Tag

Southern Music

Southern Cultural Literacy for America Blog

Southern Cultural Literacy for America

What are some songs or books that you think all Southerners should know? Cultural literacy is the ordinary process by which a population acquires a language of thought through the forms already belonging to it. Those forms are the songs, stories, images, and phrases that circulate in the ordinary life of a place. Everybody knows the Mona Lisa. Everybody knows…
Tom Daniel
November 6, 2026
The Hand on the Throttle Blog

The Hand on the Throttle

Southern railroad songs are often treated as a musical celebration of trains: their speed, their whistles, and the power of a locomotive moving through the landscape. The cultural connection is in the songs and in the life the songs come from. The South had more single-track, light-rail, and newly built lines than the Northeast in the decades after the Civil…
Tom Daniel
October 28, 2026
The Devil’s Box Blog

The Devil’s Box

Do you have a piano in your church? An organ? A guitar? A bass and drum set? A pedal steel? I’ve visited a lot of churches all over the South covering more denominations than I can count, but I have never once encountered a fiddle in any of them. The fiddle has probably acquired more theological baggage than any other…
Tom Daniel
October 22, 2026
Music in the House of Lee Blog

Music in the House of Lee

Robert E. Lee did not play an instrument. That single fact, set beside the musical lives of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Jefferson Davis, requires a moment of careful consideration, because it does not mean what it first appears to mean. Jefferson submitted himself to decades of violin practice, treating musical discipline as inseparable from intellectual formation, and understanding that…
Tom Daniel
October 7, 2026
The Alabama Heathens Blog

The Alabama Heathens

The Alabama Heathens are a Southern rock band from North Alabama in the least marketable sense of the term. They didn’t assemble in a conference room somewhere to look like a region. They formed because some boys from Huntsville, Priceville, and Muscle Shoals kept ending up in the same joints with guitars, and then decided the joints were the whole…
Tom Daniel
September 28, 2026
Omnipotent Moral Busybodies Blog

Omnipotent Moral Busybodies

C. S. Lewis wrote that "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own…
Tom Daniel
September 15, 2026
Southern Music is Not a Purity Test Blog

Southern Music is Not a Purity Test

When a life as public as Dolly Parton's closes, the temptation is to sort the woman by the last arguments attached to her name. The internet-fueled predictable reaction is to give her a cultural Judgment Day based on cherry-picked items of discontent while ignoring her contributions to both music and the South as a whole. That is a poor way…
Tom Daniel
September 8, 2026
Sacred Steel and Southern Rock Blog

Sacred Steel and Southern Rock

I came to Sacred Steel late, and I came to it by accident. I'd been going back through my list of American musical traditions that are actually Southern, checking for anything I'd left out, and Sacred Steel was one of the names that turned up as a gap. I didn't know the tradition at all going in, so I did…
Tom Daniel
August 24, 2026
B.F. White and the Sacred Harp Blog

B.F. White and the Sacred Harp

History tends to remember songs, and is considerably less interested in the people who made sure there was somewhere to sing them. Benjamin Franklin White is one of those people. Born in Union County, South Carolina, in 1800, he spent the better part of his adult life in Hamilton, Georgia, where he taught singing schools, compiled tunebooks, presided over conventions,…
Tom Daniel
August 17, 2026
The Sacred Ordinary Blog

The Sacred Ordinary

There is a habit in modern life of searching for meaning only in the dramatic and flamboyant. We are told to look for fulfillment in great achievements, grand adventures, public recognition, and constant reinvention. The ordinary day, by contrast, is treated as something to escape. Routine is drudgery. Repetition is boredom. Domestic life is confinement. Work is merely transactional. The…
Tom Daniel
August 6, 2026
Patrick Henry
Give Me Fiddle Blog

Give Me Fiddle

Patrick Henry, otherwise known as Mister Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death, was a pretty good musician, much like his contemporary, Thomas Jefferson. But Henry did not practice scales. He did not copy violin pieces by hand into notebooks, did not build a personal library of Italian Baroque composers, and did not submit himself to the long discipline of…
Tom Daniel
July 31, 2026
Emy-Lou Biedenharn: International Singing Sensation Blog

Emy-Lou Biedenharn: International Singing Sensation

In the world today, there are well-known singing competitions on major television stations that help launch singers to national and international fame. For the sweet Southern gal Emy-Lou Biendenharn, born in 1902 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, those were not options.  She had a more difficult path to travel.  Yet walk it she did, and with the typical strength and grace of…
Walt Garlington
July 24, 2026
Music in the House of Davis Blog

Music in the House of Davis

There is a rosewood Knabe piano at Beauvoir, the Jefferson Davis home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, that has survived more than most Americans could bear. Hurricane Katrina lifted it from the front parlor and deposited it in the limbs of an oak tree on the grounds. Restorers could not save it. But there it sits still, in the presidential…
Tom Daniel
July 21, 2026
Dabney Was Right About Music, Too Blog

Dabney Was Right About Music, Too

Robert Lewis Dabney stood before the graduating class of Hampden-Sydney College in June of 1882 and told them, with the measured certainty of a man who had already watched one civilization end, that another was ending around them. He was sixty-two years old, a Presbyterian theologian, Stonewall Jackson's chief of staff and biographer, and one of the most unsparing critics…
Tom Daniel
July 9, 2026
The Paradox of the Lomax Recordings Blog

The Paradox of the Lomax Recordings

Every folk song collector runs into the same problem the moment the recording machine actually starts turning: the song they are capturing has never had one fixed shape, and the machine is about to give it one anyway. A ballad sung on a porch in Kentucky on a Tuesday might run six verses. Sung again on Thursday by the same…
Tom Daniel
June 25, 2026
Across the Rappahannock Blog

