery, everyone you meet is a friend, a neighbor, or maybe even one of your people.

Five Southern poems that smell like honeysuckle, mountain laurel, moss and tomatoes.

Zoh Amba is a rarity — a white woman saxophonist, from Appalachia, no less — playing “free jazz” in New York and around the world. But to pigeonhole her into a “hillbilly exotica” tale would be to devalue the hard work of a woman whose music fearlessly chases the divine.

Legendary music writer Holly Gleason talks to the South’s most beloved star about love, forgiveness and how to live life with an open mind and an open heart.

It just may be that everything we need to know about living life, we can learn from Dolly Parton.

Tennessee’s Adeem the Artist sounds country — truly and deeply country — but every sharp lyric and wicked guitar twang challenges our notions of what “country” really means.

A poem about how a single word, in the mouths of Appalachians, can tell the world a great deal about how mountain folks see things.

Alabama musician, painter, and podcaster Abe Partridge talks about snake-handling — and faith, forgiveness, and how to reach an understanding with people you’ve written off.

A Tennessee poet brings us five works. All of them speak to small matters that every Southerner holds dear.

Abe Partridge’s “Alabama Astronauts” adventure taught him a lot about loving his neighbors. It’s got lessons to teach us, too.

The Mississippi-born trumpeter and composer, now 81, is a musical pioneer whose work stands alongside the achievements of Southerners like Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters and Hank Williams.