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SINS FORGOT

We should probably start with the Cowboy. He’s the one you should have met. We all called him a genius. He neither confirmed nor denied. “I ain’t saying I’m a genius,” he’d parry. “But you’ve got to...

By Peter Cooper

’TIL THE DAY I DIE: BUD WELCH

’Til the Day I Die is a visual exploration of gospel and blues, shot on Super 8mm film.

By Nathan Willis

Smart with a Guitar

Floyd Council’s heart gave out on May 9, 1976: bad cholesterol and, in the end, kidney failure. He was sixty-four. He’s buried outside my hometown of Sanford, North Carolina.

By Ed Winstead

KNOW WHERE YOU ARE

The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded by Molly McCullly Brown is out today from Persea Books. 

By Laura Eve Engel

SERVICE AND LABOR

Please join us in congratulating our colleague Rebecca Gayle Howell, whose new collection American Purgatory is a powerful book offering a hope in community that shares struggle and defiance.

By Oxford American

Off-post

By Tamara Reynolds

Roots Of The Blues

By David Katzenstein

BACK INSIDE OF MEMPHIS, WITH THE COUNTRY BLUES (AGAIN)

“No one can tell you why Memphis is as magical as it really is.”

By Augusta Palmer

A Political Blues

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

By Maxwell George

FROM COUNTRY TO CITY

The Oxford American has been nominated for a 2017 National Magazine Award: Zandria F. Robinson’s essay “ Listening for the Country” is a finalist in the Essays and Criticism category.

By Oxford American

AMONG THE POSSIBILITIES

But I am reading  The Maytrees by Annie Dillard, handed to me by her friend Lee Smith. The cover is white—wintry, and the story is set on Cape Cod, which I only have visited in winter. My...

By Frances Mayes

WHAT I LEARNED FROM WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY

Atget, Modotti, Weston, Stieglitz, Avedon, Karsh, Brassaï, Bresson, Ulmann. Jim would hand the books to me with no explanation, no bias of who was who and why and what the world already thought of...

By Rebecca Gayle Howell