Across the Rappahannock

The Confederate Army of 1861 went to war with music built into its structure. Every regiment was required by regulation to maintain a brass band — typically eight to twelve musicians, but authorized up to sixteen — whose duties were not ornamental. They beat the drum calls that moved men out of sleep and into formation before dawn. They played…
Tom Daniel
June 18, 2026
After the Cannons Have Cooled Blog

After the Cannons Have Cooled

Southern music is not a single thing. It never has been. What we casually call Southern music is in reality a family of related musical responses to history — responses that look and sound similar on the surface but serve entirely different human purposes. A song written to send men to war is doing something fundamentally different from a song…
Tom Daniel
June 9, 2026
Native American Music and the South Blog

Native American Music and the South

Frequently, I have described Southern music as a blending of influences. The interaction between Scots-Irish settlers and enslaved Africans produced a musical synthesis that is audible, traceable, and well documented. One can easily point to specific features to prove it. There are ballad forms, fiddle repertory, banjo construction, and rhythmic sensibility to reasonably identify their origins in Southern music. The…
Tom Daniel
May 27, 2026
Daniel Donato and Cosmic Country Blog

Daniel Donato and Cosmic Country

What would you call it if you created a band with Buck Owens, Don Rich, Duane Allman, Gram Parsons, Clarence White of The Byrds, and Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead? Daniel Donato of Nashville calls it Cosmic Country, and it might be the most intriguing thing you’ve heard in a long time. Daniel Donato is one of the more…
Tom Daniel
May 20, 2026
David Allan Coe Blog

David Allan Coe

David Allan Coe died. If you’re looking for a clean, agreeable tribute, this ain’t it. Those are easy to find, and they all follow the same predictable pattern of dates, albums, controversies, and a polite nod about his influences. That kind of writing treats a musician like a museum exhibit: labeled, contained, and ultimately harmless. David Allan Coe was a…
Tom Daniel
May 13, 2026
The Sons of Erin and the Sons of Dixie Blog

The Sons of Erin and the Sons of Dixie

It’s not unusual for music to preserve historical memory, but it is surprising sometimes where that memory ends up surfacing. One such instance appears in the work of Irish balladeer Derek Warfield, whose songs normally focus on Dublin and Belfast, but in this particular instance, he turns his attention to Dixie. This might seem like a head-scratcher of an unlikely…
Tom Daniel
April 24, 2026
Jefferson Could Play Blog

Jefferson Could Play

We love to affectionately remember Thomas Jefferson as a mind detached from the body. Many accounts present him as a man of paper, of correspondence, of carefully arranged ideas set down in elegant prose. The familiar image is that of the “Sage of Monticello,” seated at a writing desk, producing language that would echo across the centuries. That image is…
Tom Daniel
April 14, 2026
The Tempo of a Civilization Blog

The Tempo of a Civilization

Why does Southern music move the way it does? I’m not talking about a particular instrument it favors or a particular chord progression it follows. I’m talking about why Southern music leans into such a smooth shuffle groove instead of velocity, why it settles back instead of lunging forward, and why it stretches instead of snaps. And why, if one…
Tom Daniel
April 10, 2026
The Sound of Southern Easter Blog

The Sound of Southern Easter

The South has produced many distinctive musical traditions, but few are as recognizable or as beloved as the Southern gospel quartet. I’ve written many essays about Sacred Harp and gospel, but I have inexcusably written very little about the Southern gospel quartet. And what better time of year than Easter to celebrate one of the most iconic sounds of the…
Tom Daniel
April 3, 2026
From Ulster to Appalachia Blog

From Ulster to Appalachia

Every March, America goes nuts about green, and becomes briefly and theatrically Irish. Rivers turn green. Beer turns greener. Bagpipes appear in places that have not known sheep in living memory. Plastic bowler hats appear, and suddenly everybody sounds like a Frosted Lucky Charms commercial. An impressive number of folks discover that their great-great-great-grandmother’s second cousin once spelled her name…
Tom Daniel
March 17, 2026
Victory Blog

Victory

The regime occupying Washington, D. C., having launched its latest war of conquest, where may a Southerner look for consolation in a world gone insane?  The Psalmist answers: ‘From whence shall my help come? My help comes from the LORD, Who made heaven and earth’ (Psalm 121:1, 2). So has it often been in the South, that our people seek…
Walt Garlington
March 13, 2026
The Carried Song Blog

The Carried Song

If I were a Yankee, I could likely make an outrageous claim and expect it to be believed on the strength of its articulation alone. Yankees, of course, possess the advantage of literacy, and literacy, in modern cultural shorthand, is synonymous with intelligence. As a Southerner, I don’t enjoy that rhetorical luxury. Everything I say must be prefaced, situated, and…
Tom Daniel
March 11, 2026
Townes Van Zandt Blog

Townes Van Zandt

Townes Van Zandt was an American singer-songwriter born in 1944 in Fort Worth, Texas, whose work occupies a quiet but enduring place in Southern music. His songs sit at the crossroads of folk, country, and blues without ever settling comfortably into any of them, largely because he showed little interest in belonging to pre-set categories. Born of Dutch ancestry and…
Tom Daniel
March 6, 2026
49 Winchester Blog

49 Winchester

49 Winchester are a Southern band in the oldest, least marketable sense of the term. They are a group that formed because some guys in the same place played music together before they’d ever heard of tours and contracts. They come from Castlewood, Virginia, in the far southwestern corner of the state, an Appalachian region closer in spirit and history…
Tom Daniel
February 26, 2026
Songs of Lament Blog

