Homecoming Queen

On Sharon’s stage, delivery and dance moves are queen, and in her audience one can rediscover the lost arts of performance: command, direction, showmanship, sincerity.

By Maxwell George

"Midnight" by Futurebirds

By Maxwell George

I Would Call Myself a Gardener

His songs are about women that rain, read magazines from the back to the front, or dance all night, and men that lose them, go underground with their wedding ring, get strung out like Christmas...

By Maxwell George

I Remember His Sweetness

“He said to get in touch with him when I got to New York, and once I was settled there, I did that,” Whitworth remembers.

By Maxwell George

A BUZZ DISPLACED

Despite Michael Jordan's outsize influence, the Charlotte Hornets provided the definitive iconography of my youth.

By Maxwell George

A Political Blues

“The blues to me is personal music. The blues to me is political.”

By Maxwell George

CAPTURING THE CHAOS

This month, Omnivore Recordings reissued a forgotten Memphis classic, a kind of conceptual compilation called  Beale Street Saturday Night, produced by Jim Dickinson in 1979. To...

By Maxwell George

FOUL IN WISDOM

Following up on Ryan Adams. Last week’s news is a colossal disappointment for Adams’s fans—many of whom, like myself, had remained loyal to his music despite his career of public tantrums and...

By Maxwell George

HANDS IN BLEACH

An interview with the  OA's new poetry editor, Rebecca Gayle Howell. "For me," Howell says, "the writing life is much like any trade work: one part apprenticeship and one part practice. My...

By Maxwell George

JASON ISBELL’S ONGOING MOMENT

I think the best that we can do as songwriters is try to document and try to record something about the time that we’re living in. If you want to connect with people who are alive now—unless you’re...

By Maxwell George

MCGUIRE’S TEXAS NASHVILLE PORTRAITS

Since many of the best musicians working in Nashville over the years are Texans, a good portion of Jim McGuire’s ongoing Nashville Portraits series features the iconic natives of the Lone Star state,...

By Maxwell George

MCGUIRE'S TEXAS NASHVILLE PORTRAITS

By Maxwell George

THE GUN SHOW

Irrespective of the national debate over gun control, for many Americans, the heart and the soul is located near the trigger finger. Inevitably, firearms have figured into the Oxford American...

By Maxwell George

THE STILLNESS AND THE HUM

Talking tornadoes with Justin Nobel. I can imagine a world where  tornado and  typhoon have become forgotten and laughable words, and we no longer remember what it’s like to feel...

By Maxwell George

THE TEXAS PLAYBOYS’ TAXONOMY OF FARTS

As a Texas Playboy, it seems, you were one of an exclusive brotherhood, and Bob Wills, the king of Western swing, was much more than a personality and a paycheck. But you had to earn your membership.

By Maxwell George

W-W-JOE-D?

Joe Bageant’s book  Deer Hunting with Jesus, a rural Virginia native’s emic look—and deft analysis—of the political mindset, faithfully Republican as it is, of working-class America, came out in...

By Maxwell George

WHAT IT IS WE CHOOSE TO LISTEN TO AND WHAT IT DOES TO US

In Lament from Epirus , Christopher C. King finds his musical and spiritual Elysium.  I call two places my home: I call my record room my home and I call Epirus my home. Where I was born and...

By Maxwell George