Elton & Betty White
I love music. I miss the South. And the Oxford American is the only magazine I know where I can discover or re-discover any number of obscure and popular southern musicians from Swamp Dogg (the first D-O-double-G) to The Feminine Complex (a teenage girl-group from Nashville) to my Mississippi highschool history teacher, Caroline Herring (who apparently went on to sing her own leftist folk tunes).
My momma first turned me on to this magazine around 1998. Thanks momma. It was first founded and published by popularly acclaimed author John Grisham. Begun in Oxford, Mississippi, it has since shifted hands and now operates under its own non-profit status out of the University of Central Arkansas. A quarterly magazine of top-rate southern literature, the OA also delivers their annual Southern Music issue, which includes a cd, typically of 20+ tracks. They are currently on their 11th music issue, which boasts 2 cds, one being the first in a series that focuses on the music of a particular southern state. This issue‘s state is the magazine‘s home base, Arkansas.
Imagine several generations of southerners coming together to make you a mix tape of favorites and obscurities, past and present, and you start to get the idea. In past issues I‘ve had the pleasure of (re)discovering... Jerry Lee Lewis, Bukka White, Esther Phillips, Bongo Joe, Willie Nelson, R.E.M., Ann Peebles, Henry Flynt, the Yo Yo‘s, Robert Mitchum, William Grant Still, Dolly Parton, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Wilco, and Sister Ernestine Williams, among so many others. Nevermind “Southern“, the OA Southern Music compilations are some of the most diverse collections of American music you can find anywhere, and without a doubt they are some of the very best.
It is one thing to have a collection of new and inspiring music; but it is icing on the cake, after getting lost in the music, to remember that there are entire articles on each of the often obscure musicians. The writing itself is typically stellar. To read the background on soul master Esther Phillips or the cosmically elated interracial music duo Elton and Betty White, well it‘s just special. I can‘t recommend these magazines and these cds highly enough. Go find them and share them.
