Oxford American

The Oxford American is a national magazine dedicated to featuring the very best in Southern writing while documenting the complexity and vitality of the American South. Billed as "The Southern Magazine of Good Writing," it has won two National Magazine Awards and other high honors since it began publication in 1992.

CONTRIBUTORS

Oxford American

Johnny Cash, Pray for Me

The Maple Leaf Piano Speaks to the Bayou Maharajah

That High Lonesome Sound

Mickey Guyton Talks to Us

Old-Time Folks

Little Blue Transistor Radio

Not Country, Not Western, Just West

The Bard of Lower Broadway

Dr. Ralph Stanley Live at the Carter Family Fold

The Singer

Exiting / In

Once Upon A High Lonesome • Listening for a cry in the night

THE TRAGIC TALE OF RACKBACK TOM AND HIS REPENTANT SPOUSE

HER RIGHTFUL PLACE • The everlasting legend of Tanya Tucker

Silent Heartbeat • Buddy Harman and the quiet revolution of country drumming

The Country Idiom of Hip-Hop • How trickster tales, diasporic toasts, and James Brown shaped a genre

I Ain’t Got Nothing But Time • The mostly true legend of Hank Williams

Songbook

My Dear Companion • On Linda Ronstadt and her gal pals

Place Embodied • The sonic landscapes of Solange’s When I Get Home

HIRAETH • How to find our way back

If You Don’t Like Millie Jackson … • Before there was a Yeehaw Agenda

RAMBLING HOME • The living tradition of an Irish ballad

“For My Lover” • Tracy Chapman on the rewards of risk and love

COUNTRY MUSIC WASN’T OUR GENRE BUT PATSY CLINE WAS • A voice that conjured a secret love

Fairytale • The Pointer Sisters, the Great Migration, and the soul of country

GLITTER, COWBOYS, AND TEARS • Orville Peck’s queer honky-tonk

Olivia Newton-John’s Catalog of Emotion • And the quiet power of her voice

Will the Real Mr. Heartache Please Stand Up and Cry? • The surreal tragicomic legacy of Johnny Paycheck and David Berman

A TALE OF TWO SONGS • Love lost, love found

Future Roots • Tomás Doncker on his twenty-year collaboration with Yusef Komunyakaa

Black at the Roots • A lesson on country music’s lineage

Music Credits