Rivers flood broad expanses of the Southern imagination. The mythic Mississippi rolls through literature, our watery national spine, by turns torpid and apocalyptic. But there are countless intimate tributaries and every Southerner knows one. Flowing water provides blessed relief in summer, spiritual cleansing...

"... common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."
- Vladimir Nabokov

The ghosts are there, when we can bear to look. We inhabit the past, or, more properly, the past inhabits us. It's the only dimension...

"Ballads lead their life in the mouths and ears of men by hear-say like bluebirds and flickers in the nest of hollow trees." - Robert Frost

Ballads are consequential music. Something happens, often something dark or violent, and effects are felt....

Dini Lamot stepped to the microphone early in Saturday night's Human Sexual Response reunion show and declared that he had met his husband, fellow Humans singer Windle Davis, at that very location 38 years ago. He shouted thanks to New York and...

If you could conjure a future past, a time both technologically advanced and bucolic, would passionate data shepherds still prove digitally-rendered pleasures of valleys, groves, hills and fields while gamboling on beds of roses? You may fetch up on such a golden shore while lost in Wild, the new release...

You might encounter Jesus here and there. Invoked from the pulpit or Facebook. In pro forma political pieties. Credited or blamed for events big and small. You probably didn't encounter him in a roughneck Motel 6 as you were poised to fall into...

Sydney Wayser and I spoke periodically over the past two years about what kind of record she would make next. Her third release needed to be a clear step forward, a departure. I knew what record I wanted to hear: focus on your voice, I said, a supple instrument that...

Let's agree that most YouTube videos of cover songs by high school students are meant to entertain a small circle of friends and earn derisive snorts much beyond the school grounds. Few are so pure in intention and strikingly beautiful in execution that they...

There's a warm welcome in the sound of acoustic guitars. Resonant, woody and mellow like a fire in the grate after an autumn walk in the country, colored by the inflections of fingers and picks, strings and slides. So close...

Over the last few days, I've read -- watched, listened and read -- "Piano Demon," the fascinating story of nearly-forgotten 1930s jazz pianist Teddy Weatherford as it unfolded on my iPad. In a pre-release version of The Atavist, I've glimpsed how we'll read as smart mobile devices become even...

Though it produced a body of work kaleidoscopic in its variety and intersecting interests, the search for answers to deceptively simple questions drove Alan Lomax to wander America and eventually the world: "Why do people sing? Why do they dance?"

A new Lomax biography follows his journey...

I once followed Metallica through a coliseum's fluorescent underground maze to a pitch-black stage. When the lights ignited, the crowd unleashed a roar like the tailpipe of a fighter jet. The band responded with fusillades of drums and screaming guitars. The players -- thoughtful, even gentle, over pre-show...

Though they were the books of the summer, Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad share the dying-light chill of autumn, uneasy reminders that the honey of nostalgia soon ferments into the vinegar of regret. Both deploy central characters who make, promote, or obsess about...