Leaving Eden tells the story of countless small towns across the South since the days of slavery.
Yoko Ono: She Who Laughs Last
It’s been said that falling in love with John Lennon was the worst career move that Yoko Ono could have made.
Adrienne Nixon Basco Knows Why the Free Bird Sings
“It was difficult to get them to believe in me … I mean, Southern rock is by nature a very white, very male-dominated genre.”
Remembering Michael Jackson
Tweet A decade ago this year, Michael Jackson died. Two days after his death on June 25, 2009, I wrote the following tribute for The […]
A Mother’s Wisdom: ‘You Can Do Whatever You Want To do’
TweetI wrote the following tribute to my mother, Joan Carlton Kemp, for a Charlotte, North Carolina, publication on February 18, 2018, the morning after she […]
‘Antifolk’ injects punk’s energy into Woody Guthrie’s protest tradition
Tweet In the mid-1980s a ragtag groiup of folk musicians led by the one-named singer-songwriter Lach, along with Roger Manning, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Kirk Kelly, […]
RIP ‘The Village Voice’: My Life in the Ailing World of Alt-Weeklies
TweetWHEN I WAS laid off from my job as editor-in-chief of the North Carolina alt-weekly Creative Loafing Charlotte in 2013, my staff had just wrapped up an […]
‘To Live Without You Would Only Mean Heartbreak’: Aretha Franklin, 1942-2018
TweetChildhood memory: I’m ten years old and sitting on the living room floor of my family’s home in the early 1970s, vinyl albums and 45s […]
R.I.P. Grant Hart: On Sugar Lake with Hüsker Dü
TweetI was lying on a raft in the cool, crystal blue waters of Sugar Lake, a rock quarry near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, beer in […]
Name That Tune: The Embattled Art of Sampling
Tweet In 1989, the legal and artistic implications of digital sampling in hip-hop were reaching a boiling point. Old-school rockers called it “stealing,” forgetting that […]