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 The Oxford American's 2007 Music Issue
Why on Earth a Wisconsinite would pick up a copy of the Oxford American is not entirely clear. OA is a quarterly review of the finest of Southern writing: The Atlantic Monthly for Atlanta, if you will, featuring fiction, essays, opinion, reviews and photography. It's a stretch to consider this relevant to life and culture in Madison, Wisconsin, nearly 800 miles away from OA headquarters in Conway, Arkansas, but as someone intrigued by the vague notion of "Southern culture," I took the dive. (A magazine whose operations have been interrupted and relocated several times, OA started in Oxford, Mississippi, hence the O.)
Luckily, OA prepares its issues for export. Unlike less accessible regional mags (Garden & Gun comes to mind, another oddity for a coffee table in Big Ten country), OA diligently publishes regional stories written in universal language. Their "Best of the South" issues, for example, are reader-friendly, audience-appropriate tour guides through oddities and favorite nooks that might not even be known to true-blue Southerners, but that end up on our mental checklist for the next time we're in Murfreesboro or Macon. The other courtesy OA extends to its readership is rhythm; a year's subscription will now net a Music Issues, a Movie Issue, a Best of the South issue, and a grab bag issue. (Past efforts out of the yearly schedule include the Food Issue and the Art and Architecture Issue.)
Of this standardized schedule, the Music Issue is the one component that most goes back to OA's roots, produced since their first run in 1992. The Music Issue operates as a kit of sorts, a CD with a compilation of Southern music and a magazine carrying an article for each track. The selection of music cuts across a wide cross-section of time, genre and location, reaching Memphis blues from the 40's, deep south rock from the 60's, Nashville country from the 80's and beyond — Erykah Badu, Ben Folds and R.E.M. have made appearances, but so have the Blind Boys of Alabama, Nat King Cole and Moondog. Put this disc on, and you're not quite sure what you're going to get, but thanks to the comprehensive and intriguing per-song essays in the magazine, you'll know exactly what you have, and it is an enriching experience, no matter where you call home.
Each CD will provide a majority of tracks outside any given listener's wheelhouse, but coming in at around 80 percent of tracks eminently re-listenable, OA does far better than most artists' releases. Further, since the proliferation of digital music has made eclectic tastes in tunes even more of a status symbol, a variety disc like this does listeners great favors. My first foray into OA was the 6th annual Music Issue, just before temporary discontinuation of publishing in 2003. How with it did *I* feel dropping Swamp Dogg, King Pleasure, Little Milton and Blind Willie Johnson on my friends?
This is not to say the OA exclusively presents a stroll through the neglected slums of Southern music in this issue. The last three Music Issue covers featured Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke and Theolonious Monk, and a quick scan of past participants turns up more staples: Nat King Cole, John Prine, Dolly Parton, Alison Krauss, among others. OA founder and editor Marc Smirnoff notes this year:
Every year we include a few obvious or famous names, like Elvis or Al Green or B.B. King, or, this year, Dwight Yoakam and our cover man, Monk, but if that were all we did, Wal-Mart might as well compile these things. (Plus, with the titans, we use off-center tracks. It's not "The Thrill Is Gone" or the common version of "Suspicious Minds" that we put on.)
The message is this: Any OA Music Issue is worth picking up at your local Borders, including this one. This year's highlights, to this untrained ear, include:
"Look Out Dog, Slow Down Train" by the Hackensaw Boys. Between BMG, the public library, iTunes and BitTorrent, you would probably never come across this song in your life, but thanks to OA, you can take a moment and marvel at it. This is rockabilly infused with modern punk influences, resulting in a hellfire of fiddlework. Geoffrey Himes' essay highlights the development of their sound and their ties to, of all bands, Modest Mouse.
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"Parchman Farm" by the Parchman Prison Band. Part of the history that OA chronicles is the foundation of soul music. It's inexorably intertwined with the sound of the South, and this track calls upon the upbeat R&B sound that channels Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett and — you got it — inmates enrolled in the music program at the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
"Sweet is the Melody" by Iris DeMent. As the intensely personal essay by Kevin Brockmeier says so well, "The great singers, like Iris, have the ability to lift [mourning] up and cradle it in their voices, and in that way make it complete."
In addition to the sounds, the accompanying articles are essays of the highest quality, and in such volume that finishing them in one sitting, or one day, or one week, is impossible. These pieces bear a number of different focal points: the band, the song, the sound, even the song's place in their personal history. This is much more than a litany of band reviews; these writers work hard to package introductions to this music in an engaging way. (Past essays on Chris Bell's suicide and the role of My Morning Jacket in the dissolution of a relationship still twist the heart.)
In addition, the 2007 issue features a dozen articles outside of the track essays, including one on the making of Blonde on Blonde in Nashville. With that, the OA 2007 Music Issue jumps from "Must Have" to "Must Have Right Now", as it is every single year. This is southern music at its finest, and a magazine at its best. If a Midwestern lad with sheltered tastes finds it to be priceless, surely you will, too.
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Andy Stilp
(andy.stilp at gmail dot com)
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