Songs of Lament

There is a particular kind of song that only appears after history has already banged its gavel and rendered its verdict. While some songs are intended to rally the faithful or stiffen resolve, this is not that kind of song. This song arrives later, once the cannons have cooled, the banners have been folded away, and the surviving population has…
Tom Daniel
February 18, 2026
It Really Is Blue Blog

It Really Is Blue

Originally published at Reckonin.com If you spend any time at all online, you're aware of the proliferation of artificial intelligence-created content. Tools exist which have made AI now easily accessible, free or cheap to use. This powerful tool is in the hands of the general public with virtually no oversight in place, and as you might imagine, the content being…
Anne Wilson Smith
February 13, 2026
Front Porches Blog

Front Porches

When people talk about the history of American music, they almost always picture a stage, with a spotlight and a performer separated from an audience by footlights and distance. We imagine these grand, almost sacred spaces designed for reverence and applause. Of course, those places definitely matter, but they come late in the story. Southern music did not begin on…
Tom Daniel
February 3, 2026
Dolly Parton and Southern Endurance Blog

Dolly Parton and Southern Endurance

Greatness. In Southern music, “greatness” is rarely the result of innovation alone. More often, it emerges from endurance—specifically, the capacity to move through cultural, commercial, and institutional pressure without surrendering. The South has produced countless musicians whose work crossed boundaries of region, genre, race, and class, but far fewer who managed to do so while retaining control over their voice,…
Tom Daniel
January 28, 2026
I Don’t Want Christmas to End Blog

I Don’t Want Christmas to End

I Don’t Want Christmas to End, the 2021 Christmas album by Zach Williams, doesn’t feel as much seasonal as it feels Southern. Recorded at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Zach Williams’ first full-length holiday record does a lot more than borrow the iconography of classic American music as it absorbs the essence of the iconic studio that shaped American…
Tom Daniel
January 20, 2026
A Lil Church Blog

A Lil Church

"Christian music is everywhere--whether you realize it or not." That headline was not produced by a Christian publication. The Wall Street Journal ran it on November 8, 2025. According to the article, popular Christian music is the fastest growing genre in the entertainment industry. In other words, Christian music has gone mainstream. A couple of weeks ago, I attended the…
Brion McClanahan
November 11, 2025
The Graveyard Crossroads of Grady Blog

The Graveyard Crossroads of Grady

Grady, Alabama, was never more than a dot on the map, a rural settlement where the fields pressed in close and the pines rose taller than the houses. It lay twenty or so miles south of Montgomery, past the sprawl of the city and into a quieter country of red clay and sandy roads. The WSFA Tall Tower looms over…
Tom Daniel
October 31, 2025
The Sorrow Singer Blog

The Sorrow Singer

In the South, a funeral isn’t just a formality. It’s a moment when music becomes memory, and memory becomes something you can hum for the rest of your life. —Tom Daniel My memory puts on a coat of gray, A keening tweed that moans just like a choir, A dirge-like gabardine that knows the way Of tears, a worsted wool,…
Maura H. Harrison
October 1, 2025
The Drawl and the Song Blog

The Drawl and the Song

At a recent Abbeville Conference, I tackled a subject that’s been hiding in plain sight all along - the Southern accent. I’ve lived in Alabama almost my whole life, so I’m definitely familiar with the Southern accent. Now it’s true that my wife and I lived in Iowa for three years, but we actually kind of liked it up there.…
Tom Daniel
September 3, 2025
Blood in the Branches Blog

Blood in the Branches

This is a true story where music, memory, and mass murder meet beneath the Southern sky. I’ve said before that my family tree may have tangled roots, but this time, it’s got blood in the branches. I want to tell you a story that winds through the bare winter trees of Stokes County, North Carolina… a story that runs like…
Tom Daniel
August 11, 2025
Legends of Southern Radio Blog

Legends of Southern Radio

Imagine a world where radio wasn’t just background noise, but was a powerful force across an entire region of the country. I want to look into the dusty dials and glowing tubes of early Southern radio, and explore all about some of the stations that didn’t just play music, but changed culture, identity, and race relations in the American South…
Tom Daniel
August 4, 2025
Havin’ A Large Time Blog

Havin’ A Large Time

Reporter Bill King discusses his decade of work covering the Southern music scene from 1976-1986. We're havin' a large time. You can pick up his book, Large Time: On the Southern Music Beat, 1976-1986, and enjoy more detailed stories. https://youtu.be/cxMqZTfhqSM The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.
Abbeville Institute
July 30, 2025
Music and the Soul Blog

Music and the Soul

Originally published at Reckonin.com Most of the music we hear in modern life is of the pre-recorded sort, mass produced by corporations. One might argue that the large-scale production and distribution of music has some upsides - we can experience a wider variety of musical styles, and the work of the most talented artists can be appreciated by everyone regardless…
Anne Wilson Smith
July 29, 2025
Southern Story and Song Blog

Southern Story and Song

A review of  Southern Story and Song: Country Music in the 20th Century, (Shotwell Publishing, 2024) by Joseph R. Stromberg, Some claim that the zenith of Country Music’s popularity was in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. With mega-selling artists like Shania Twain, Garth Brooks, and Toby Keith, Nashville record company executives certainly weren’t hurting for cash during this era and…
John L. Goodwin
April 3, 2025
The Southern Cadence Blog

