ON THE BEAT APRIL 14, 2017 12:00 PM ‘A hard life of bad luck and trouble’ BY DAVID MENCONI MIDDLESEX, N.C. It’s been a while since Algia Mae Hinton was on a stage, but she’s still a dancer. That hasn’t changed, even though she’s wheelchair-bound nowadays. “The reason I can’t walk, I danced so much […]

The Glorifying Vines Sisters are a thriving musical institution. Based in Eastern North Carolina, they’ve been tearing up the road for decades and tearing up every church they visit. But they don’t confine themselves to churches; they’re comfortable playing secular venues, too. “If we’re going to do like Jesus did,” says singer and manager Alice […]

  I had the same conversation over and over again when I was conducting research for my doctoral dissertation on contemporary black gospel music. When I spoke to older churchgoers—dozens of them, in central North Carolina and Houston, Texas—they always told me the same thing. It went something like this: “Contemporary gospel is OK. It’s […]

  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 […]