Yellowhammer Press

James Lee Burke does not necessarily write “literature.”  His books do not challenge the intellect, nor do they express the ineffable.  They do not probe and prod.  They do not lay bare areas of inquiry that have been heretofore ignored.
Who cares?
His novels are engaging, readable, and present us with a version of the South that [...]

When, I wonder, did it become commonplace with Southern writers to center a body of work in one specific small town?  Wendell Berry has his Port William. Ron Rash had his Cliffside.  I suspect it all started with Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha.  George Singleton has recently given us Forty-Five, South Carolina.
In The Half-Mammals of Dixie, Singleton unpacks [...]

For fans of Old Time and Appalachian music, Smithsonian Folkways’ Backroads to Cold Mountain is a must have.  Compiled by musicologist John Cohen, it’s a great collection of mountain music from the early days of audio recording.  Less intimidating than the sprawling Goodbye, Babylon or the Anthology of American Folk Music, it’s a great primer [...]

Like many of its fans, I first came across The Accountant after learning it was the inspiration for “Sinkhole,” a song by Athens, GA band The Drive-By Truckers.  I tracked down the film (no easy feat at the time — it’s a relatively  hard thing to get a hold of, especially now that the Ginny [...]

Much of the work we discuss here isn’t new.   We’re not solely concerned with new books, new authors, or new artists.  I learned firsthand that educating oneself about actual Southern art — more than just ceramic roosters — is a process that requires some digging.  Investigate on your own, teach yourself about what Southern art [...]

When I was a child, my grandfather sang me odd, halting songs, seemingly atonal and operating within a structure I could scarcely remember, let alone master. Lyrically they were very simple and very much about the Crucifixion and its attendant imagery.  The lyrics were preceded by syllables more akin to shouts than notes, and though [...]

The enemy of every Southern historian is sentimentality.  It and its louche cousin, romanticism, are seductive enough to derail any attempt at actual scholarship.  Few undertake to tell some fragment of the Southern narrative without being suckered in by marauding Union cavalrymen or the tale of some poor-but-proud widow scratching an existence from a rocky [...]