The Southern Cadence

We all have an idea that when we hear Southern Music, we know it, but what is it? What is it about Southern music that makes it stand out from other types of American music or music from around the world? How do you know it when you hear it? How do you explain to somebody the difference between the…
Tom Daniel
February 25, 2025
I Ain’t Apologizing Blog

I Ain’t Apologizing

Jon Harris has been affiliated with the Abbeville Institute for nearly a decade. He was one of our Summer School students, has been responsible for some of our video work, and was the editor and producer of our 1607 Project documentary. He hosts the popular YouTube channel Conversations That Matter and published two books on social justice and Christianity. He…
Abbeville Institute
January 3, 2025
Country Music in the 20th Century Blog

Country Music in the 20th Century

A review of Southern Story and Song: Country Music in the 20th Century (Shotwell, 2024) by Joseph R. Stromberg Readers who have enjoyed the articles posted here at Abbeville by Joseph R. Stromberg will be as excited as I was to learn he’d written a book about country music. This excellent book explores the rich cultural tapestry of Southern music,…
Tom Daniel
December 2, 2024
The Comical Tragedy of “Kumbaya” Blog

The Comical Tragedy of “Kumbaya”

In the Low Country of South Carolina and the coastal regions of Georgia, the Gullah people are everywhere because they never left. Although there were significant numbers of Gullah who migrated out of the South at the turn of the 20th Century, the multitudes who stayed replaced them quickly and remained isolated. Their customs, dress, arts, language, and music still…
Tom Daniel
October 29, 2024
A Rare [Southern] Bird Blog

A Rare [Southern] Bird

“The cabin was quiet..people were in prayer.” –Artimus Pyle On May 30, 1976, along with Aerosmith, Nazareth and Ted Nugent, Lynyrd Skynyrd played for a very large crowd at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C.  My brother Kenny was there and 48 years later still has his ticket stub, a collector’s item now.  In those days, there was a great divide…
J.L. Bennett
October 22, 2024
Rethinking Southern Poetry Blog

Rethinking Southern Poetry

"Works of fiction--novels and poetry--can mean more to a people than all the political manifestos and reports from all the think tanks and foundations ever established by misguided philanthropy." Tom Fleming, 1982 I take this quote seriously. So should anyone interested in the Southern tradition or in a larger sense Western Civilization. Fleming implored his reader to do so, for…
Brion McClanahan
April 16, 2024
The Fasola Fellowship Blog

The Fasola Fellowship

I’m not deaf to the vibrant Country music chatter. Got opinions, but on social media, I made a vow: don't discuss the current thing. Yet, the discourse reminded of something. Donald Davidson was a man of tradition. He liked the old way. Saw a kinship between song meant for singing and verse meant for reading, a stance rare among his…
Chase Steely
April 15, 2024
From Mayberry to Nashville Blog

From Mayberry to Nashville

What do a popular country group and the Vanderbilt Agrarians have in common? West Virginian Arlos Smith penned the song Mayberry for the pop-country group Rascal Flatts. There are striking similarities between the Agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (ITMS) and the song Mayberry, but I couldn’t find any evidence that the work of the Agrarians had any influence on…
Brett Moffatt
November 7, 2023
The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down Blog

The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down

Has Virgil Kane Been Reconstructed? In 1865 George Stoneman was a mediocre Union general leading cavalry behind Confederate lines in Virginia. 100 years later a Canadian rock band made him famous. It took Robbie Robertson more than six months to write the song. He spent time in libraries researching the end of the war. Many say it was an anti-war…
Garrick Sapp
October 18, 2023
A Southern Christmas Sampler Blog

A Southern Christmas Sampler

If you're like my family, you probably start playing Christmas music as soon as the calendar hits November 1, and you keep it on rotation through the 12 Days of Christmas in January. The classics from the Big Band and post World War II era are staples, but most are written for a distinctively Northern audience. Traditional Christian hymns also…
Brion McClanahan
December 15, 2022
Big Bang Blues BlogMedia Posts

Big Bang Blues

Tom Daniel discusses blues music, from the 2022 Abbeville Institute Summer School at Seabrook Island, SC, July 5-8, 2022 https://youtu.be/NZ9_hcxfpLw Note: The views expressed on abbevilleinstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.
Tom Daniel
September 29, 2022
Give Me That Old Time Rebellion Blog

Give Me That Old Time Rebellion

A while back, some of the folks at Abbeville Institute turned out a fine anthology of the greatest Southern rock melodies of the present day. Music, of course, like most everything else, changes with the times and there were other golden eras for country music that gave the listeners of their day a far different sound and put them in…
John Marquardt
September 19, 2022
Elvis Has Left the Building Blog

Elvis Has Left the Building

The Baz Luhrmann Elvis movie is as good as it is frustrating. The movie might serve as a good introduction for those who don't know much about Elvis (which, sadly, is becoming most people). I say it might because it is more than likely that viewers will come away knowing more about Col. Tom Parker, Elvis' manager, than Elvis himself.…
Aaron N. Coleman
June 29, 2022
An Unlikely Prophet: Agrarianism in the Music of Jackson Browne Blog

An Unlikely Prophet: Agrarianism in the Music of Jackson Browne

The flourishing of art is necessary for the preservation of any people or tradition. Over-reliance upon didactic or dialectical methods of communication is trademark of rationalism's withering grip. Artistic expression, whether in architecture, on the canvas, in prose or verse, in works of literature, or in music, possesses the ability to conjure or reinforce the values and traditions of a…
Robert Hoyle
December 6, 2021
What Makes This Musician Great?–The Balfa Brothers Blog

