TweetThe following roundtable discussion was published in Option magazine 25 years ago. The points made by James Bernard, editor of hip-hop magazine The Source; Lee Ballinger, editor of Rock & Roll Confidential; myself (I was editor of Option at the time), and several others are as relevant today as they were a quarter-century ago. I…
TweetIf you don’t think race played a role in the banning of Invisible Man from a rural county school system in piedmont North Carolina, you haven’t listened to the nuances in the reasoning of the men who chose to censor the Ralph Ellison classic. On Wednesday, after outrage over the Randolph County Board of Education’s…
TweetThose words come from the late Phil Walden, one-time manager of the southern soul singer Otis Redding and southern blues-rock band The Allman Brothers. It was an unexpected observation Walden made to me about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during an interview a decade ago for my book, Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music,…