MARCH 29, 2017 by: JENNIFER ODELL   Music Maker Relief Foundation gives $62,000 to Louisiana musicians” data-description=”The Music Maker Relief Foundation has been providing assistance to Baton Rouge-area musicians affected by last year’s floods.” Seven months after unprecedented rainfall flooded Southeast Louisiana, musicians across the state are still struggling to get back on their feet, having […]

Many Americans are uncomfortable with the very idea of black people living in the rural South. “Black” plus “rural,” for them, evokes images of slavery and of the “Strange Fruit” hanging from Southern trees that Billie Holiday so hauntingly sang about. This discomfort is reflected in the mass media’s tacit erasure of anything connecting black […]

  The Blues Doctor knows what ails you. He’s an expert diagnostician of the many maladies of the heart and soul. He got his education early, being born in the depths of the Depression to the cotton fields of Bishopville, South Carolina in 1933. As a member of a share cropping family, he started working […]

  Pat Sky’s biography reads like fiction. He’s a man of extraordinary gifts. A Southerner of Creek Indian heritage, he helped establish the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1960s—observers and critics often mentioned him in the same breath as Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk. Around that time, he produced Mississippi John Hurt’s […]

When I was studying ethnomusicology in graduate school, we sat around a classroom one day debating the question, “What is the most fundamental element of music?” Some argued for pitch. Some argued for rhythm. Although it didn’t occur to me at that time, the answer seems obvious to me now—sound. Sound itself—vibration, sonic energy—is the […]