What Makes This Musician Great?–The Balfa Brothers

In a significant departure for this series, the 9th installment of What Makes This Musician Great will focus on a band instead of one musician, and more appropriately, a band of brothers.  The Balfa Brothers were a Cajun band of real-life brothers Rodney, Dewey, Will, Harry, and Burkeman.  They learned music from their father, who was a Louisiana sharecropper, and…
Tom Daniel
September 22, 2021
What Makes This Musician Great?–Carl Perkins Blog

What Makes This Musician Great?–Carl Perkins

In this fifth installment of the series “What Makes This Musician Great,” we will travel back to the cultural hurricane in the early days of Rockabilly music, and celebrate the innovative musical giant known as Carl Perkins. As our society moves further beyond those explosive, tumultuous days of the mid-1950’s, it’s becoming easier to lose focus on everything that was…
Tom Daniel
August 25, 2021
What Makes This Musician Great?–Hank Williams Blog

What Makes This Musician Great?–Hank Williams

This is the second installment of the series ‘What Makes this Musician Great,” and will focus on the man from Butler County, Alabama – Hank Williams.  In this ongoing series, I explain what makes Southern musicians and their music so great and worth remembering while using non-technical language that can hopefully be understood by non-musicians, and this is the perfect…
Tom Daniel
August 4, 2021
What Makes This Musician Great? – Duane Allman Blog

What Makes This Musician Great? – Duane Allman

Recently, I started looking into the connections between musical preferences and personality types.  In the early and middle parts of the 20th century, there were some questionable and unfortunate attempts in the world of substance abuse treatment facilities to use an addict’s musical preferences to predict his personality type and subsequent treatment options.  They tried to correlate musical preferences such…
Tom Daniel
July 27, 2021
Academy of Southern Music Blog

Academy of Southern Music

My name is Tom Daniel, and I’m a happy guy.  I’m naturally optimistic, and I love talking about all the good things that come from the South.  I get discouraged when I see Southerners who keep falling into that same trap where they only want to talk about the years 1861-1865.  When there are 400 years of Southern culture to…
Tom Daniel
June 1, 2021
Carry Me Back to Old Virginny Blog

Carry Me Back to Old Virginny

In the early 1870s, a young pre-law student at Howard College was inspired by classmate and future wife, Mamie Friend. James Alan Bland would listen to the homesick sentiments of Mamie and her home in tidewater Virginia. During a trip to meet Ms. Friend’s family the two sat down together with pen, paper, and a banjo. Bland composed his song…
James W. Whitehead V
May 11, 2021
Cajun Music Blog

Cajun Music

If these were normal times, we’d all be unpacking our Mardi Gras gear right about now.  Purple, yellow, and green would be everywhere, and I would be writing about how the first (and oldest) Mardi Gras in North America was in Mobile, Alabama, and not New Orleans.  But things went a little haywire recently, and Mardi Gras got canceled.  However,…
Tom Daniel
February 16, 2021
Hillbilly Thomists Blog

Hillbilly Thomists

What would you give in exchange for your soul? Bluegrass greats Bill Monroe and Doc Watson asked that question in one of their most memorable live recordings. It’s also the same one posed by Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., on one of the tracks of the first album released by the Hillbilly Thomists, a bluegrass band of Dominican friars from…
Casey Chalk
February 8, 2021
Rock ‘n Roll has a Southern Accent Blog

Rock ‘n Roll has a Southern Accent

Rock ‘n Roll may be the most significant cultural export in American history.  There is no doubt that American culture, for good and bad, has had an enormous impact on global culture, and Rock ‘n Roll is one of our most iconic contributions.  Around the world, people don’t hear Rock ‘n Roll and think of Switzerland or Brazil or Thailand. …
Tom Daniel
January 27, 2021
Appalachian Music and the Phonograph Blog

Appalachian Music and the Phonograph

In the late 19th century, Romantic composers were driven by nationalism as a means to advance their art.  For example, Russian composers like Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov made their composed music sound Russian, and the only way to do this was to become immersed in Russian folk music to see what made it tick.  They studied work songs, play songs,…
Tom Daniel
December 4, 2020
How to Listen to Jazz Blog

How to Listen to Jazz

When you hear the word “jazz,” what type of music pops into your head?  What do you hear?  You probably hear piano, brass, saxophone, or all of the above.  But do you hear it melodious and catchy, or do you hear it jumbled and chaotic?  There’s a lot of jazz out there that’s very melodious and catchy, and extremely easy…
Tom Daniel
November 27, 2020
Damn Right You Should Listen to the Blues Blog

Damn Right You Should Listen to the Blues

“The blues ain’t nothin’ but a good man feelin’ bad,” according to “Negro Blues,” penned in 1913. There’s no question about the “feelin’ bad” part. The genre is defined by its twelve-bar tune with the distinctive flatted third and seventh notes on the major scale (producing the “blue” note) coupled with lyrics of misery, injustice, and even sometimes self-loathing. One…
Casey Chalk
September 9, 2020
The Colored Sacred Harp Blog

The Colored Sacred Harp

I have written here before about the history and mechanics of Sacred Harp singing, shape-notes, and Singing Schools.  James Kibler has delivered some truly excellent talks about Singing Billy Walker and the origins of Amazing Grace as an original tune called New Britain in Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, and I strongly urge you to listen to his presentations.  Listen…
Tom Daniel
July 29, 2020
Southern Rock for the Apocalypse, Dixie Version Blog

Southern Rock for the Apocalypse, Dixie Version

The Orwellian nightmare known as 2020 continues. Not only are Confederate monuments and symbols under attack, seemingly benign references to anything Southern are now considered "racist." Real estate listings that use the term "master bedroom" are being changed because the term is a reference to slavery, as does the word "plantation." The State of Rhode Island is considering changing its…
Brion McClanahan
July 3, 2020
Southern Rock for the Apocalypse, Part VI Blog

