Tag: Southern music

WATCH: Adia Victoria, “Magnolia Blues”

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Artist: Adia Victoria
Hometown: Campobello, South Carolina and Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Magnolia Blues”
Album: A Southern Gothic
Release Date: September 17, 2021
Label: Canvasback

In Their Words: “In an unpublished manuscript in 1933, William Faulkner spoke on the Southerner’s ‘need to talk, to tell, since oratory is our heritage.’ After a year spent in my room in Nashville, I wondered what stories I had to tell.

“Often the only view of the South beyond my window was the magnolia tree in my backyard. It blocked the rest of the world from my sight. I limited my gaze to its limbs, its leaves and the obscene bloom of its iconic white flower.

“The magnolia has stood as an integral symbol of Southern myth making, romanticism, the Lost Cause of the Confederates and the white washing of Southern memory. ‘Magnolia Blues’ is a reclaiming of the magnolia — an unburdening if its limbs of the lies it has stood for. This song centers the narrative of a Black Southern woman’s furious quest to find her way back home to the South under the shade of her magnolia.

“‘Magnolia Blues’ is an ode to Southern Black folk — too often hemmed out of what we mean when we say ‘Southerner’ — and it is also an ode to the South itself. To rescue it from — in the words of William Faulkner — ‘a make believe region of swords and magnolias and mockingbirds which perhaps never existed.'” — Adia Victoria

Photo credit: Huy Nguyen

Celebrate Giving Tuesday with the Music Maker Relief Foundation

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Earlier this year, we wrote about the wonderful work our friends at the Music Maker Relief Foundation are doing to support Southern musicians and preserve the musical legacy of the South. Now, you can give back to this wonderful cause and pick up some cool swag in the process. As part of #GivingTuesday, a November 29 global event that encourages participants to donate to charities that acts as a foil to the more consumer-driven traditions of post-Thanksgiving Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping, we've teamed up with Music Maker to offer the chance to win some awesome prizes for anyone who donates to the foundation today. 

Donate to Music Maker and you'll automatically be entered to win one of the prizes below. You'll also receive a link to download an exclusive mixtape curated by the BGS and Music Maker. Please note: In order to be eligible to win a prize and to receive the mixtape, you'll need to note "BGS" in the comments section of your donation. Music Maker plans to match up to $10,000 of donations made today.

Music Maker T-Shirt

This Next Level Apparel 50/50 t-shirt is a must-have for any music lover. The shirt commemorates one of Music Maker's dearest partner artists, Captain Luke.

The Whole Nine Yards Set

Over the past 20 years, Music Maker has accumulated an incredible collection of music from amazing artists from all over the South. Our new version of “The Whole Nine Yards” contains a digital collection of all 170 Music Maker releases consisting of 2,109 songs, as well some unreleased gems. This beautiful package comes with a customized walnut USB drive, box, and five greeting cards

We Are the Music Makers Book and CD

We Are the Music Makers: Preserving the Soul of America’s Music, written by Timothy and Denise Duffy, features over 65 photographs taken by Tim Duffy over 20 years along with stories and songs. Of the book, B.B. King said, “We Are the Music Makers highlights an essential part of our culture, providing us a glimpse into the lives of the amazing, and often little known, musicians of the American South. Tim Duffy has taken every opportunity to sustain a dimension of blues culture that could easily be lost forever, and nowhere is that more apparent than in his new book.

BGS Zip-Up Hoodie

Stay warm with a Bluegrass Situation hoodie. This design is printed on a slim fitting, soft-style, zip-up sweatshirt.

BGS Leather Coozie

Extremely high quality leather coozie that is bound on two sides to make sure the coozie doesn’t slip from your beverage.

Following the Feel: An Interview with Hiss Golden Messenger

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Hiss Golden Messenger, the sobriquet or “umbrella” under which singer/songwriter M.C. Taylor plays, has always been about questions: seeking them, asking them, and abiding in the kind of creative space that holds high the old adage about journeys surmounting destinations. At a time when it seems like Google can answer nearly anything for anyone — yes, even more existentially inclined questions like “What job should I hold?” or “Where should I live?” — Taylor seems to prefer existing in the kind of creative waters where queries act like ripples, each leading toward the horizon. Where they arrive, whether they arrive, is an act of trust.

