Southern Songs and Stories

Imagine getting your dream job and immediately being scrutinized for your appearance; being asked to wear a wig that was nothing like your natural hair; being quizzed on obscure bits of the history o…

 It is easy to think of musical genres as enduring, definitive territories that are discovered as much as they are created. But even continents drift, and when you dig deep into the careers of artist…

At Southern Songs and Stories, we have become fans of the WUNC - North Carolina Public Radio podcast The Broadside, and here we collaborate to give you a special presentation of one their recent epis…

When was the last time you picked up a book or a magazine instead of going to your smart phone or computer to read about music? I admit that, like so many of us these days, my first instinct is to sc…

Shinyribs is an Austin Texas band that began in 2007 as a side project for Kevin Russell, who also goes by Kev, and was then still committed to The Gourds, the band he had co-founded fifteen years ea…

Credit Halloween coming up for this.

You probably know that this podcast has a direct tie to public radio station WNCW — it is produced in studio there where I am program director — but its origin ca…

For Jonathan Wilson and Bella White, family figures prominently not only in their lives behind the scenes, but also in the musical paths both chose early on. It should come as no surprise that as a b…

Over the four days of the 2023 Earl Scruggs Music Festival, held at the Tryon International Equestrian Center over Labor Day weekend, I was alternately emceeing performances, working with WNCW staff,…

Sometimes people have a determination and intensity that is not obvious at first. In our conversation after her performance last August at the Reeves Theater in Elkin, NC, Cristina Vane said, “I'm no…

Ed Snodderly is a renaissance man -- he is a prolific songwriter with a who’s who of artists performing his compositions; his lyrics to the song "The Diamond Stream" are featured in Nashville’s Count…

As Carl Sandburg said in his poem “Washington Monument by Night”, "Nothing happens unless first we dream." In the case of Miko Marks, her music career took off only after she had a literal dream, whe…

In this series, we often spend time with artists and styles of music that are not celebrated in the mainstream, and our guest here is no exception. With a focus on music that is from artists living i…

It is that time of year again -- the beginning of summer and in the U.S., Independence Day. The July 4th holiday is celebrated in many ways, including in song, like the one that starts off this podca…

This story begins with Citizen Vinyl, a combination vinyl pressing plant, recording studio, bar and restaurant in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, in the old Citizen-Times building. Built in the l…

It was a warm and picturesque spring day in the South Carolina countryside, just outside of the city of Greer, on the grounds of the Albino Skunk Music Festival, which got its name from some white sk…

We talked for an hour and a half and could have easily talked for much longer, although even in this relatively short time, it felt like our conversation was far greater than the time it occupied, al…

Hello and welcome to Southern Songs and Stories, with a favorite episode from 2021 here on this re-podcast of The Country Heart and Jazz Mind of Sierra Ferrell, published in late July of that year. S…

They call it “Klezgrass”. Taking equal parts bluegrass and klezmer, husband and wife duo Zoe & Cloyd use fusion as their north star to guide their musical direction on their latest collection Songs O…

To be honest, I had never considered The Get Right Band to be psychedelic, and before hearing their album iTopia, had thought of them more as a kind of power pop group. But when I started diving in, …

Half a century ago, one of the first all-female bluegrass bands gave us the genre’s first album played exclusively by women; their banjo player’s mother was embarrassed about her daughter’s choice of…