Southern Rock for the Apocalypse, Part VI

Hot 'Lanta - Allman Brothers Band https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWSoo3bLhIc The typical standard jazz composition that would be played by Miles Davis or John Coltrane is exactly the same type of composition as “Hot ‘Lanta.”  It begins with the melody (which is repeated), moves into a section where everyone takes turns improvising (Duane Allman melts off your face), and then concludes with a…
Tom Daniel
May 15, 2020
A Southerner’s Movie Guide, Part X Blog

A Southerner’s Movie Guide, Part X

12.   Southerners in the Late 19th  and Early  20th Centuries **The Yearling (1946).  This is an all-time favourite about family life on the Florida frontier and a troublesome pet deer.  Seldom noticed is that the father, Gregory Peck, is a former Confederate soldier.  The film is based on the novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.  Another fine Rawlings book about her…
Clyde Wilson
February 20, 2020
Not Just Whistling Dixie Blog

Not Just Whistling Dixie

There are few Southern hearts that still fail to skip a beat or two when a military band strikes up “Dixie,” the de facto national anthem of the Confederacy and the song that has undoubtedly become the one most closely associated with the antebellum South.  This, however, was not the case with the creator of that iconic tune, Daniel Emmett,…
John Marquardt
December 13, 2019
The Steel Woods Blog

The Steel Woods

There’s a Southern accentWhere I come from.The young un’s call it country,And the Yankees call it dumb.                      Tom Petty, "Southern Accents" (Covered by The Steel Woods) Southern rock and "outlaw country" are experiencing a renaissance of late. Undoubtedly influenced by the rash of bubble gum pop country from Nashville, this darker and more authentic working class music speaks to Americans…
Brion McClanahan
December 11, 2019
Front Porch Braggin’ Rights Blog

Front Porch Braggin’ Rights

My new neighbor Ozzie, who grew up in the Bronx, thinks that the South is a place “without much culture.”  Ozzie acts as if he is an expert on the subject, even though his Southern experience has been confined to living in the D.C. suburbs for a few years before retiring out here to the Blue Ridge Mountains last year.…
Ben Jones
December 9, 2019
A Love of Place Blog

A Love of Place

Southerners love home. This is true of many people throughout history, but place has, in part, defined the South. The earliest settlers to what became the South championed its Utopian physical qualities: warm weather, a long growing season, bountiful plant and animal life. Bad weather, disease carrying insects, and dangerous wildlife were annoyances to be tolerated if not overcome. Southern…
Brion McClanahan
September 20, 2019
The Land of Lincoln Bans Confederate Railroad Blog

The Land of Lincoln Bans Confederate Railroad

Illinois’ Governor J.B. Pritzer has banned the Southern rock band Confederate Railroad from the Illinois State Fair because of the band’s name and Confederate flag on their logo. He said that the administration bars using resources to promote symbols of racism. Well, kiss my grits. Let’s look at the state fair’s “Land of Lincoln.” “The land of Lincoln” is the…
Paul H. Yarbrough
July 17, 2019
An Okie From Muskogee Blog

An Okie From Muskogee

As someone who grew up during the decade of the 1960’s, I am paying attention when I hear those on the Left talking of the events which took place 50 years ago. I was born in Dallas, Texas, but my family moved to Fairfax County, Virginia, when I was four. I lived in Northern Virginia during that decade. At the…
Timothy A. Duskin
July 8, 2019
Scotch Snaps and Southern Music Blog

Scotch Snaps and Southern Music

I need to tell you one story in order to tell you another. The Czechoslovakian composer Antonin Dvorak moved to the United States in 1892, and immersed himself in American music while composing his New World Symphony.  Although he was fascinated, inspired, and moved by traditional Southern folk music, Dvorak complained that he simply couldn’t tell the difference between Scottish…
Tom Daniel
March 22, 2019
Southern Music is American Music Blog

Southern Music is American Music

Why do Southerners continue to fall into that trap where we only talk about the years1861-1865?  There are almost 400 years of Southern culture to talk about, yet we keep limiting ourselves to just four of them.  And it doesn’t matter how much of an expert someone becomes about Fredericksburg, Yankees will always have that same ace-in-the-hole comeback, “You lost.” But…
Tom Daniel
December 14, 2018
The King and the Fool Blog

The King and the Fool

The King of Rock and Roll brought himself up by his bootstraps, served Uncle Sam as a soldier and before his early demise came he had made an honest fortune for himself and many others. For that, he is belittled by those who hardly knew him. “A little nod to the good old days, back when black visionaries could invent…
Paul H. Yarbrough
November 30, 2018
End of an Era Blog

End of an Era

I was saddened to hear that Phil Harris had died. I knew the man. You might say we were old friends. As a matter of fact, we first met in 1954 in Monterey, California. I was attending the Army Language School, learning Russian, and Phil was playing in the Bing Crosby Pro-Am tournament. His professional partner was Dutch Harrison, a…
Thomas Landess
August 17, 2018
The Southern Muse of Ronnie Van Zant Blog

The Southern Muse of Ronnie Van Zant

The 1970’s were an interesting time in the South. The 1970's were the last time Southerners could be Southern without feeling the need to apologize for, or be ironic about, their Southern identity. In fact, in the 1970's, it seemed to actually go a little beyond this. We shouldn’t push this too far, but in 1970’s America there seemed to…
Jeff Rogers
August 13, 2018
Lead Belly’s Southern Roots Blog