With Hiss Golden Messenger’s new album, Heart Like a Levee, the questions mainly revolve around the fear that comes with throwing off the mantle of a full-time job and instead pursuing a creative life. For a man with familial responsibilities to consider that act doesn’t just involve “developing wings on the way down,” as Kurt Vonnegut once described, but something far more daring. After all, what happens to art if it’s required to pay the bills? As it turns out, taking that leap has produced one of the most striking albums from Taylor’s already impressive Southern folk repertoire. If the first three songs feel like a natural extension of his previous work, things take a shattering turn on the fourth, “Like a Mirror Loves a Hammer.” The song’s entire construction feels otherworldly. The main guitar riff practically pulses while Taylor’s voice comes across not in the assured rasp of his other songs but in a higher-register whisper. Then there’s the saxophone: Delivered with punctuating grit, it rubs against the melody like sand paper, polishing the entire, beastly thing down to a dark gem. If music — for any musician who has lived long past debut and sophomore albums — involves departures, then Taylor’s new album and this song, in particular, has cast listeners off into new waters. It’s an adventure worth every note.

Hiss Golden Messenger, as a name, suggests someone who delivers answers, and yet there’s this overarching theme of questions that arises in your songwriting. What do you make of the juxtaposition involving a messenger who arrives questioning?

I’d not ever thought of that before, I have to say. I don’t think very much about the name of my band. Maybe I should because I get asked about it a lot. People ask me where does the band name come from and I don’t have a pat answer.

Maybe I can expand it then. I can’t help but think of mythology or old folk tales when I hear your name, and those stories purport to teach us something by offering us lessons. But things seem so uncertain in today’s world. Do we live in a time when our mythologies can only exist as questions?

I’ll put it this way — this is not an answer to your question, but it’s as close as I can get — I’m not interested in art that offers me answers; I’m far more interested in art that poses questions. And I have a lot of personal questions. Hiss Golden Messenger, as a project or an experiment or umbrella under which I work, is one that allows me to work out a lot of very personal stuff, sometimes under cover of metaphorical language and sometimes not at all. My music is about communication or missed communication. I think that all of that necessitates a lot of questions. I just have a lot of questions. Sometimes I want the answer, and sometimes I don’t want the answer, I just want to know what the question is.

I don’t think you’re alone in that. There is a sense that answers aren’t necessarily end points.

That’s why some people — not a ton, but more and more — are drawn to this music. I just have some questions and I know that these are not totally unique questions. They’re questions that a lot of people who are growing up in this place and this country have.

More every day with each news story.

Yes.

On “Cracked Windshield,” the fear that your art must take on the added burden of financing your life comes into full view. What do we lose from art when it must suddenly pay the bills?

I think art is in danger of losing its edge when you’re depending on it to pay your bills. The music that I like most is emotionally or spiritually raw. That doesn’t have a lot to do with how the album sounds, but it has more to do with the way the melody is delivered. I want my own music to retain that sort of emotional candor. I don’t know, when you start depending on your art to make a living you really … it’s easy to second guess a lot of things.

I can see that. The line you have, “A song is just a feeling, when you make it pay the rent,” really strikes at that. Do you think anyone who is too coddled by success loses touch with that edge?

No, not really. If you can disassociate your art from the money that you make from it, I don’t think so. There are a lot of examples of artists that were very successful who made very powerful, emotionally moving art. I was out running this morning listening to mid-period Aretha Franklin. She was a big star at that point, and those records are about as powerful as you can get on an emotional level, I think. So, no, I don’t think so, but if you’re using your … This is a tricky subject and not really one I know a ton about. There are some people who make art as a method to get rich, and I think you’re setting yourself up for some weird situations, if that’s the case. I’ve been making records for so long with no feedback, and certainly wasn’t making any money at all. Part of my journey was figuring out a way to be satisfied with the art when nobody was listening to it. And to figure out a way to evolve my craft and grow as an artist when, really, it was me and a dozen other people who were hearing songs. That was, at times, a thankless sort of journey, but I’m really glad I’ve been on that road because it’s kept the aesthetic parts of making music at the forefront of what I do.

It seems like that’s an interesting foundation from which to grow.

The road has been a very, very long one, from when I started to this particular phone call right now. It’s been a long journey. I haven’t changed up what I think of as my source material since I was in my early 20s, so for 20 years I’ve been trying to make a record that sounds like Heart Like a Levee and I wasn’t supposed to until now.

Isn’t it funny how it comes down to timing? You have to hit that mark in your life.

It really does, and you have to get to a point where the work feels genuine, where the words coming out of your mouth feel like they’re real and they mean something to you, like you have something at stake in singing them.

You mentioned your journey and I’m taking this question more literally here — in terms of all the different places you’ve been — but Biloxi, Birmingham, Atlanta all arise as place names in your music. How do places leave their mark on you?

