"After Chicago we played Miami again, and some one-nighters in northern Florida and Georgia, with a two-night stand at the famous Royal Peacock Club on Auburn Street in Atlanta..." --Don Nix Don Nix’s book Road Stories And Recipes contains personal music experiences...
“The Queen rolled through my life as I recorded albums and played tours. She was there with me when we opened the Roxy in LA with our premiere performance of Tonight’s the Night. She took me between the ranch and my home in Malibu as I flew back and forth on my beloved Pacific Coast Highway, avoiding constricted and impersonal air travel. The Black Queen, one of my all-time favorites, will always be with me, after being such an integral pasrt of my life and writing in the 1970s.”
“I don’t play nothing but stone blues.”
Macon, Georgia, native Tina McElroy Ansa published her second novel, Ugly Ways, in 1993. Ansa ranks as an influential novelist, teacher, filmmaker and journalist who lives in my hometown on the Georgia coast. Ugly Ways tells the story of three sisters–Betty, Emily and...
By James Calemine This 2007 Coen Brothers film was adapted from the Pulitzer-Prize winning author Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 book, No Country For Old Men. For the most part, Joel & Ethan Coen adhere to the book’s dialogue, characters and plot. When an interviewer...
Released in 1971, Straight From The Heart counts as Ann Peebles' third album. Produced by Hi Records legend Willie Mitchell Straight From The Heart generated four hits. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Peebles began singing in the church with her family when she was...
The genius of More Dirty Laundry: the Soul of Black Country resides in defying musical prejudices.
By James Calemine Born during 1947, in West Memphis, Arkansas, Shirley Brown’s first single–“Woman to Woman”–sold a million copies in eight weeks. Brown sang in the church as a child. At 14, her luminous voice caught the attention of bluesman Albert King. The Concord...
“I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place,–a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of nature.” –Henry David Thoreau In Janisse Ray’s Drifting into Darien: A...
By James Calemine Albert King never tolerated nonsense. His guitar-playing captured the essence of his personality. He played a right-handed guitar upside down, but he was left-handed. King carried a loaded .45 pistol with him in the studio. He stands as one of...