It’s something music fans and readers of Southern literature look forward to each year: the annual Southern Music Issue from Oxford American, when the distinguished magazine highlights the music of one Southern state.
This year’s issue is devoted entirely to North Carolina (with Nina Simone on the cover!), and if you haven’t already done so, stop reading this article and click here to order up yourself one.
Each music issue comes with a compilation CD and a code to download the compilation plus bonus tracks as MP3s.
We wanted to be part of the celebration, so you’ll find our full-page color ad on page 47, right smack-dab in the middle of a terrific profile of folksinger Etta Baker, written by Rebecca Bengal.
Other highlights include:
- Wiley Cash on Ella May Wiggins’ 1929 song “Mill Mother’s Lament”
- Michael Parker on Rudy Johnson’s 1967 song “Don’t Play that Song (You Lied)”
- 2018 NC Literary Hall of Fame inductee Randall Kenan on the 1957 Coltrane/Monk track “Crepuscule with Nellie”
- 2018 NC Literary Hall of Fame inductee Jill McCorkle on “Beach Music”
- Zachary Lunn, winner of our first (2018) Sally Buckner Emerging Writers’ Fellowship, on Fort Bragg in winter
- Jonathan Lethem on the Winston-Salem band the dB’s
- OA editor Maxwell George—a North Carolina native—on “Ryan Adams, Thomas Wolfe, and Leaving Home”
- Nickole Brown writes “Hellbender”
- Tyree Daye pens “The World Grows”
- And a whole lot—and we mean a WHOLE LOT—more
Founded in 1992 in Oxford, Mississippi, The Oxford American is a quarterly literary magazine dedicated to featuring the best in Southern writing while documenting the complexity and vitality of the American South.
They publish poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that shows the South in all its myriad contradictions and beauties.
Subscriptions are only $39 a year. Click here to subscribe.