Oftentimes, it has to do with the number of syllables that are in the name. [Laughs] Sometimes I need that many syllables. I don’t know. A lot of the place names that appear on Heart Like a Levee are in the South, the Southeast. The cultures of the South will always be a very important part of what I do and I’m not ashamed of that at all, and that’s not something I would really try and hide. A lot of the places in the South are places I’ve passed through traveling around on tour. And they’re places that have, occasionally, a personal significance for one reason or another. Others are places that you can’t help but go through every time you go out on the road, like Atlanta is one of those places. Other places like Plaquemine, Rosedale … if you’re a student of the South — student, broadly speaking — these are beautiful places to pass through. Maybe they’re not places you want to stay for one reason or another, but they’re places that are important to the universe of the South.

Speaking of that universe, I understand you like to read Cormac McCarthy, Barry Hannah, and other Southern writers.

I’m interested in the Southern vernacular writ large. I grew up in California and I’ve always been drawn to that particular Southern groove. And I don’t mean just musically. That pocket exists in literature, it exists in food, certainly, it exists in visual art, in photography that comes from here. There’s a certain something that I think of when I think of Southern culture, and I don’t know what it is that drew me to this world, but I love it still. It’s still something that brings me a lot of joy and makes me think a lot.

I like the word groove because the South can suck you in — not everybody — but it can get you.

Some people can take it or leave it; some people are expressly trying to avoid the South.

Or their ideas of it.

Yeah, for sure. And some people are tuned into that frequency that is like you have to be there. If you know it, then you know it; and if you don’t, it’s hard to explain what it is. Kind of like the whole idea of groove. You can’t teach groove. You’re either born with it or you’re not. And if you don’t have it, you can maybe get close to it, but you’re never going to have it.

I’m not sure why, but it reminds me of the number of MFAs that graduate every year. They may be technically proficient writers thanks to that training, but not everyone has groove.

Oh, it’s something I talk about all the time. I call him my manager, but he’s also one of my best friends, Brad Cook. We were talking about this yesterday. It seems like more and more we have these conversations with people that are technically very intelligent, and it’s like, "Yeah, I know you’re smarter than me, but believe me, I know. I don’t know how to communicate to you that you don’t know what you’re talking about, but you’re going to have to trust me." To start to talk about something like groove is to talk about feel of something, and feel enters into very subjective territory, and that’s where people don’t trust their instincts. One way to deal with that distrust or the entering into that unknowable atmosphere is to fall back on numbers or figures, when really you just have to trust the feel. If something feels good, then you gotta go to that place with it.

Your career and the amount of time it’s taken to get here makes sense then. It may have taken 20 years, but you’re following the feel, you’re not falling back on a study of something, necessarily.

I’ve certainly made a lot of mistakes along the way, and those are very valuable.

It’s not a bad thing!

It’s great. I embrace the stuff — even the stuff I might have a tiny bit of regret about, I’m glad that I did it because it was yet another reminder that you’ve gotta follow the feel.

 

For more adventurous Southern folk music, read Amanda's interview with River Whyless.

Lede photo courtesy of the artist

Lucinda Williams: Every Exit Leaves a Little Death

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The Ghosts of Highway 20 may sound, in title, like it has traces of wanderlust, but the ideas behind the 14 songs on Lucinda Williams’ latest record find their weight in where they come from rather than where they’re going. In many ways, Ghosts is a record that honors Williams’ father, poet Miller Williams, with opening track “Dust” its most obvious but certainly not its only homage. The song is her second re-imagining of one of Miller’s poems, expanding on his composition of the same title after finding success with a similar endeavor on 2014’s “Compassion.”

“[‘Compassion’] was not the first time I’d tried to tackle it. I’d been, for years and years, wanting to take one of his poems and turn it into a song, but I hadn’t been successful at it — it’s really quite challenging,” she says. “When you sit down to do it, you realize the difference between poetry and songwriting. You can’t just take a poem and slap a melody onto it. You have to take the lyrics and rearrange them into something that looks like a song.”

“Dust” is the only track on The Ghosts of Highway 20 that directly stems from the poetry of her father, but the record is filled with glimmers of his influence. “If My Love Could Kill,” a gut-wrenching glimpse into the pain of watching a loved one grapple with Alzheimer’s, directly draws from her father’s battle with the disease. But Ghosts isn’t limited to honoring Lucinda’s roots alone: There are fathers and grandfathers and brothers and sisters whose stories fill the lines of the expansive record, too. Bruce Springsteen’s “Factory,” the record’s lone cover song, finds its meaning in Lucinda’s father-in-law, who spent over three decades working in the factories of Austin, Minnesota.

