Rocky Mount, N.C. native Thelonious Monk looks out from the cover of the Oxford American's 9th annual Southern Music Issue. It's rich, as always. You might think that by now the OxAm folks would be running out of worthy Southern, or at least Southern connected, musicians to profile, but that's happily not the case. (Though in a bunch of instances, they sort of cheat, such as with Betty Davis, Dan Hicks and Van Dyke Parks, profile subjects who spent a hot minute living below the Mason Dixon line, then headed north.)
Along with Monk, there are some big names featured: Sean Wilentz writes about the making of Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde in Nashville in 1966 and Holly Gleason explores what's going on underneath Hollywood country boy Dwight Yoakam's hat. But the real pleasures are in the obscurities and discoveries, and the 26 song CD that comes with the magazine. You hear Fred Neil's spooky, soulful "Little Bit Of Rain" and then you turn to Mike Powell's pieced together story of the guy who wrote "Everybody's Talkin'" and of whom Dylan once said "You couldn't touch him, everything revolved around him," and who was, Powell writes, "at best an antihero, and at worst the kind of story people don't bother to tell."
Those stories are included here, though, about the great '50s doo-wop group The Clovers and Teddy Grace, a Louisiana white girl all but lost to history - until now - who you would be forgiven for mistaking for Billie Holiday on first listen. (She's pictured with the Mal Hallett Orchestra in 1934 in Atlantic City before a huge crowd inside what looks like Boardwalk Hall.)
And among the very best is a piece by Inquirer reviewer Steve Klinge, who wrestles with the legacy of Southern soul-pop singer Sandy Posey, who was known best for the 1966 almost-masochistic hit "Born A Woman" (later somewhat perversely covered by Nick Lowe), and who Klinge calls "one of the least emancipated female voices of the mid-60s."
Check it out online here, and do yourself a favor and pick it up.
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