Southern Songs and Stories

It would be very easy to think that rap and hip hop have little if anything in common with music like bluegrass and old time. After all, we have been led to believe that these styles of music come fr…

The Po’ Ramblin’ Boys’ C.J. Lewandowski sat with us at the International Bluegrass Music Association conference and festival in Raleigh, North Carolina in early Fall, 2022, and our conversation touch…

Sierra Hull won her fourth award for Mandolin Player Of The Year at the IBMA conference in fall of 2022, a feat that would not have been within her grasp in the not-too-distant past. Now, women like…

For his 99th birth anniversary, WNCW honored the late great Earl Scruggs by sharing portions of interviews with artists who knew him, broadcasting stories ranging from brief encounters in young adult…

2022 was a very good year for Charley Crockett. It was another prolific period for the Texan artist, who is mostly known as a country musician, although the breadth and depth of his music cannot be g…

2022 has been a year of firsts at Southern Songs and Stories. Beginning with our first guest host, WNCW’s Corrie Askew took stock of her favorite episodes of this series in the previous year. We went…

When you think about the history of the banjo, its modern context seems ironic in that so many people who enjoy banjo music are unaware of its origin story and any other context than bluegrass and ol…

This one is for all the late bloomers. For anyone that went all in on their passion as an adult rather than a youth (or hopes to still), you will find a kindred spirit in Barrett Davis, who in his la…

It is easy to think of someone who has incredible talents and intellect as unapproachable, like they exist on some other plane of reality. If it were a question of bona fides, I would have some doubt…

As a lifelong Southerner, and a mostly small-town Southerner all these years, I can understand when people want to get out of their small, Southern town in favor of a city with more people of like mi…

For a place as remote as Ashe County, NC, you could be forgiven for overlooking it as a wellspring for musical talent. But music seems to flow naturally out of the Appalachian mountains in and around…

Years ago, when the tenth anniversary of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack was the topic on my WNCW talk show What It Is, writer and editor Kim Ruehl remarked that the movie made an indelibl…

Back in 2018, we dove into the history of a beloved venue that was its own cultural phenomenon over a span of nearly four decades. It was a sprawling, quirky, at times surprising and almost always jo…

As nineteenth century US senator Daniel Webster said, “When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of human civilization.” In the case of Darrell Scott, he mastered…

Do you love live music? This episode is for you! After taking in a number of shows after a bit of a lull, I was energized, engaged, and excited. It got me thinking about telling the story of not only…

Music artists often face a difficult choice: do I make songs that people likely expect me to make, or do I go in a new direction? Artists who are successful become associated with the style of music …

Time travel is real. Not in the science fiction sense of the term, but you really can travel back in time by simply going to Galax, Virginia and seeing Dori Freeman play music with her husband Nichol…

How long is the average lifespan for a band? That could be hard to pin down, but it is surely a lot shorter than the time we have witnessed Old Crow Medicine Show do their thing. Starting out as stri…

Music is a lot like a blueberry bush. Especially blues music, since blueberries are among a handful of fruits native to North America, just as blues is a native art form. With a blueberry bush, you g…

Discovering something unusual or unexpected is one of the constant rewards of conversation with artists. In the case of Jamestown Revival, there was the revelation that Jonathan Clay is a real deal r…