“First of all, it’s a great song. I love doing it. But, also, it’s sort of a tribute to Tom's [Overby, husband and manager] dad. It’s a short, just really sweet song that’s very concise,” Lucinda explains. “It says so much in so few words. The line that I love is, ‘They walked through the gates with death in their eyes.’ I remember Tom saying to me, ‘I’ve seen that. I saw the men walking out of the factory. I could have been one of them.’”

It’s a haunting image, and one that isn’t a far cry from the fire-and-brimstone billboards and desolate stretches of road that set the tone for the entirety of the record. “Every question and every breath, every exit leaves a little death,” she sings on the album’s title track. Highway 20 weaves its way through many of the towns in the South that have held memories for Williams, so much so that the fascination with its reach began when she was naming her label, Highway 20 Records.

“I was looking at this map — I think Tom and I were talking about different towns in the South — and I saw Highway 20 and all the towns that it was running through,” she says. “It runs through all these towns where I grew up. My brother was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi. My sister was born in Jackson. I started school in Macon. Monroe, Louisiana — it also runs all the way through there.”

The exits that dot I-20 played host to some of the more formative experiences in Williams’ life, from growing up to experiencing music and, later, finding familiarity amidst a life of back-to-back shows and endless touring.

“I went back to play in Macon, Georgia, a few years ago at the old Cox Theatre in downtown Macon, which is one of the first places the Allman Brothers got started,” says Williams. “It’s this really cool little theatre. I hadn’t been to Macon, been back there, in however long, and I remember it amazed me how little had changed. It’s one of those Southern towns that, unlike places like Nashville that are kind of ‘boom’ towns right now, one of these towns you go back and hardly anything’s changed.”

Williams started elementary school in the small Georgia city and, even in those early years, her father was exposing her to art and music in its natural environment.

“One of the reasons it’s so significant for me is that I remember my dad taking me to downtown Macon to see, back then, this blues — gospel blues — blind preacher street singer guy named Blind Curly Brown. He never got real well-known or anything,” she says. “Needless to say, that was a significant moment because there I was, six years old, listening — that’s seeping into my little six-year-old mind.”

Williams tagged along with her father often during that time period, even chasing peacocks on the estate of his great mentor and friend Flannery O’Connor and, ultimately, finding O’Connor’s work to be a jumping-off point for her own. Songs from throughout her career — the vivid, dark imagery on 2003’s “Atonement” or the symbolism in 1998’s “2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten — exemplify the way Williams’ art was informed by the classic Southern writer. On Ghosts, this reveals itself in tracks like “Louisiana Story,” a tale of abuse masked in Southern idioms. Meanwhile, “House of Earth,” a song with borrowed lyrics from Woody Guthrie, continues Williams’ tribute to her influences in a tangible way without sacrificing her own distinct voice.

“I was actually sent those lyrics,” remembers Williams. “[Nora Guthrie] sent me the lyrics to [“House of Earth”]. She said, ‘You know, the lyrics are not your average Woody Guthrie lyrics, and I thought of you when I was trying to think of who might want to try to put music to them. I thought, if anyone can do it, you would be the one to do it.' So I read them, and at first I went, 'Wow.' Especially for that time — it was written in the ‘40s — it’s basically about him visiting a prostitute. It’s pretty liberal thinking, especially for that day.”

Nora was right, though: If anyone was up for the challenge, it was Williams, who went on to perform the provocative number at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. before eventually recording it for The Ghosts of Highway 20.

“One of the things my dad taught me as a writer was to never censor yourself,” says Williams. “I’ve always been a rebel at heart, so I think I like to push people’s buttons a little. I like to make people think, like any good artist does, I think, whether it be a painter or a songwriter. I think it’s good to make people go, 'Wow, what was that?'”

The Ghosts of Highway 20 was largely recorded along with songs from Williams’ last record, 2014’s Where the Spirit Meets the Bone. Working with the intention of releasing it via her own label — and producing the record with her trusted team at the helm — helped her to solidify which songs were a fit for the unconventionally long record.

“I feel secure,” she says. “It makes me feel secure if I’m working with people I trust, and I think that’s the bottom line.”

Williams’ tranformative work on songs like “Dust” or “House of Earth” makes for its own road map of the way art can reimagine itself, paving a formidable road for artists of a new generation to look back on her work for their own cues. In many ways, Lucinda Williams’ creative output mimics the unwieldy stretch of road that’s borne witness to it; like an expansive Southern highway, the best records are never really finished being explored.

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.