T he cookbook I’ve owned the longest is Most Cherished Recipes, a slim volume with a yellow paper cover and that mid-century brown plastic ring binding. The book is credited to the Altheimer-Wabbaseka ...

A hint of blue on the horizon meant morning was coming. And as they have for the past fifty-four years, Audrey and Gary Revell stepped out their screen door, walked down a ramp, and climbed into their ...

P apa Horace smoked Pall Malls. He cradled each cigarette between two fingers with the sort of nonchalance that comes from a six-decade habit. I can still hear the fire crackle within the white paper ...

H er cabin is shrouded in darkness, all quiet save the soft snores of her children snuggled tightly together in their bed. She wakes and dresses for the day, creeping gently across the wood floor, ...

T he Reivers came into my life in June 1986, in a summer that fell for me between the sixth and seventh grades. That month was a musical flashpoint, thanks to a box of records my older brother brought ...

T he cover for the 1973 album Nutbush City Limits offers a visual representation of the Southern roots and the movement to other parts of the country that are crucial to the biographies of Ike and ...

I spent my childhood in the country about fifteen miles north of Knoxville, Tennessee. The center of our little community was Harbison Crossroads, on one corner a gas station and the other the IGA, ...

I saw Fried Green Tomatoes when I was twenty-nine and dating Alex, the first woman who was not a secret to my family and friends. I had never read the 1987 novel, nor seen the movie, though Alex was ...

O n a warm Wednesday in August, the crowded patio of the Old Marshall Jail Hotel in Marshall, North Carolina, falls silent as seventh-generation ballad performer Sheila Kay Adams begins to sing. Her ...

I t’s the evening of February 20, 1954, and Aaron Copland takes the stage at Columbia University’s McMillin Theatre (now Miller Theatre) before a crowd of nearly nine hundred concertgoers. He’s here ...

T hree springs ago, standing on top of a small wooden stage behind the Austin Chronicle offices, I read a letter written by Nanci Griffith. On the lawn between me and my place of employment, invited ...

“W e have to contain, constrain, and ‘jail’ them every weekend, because they all want to go back home, to somewhere in Appalachia.” That, according to Loyal Jones—the founder of the Appalachian Center ...