Lead Belly’s Southern Roots

Sometime around 1939, Lead Belly sang the song Daddy I’m Coming Back to You, which features the interesting lyrics: “I’m dreaming tonight of an old Southern town, the best friend I ever had...I’ve had my way, but now I’ll stay, I long for you and for home.” The song was a tribute to Jimmie Rodgers, who is often considered one…
Michael Martin
August 3, 2018
The Attack on “Dixie” in Sports and Music Blog

The Attack on “Dixie” in Sports and Music

Sound was the first victim of the attack on southern heritage. In October 1971, the University of Georgia’s “Dixie Redcoat Marching Band”  dropped the word “Dixie” from its name and discontinued playing the song “Dixie” after the National Anthem. Many people, even to this day, will argue that “Dixie” was played and perpetuated to uphold white supremacy. But the tradition…
Michael Martin
June 22, 2018
Rock and Roll Civil War Review Posts

Rock and Roll Civil War

When you think of America’s so-called “Civil War”, rock music may not be one of the first things that come to mind. However, as one of the most deadly wars in American history, with Missouri being the 3rd bloodiest of all the states (in terms of war-related deaths and human rights atrocities), the War Between the States continues to resonate…
Matthew Silber
June 19, 2018
The Marseillaise of the South Plays On, For Now Blog

The Marseillaise of the South Plays On, For Now

As the 2018 legislative session was winding down in Annapolis, the Senate passed a bill retiring the Old Line State’s Confederate call to arms, but that bill was to die in committee in the House of Delegates. So, once again, though “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” has been archived, “My Old Kentucky Home,” “updated,” “Maryland! My Maryland!”—some would say…
J.L. Bennett
April 19, 2018
30 Years From Hank Williams Blog

30 Years From Hank Williams

This piece was originally printed in Southern Partisan magazine in 1985. Hank Williams has now been dead longer than he lived. And outside of a hundred or more fine songs, his thrity-year-old memory survives best among some of his cousins down in Georgiana, Alabama, about sixty miles south of Montgomery. Among them are Taft and Erleen Skipper (Taft’s daddy and…
Bill Koon
March 28, 2018
Sacred Harp Singing Blog

Sacred Harp Singing

If I was forced to give an example of at least one good thing we got out of the Puritans, I would quickly point to Sacred Harp singing.  Sacred Harp is a traditional, primitive method of church singing still favored in the Deep South, and it even comes complete with several different annual conventions.  Brion McClanahan and others have written…
Tom Daniel
March 12, 2018
In the Eye of the Beholder Blog

In the Eye of the Beholder

Once upon a time in America, in a far different and far more gentle age, it was possible for four young men from Memphis, Tennessee, to appear at a performance in a Northern city dressed as Confederate officers and sing a song entitled “Save Your Confederate Money Boys, the South Shall Rise Again” without being booed off the stage. Not…
John Marquardt
February 5, 2018
The Sense of “Southernizing” Blog

The Sense of “Southernizing”

For as long as people have been writing about Southern character—and that's getting to be a pretty long time now—they've been inclined to mention Southern individualism. From Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Mar­quis de Chastellux to Charlie Daniels' "Long-haired Coun­try Boy," Southerners have been inclined to mention or exemplify this trait themselves. W.J. Cash has probably discussed it most thoroughly,…
John Shelton Reed
March 3, 2017
Charlie Daniels and the CDB Blog

Charlie Daniels and the CDB

Charlie Daniels turns 80 today. He is still producing top quality music and is still an iconic symbol of the South and the Southern musical tradition. Most people are familiar with his hits--"The South's Gonna Do It Again," "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," and "Long Haired Country Boy"--but these tunes are a conspicuous though minimal part of a career that spans five…
Brion McClanahan
October 28, 2016
Deep Down in the South Blog

Deep Down in the South

The late 1970s represented the heyday of popular Southern music. Southern rock and "outlaw country" dominated the airwaves. It was chic to say "ya'll," even in Boston, and with the election of Jimmy Carter, it really seemed the "South was gonna' do it again." It wouldn't last. During an interview at Capricorn Studios in Macon, GA one afternoon, Charlie Daniels spit into his cup and…
Brion McClanahan
September 16, 2016
Southern Family Blog

Southern Family

What makes the South, the South?  Most modern Americans would say football and grits sprinkled with a bit of country music and NASCAR. These clichés hold true for many Southerners today, but what made the South before the commercialization of the American economy was a commitment to land, family, and God.  It was both a temporal and a spiritual understanding…
Brion McClanahan
May 23, 2016
American Music Is Southern Music Blog

American Music Is Southern Music

“American Idol,” a reality-based music singing competition on the Fox Network, has come to an end, and Yankees everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief, as their long, national nightmare is finally over.  Yankees haven’t been whipped this badly since Fredericksburg, and it’s a miracle they allowed the American Idol carnage to continue on as long as it did.  All…
Tom Daniel
April 11, 2016
A Rural Southern Easter Blog

A Rural Southern Easter

Benjamin Franklin White, born 1800 in South Carolina, was a Southern music pioneer. His collection of hymns titled The Sacred Harp, published in 1844, was based on shape note singing and became the standard hymnal in the South. Shape note music first appeared in 1801 and quickly spread through the rural Southern congregationalist communities. The music is performed a cappella…
Brion McClanahan
March 25, 2016
Stapleton Blog

Stapleton

Chris Stapleton is now a household name.  This should have happened a long time ago.  After cleaning up at the Country Music Awards, Stapleton showcased his outstanding voice in a duet with Justin Timberlake.  He stole the show, both in hardware and in talent. In no time, his debut country music album, Traveller, rocketed up the charts.  As I write…
Brion McClanahan
November 27, 2015
Modern Bards and Traditional Songs Blog

Modern Bards and Traditional Songs

Southern contributions to American music are so abundant that they can be considered as the bedrock of most all music as we know it today. From Appalachian hill music, Gospel and Blues (both Country and Urban), was birthed Country, Rockabilly, Pop, Motown, Rock and Roll and Southern Rock. All great American music has its roots in the Southern tradition. But,…
Carl Jones
March 24, 2015
Travis Tritt Flies His Red Flag Blog

Travis Tritt Flies His Red Flag

Country music singer Travis Tritt recently tweeted a controversial comment in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shooting. The tweet was in support of gun owners but at the same time took an implicit swipe at Muslims and the liberal media. The tweet has generated the predictable outrage, but also a lot of supportive replies. It is interesting that we…
Dan E. Phillips
January 16, 2015
It’s In The Mud Blog

It’s In The Mud

I have written before here at Abbeville about the legendary music that came out of the Muscle Shoals area in the 60’s and 70’s, and that was before I’d seen the excellent new 2013 documentary film called Muscle Shoals. The film centers mostly on Rick Hall, the founder of FAME Studios, and his influence on everything that happened locally and…
Tom Daniel
November 26, 2014
Twenty Million Gone: The Southern Diaspora, 1900—1970 Review Posts

Twenty Million Gone: The Southern Diaspora, 1900—1970

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yKesnaFYUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DkcQ09h2Vo That is Bobby Bare on Detroit and Dwight Yoakam on Los Angeles. Sometimes there are significant movements in history that go unnoticed because they take place slowly over a long period of time and are marked by no major event. The Southern Diaspora of the 20th century is such a movement. Twelve million white and eight million black…
Clyde Wilson
November 10, 2014
The Beatles vs Alabama Blog

The Beatles vs Alabama

On April 4, 1964, The Beatles achieved American chart success that will almost certainly never be duplicated. Only 15 artists have ever held on to the #1 and #2 spots in the Billboard Hot 100 at the same time, but that week, The Beatles topped everybody by holding on to #1, #2, and #3 all at the same time. But…
Tom Daniel
July 7, 2014
Whistlin’ Dixie Loud Enough to Brag Blog

Whistlin’ Dixie Loud Enough to Brag

Many music fans believe Southern rock died in 1977 when Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane crashed in the Mississippi woods. Certainly, there were Southern bands that had some commercial success afterward—Molly Hatchet, .38 Special, Charlie Daniels, Hank Williams, Jr.—but the Southern sound quickly disappeared from mainstream rock music and was replaced by the pop-driven scene out of Los Angeles and New York.…
Brion McClanahan
May 30, 2014
Whistlin’ Dixie Loud Enough to Brag Blog

Whistlin’ Dixie Loud Enough to Brag

Many music fans believe Southern rock died in 1977 when Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane crashed in the Mississippi woods. Certainly, there were Southern bands that had some commercial success afterward—Molly Hatchet, .38 Special, Charlie Daniels, Hank Williams, Jr.—but the Southern sound quickly disappeared from mainstream rock music and was replaced by the pop-driven scene out of Los Angeles and New York.…
Brion McClanahan
May 30, 2014
A Little Banjo Pickin’ Blog

A Little Banjo Pickin’

Excerpted from “The Banjo Entertainers, Roots to Ragtime, A Banjo History,” by Lowell H. Schreyer, Minnesota Heritage Publishing, 2007, pages 5-36. The James River valley of Virginia was a locale of banjo activity in the early 1800s. That river led to the city of Lynchburg. Only 25 miles away was the Clover Hill community in Buckingham County, part of which…
Lowell H. Schreyer
May 21, 2014
A Little Banjo Pickin’ Blog

A Little Banjo Pickin’

Excerpted from “The Banjo Entertainers, Roots to Ragtime, A Banjo History,” by Lowell H. Schreyer, Minnesota Heritage Publishing, 2007, pages 5-36. The James River valley of Virginia was a locale of banjo activity in the early 1800s. That river led to the city of Lynchburg. Only 25 miles away was the Clover Hill community in Buckingham County, part of which…
Lowell H. Schreyer
May 21, 2014
The Lyrics or Melody in Southern Music? Blog

The Lyrics or Melody in Southern Music?

About ten years ago, one of my colleagues suggested to me that Americans listen to music differently than people from around the globe. According to his way of thinking, Americans favor lyrics and beat exclusively to all other aspects of music, and ignore things like harmonic structure (what some people might call chord changes), melody, dynamics, instrumentation, song-form structure (verses,…
Tom Daniel
May 19, 2014
The Lyrics or Melody in Southern Music? Blog

The Lyrics or Melody in Southern Music?

About ten years ago, one of my colleagues suggested to me that Americans listen to music differently than people from around the globe. According to his way of thinking, Americans favor lyrics and beat exclusively to all other aspects of music, and ignore things like harmonic structure (what some people might call chord changes), melody, dynamics, instrumentation, song-form structure (verses,…
Tom Daniel
May 19, 2014
American Idol Blog

American Idol

We Southerners know a little bit about music. “American Idol,” for those who haven’t watched, is a reality-based music singing competition on the Fox Network. The very nature of what anybody would call “American music” is the definition of a blending of diverse American sub-cultures into one representative “sound,” and that alone is the definition of growing up Southern. The…
Tom Daniel
April 8, 2014