The Ballad of Harlan County

When the author returns to her family’s coal mining roots in Harlan County, Kentucky, she tries to make sense of her family legacy, as well as America’s complicated, contentious relationship with coal.

Source: Oxford American
Published: Jul 11, 2016
Length: 42 minutes (10,698 words)

Not Yet Lost

When Solastalgia, my mom’s exhibition, opened in 2013, I attended the exhibit, but I don’t remember thinking about the meaning of the word: comfort, pain. It is only now that I realize that the term also describes my parents. They fear that they will lose what they love most—that the piece of land they bought thirty-eight years ago, which allowed them to chart the course of their lives, grow food, and make art, is slowly being destroyed by forces beyond their control. They are angry about this loss, and the only way they know how to express their anger and fear is through art.

Source: Oxford American
Published: May 11, 2016
Length: 8 minutes (2,030 words)

Watching Willie’s Back

“Mess with Willie Nelson and the next thing you’ll see is the wrong end of a gun held by the Devil himself, Robert Paul English.” A profile of Paul English, Willie Nelson’s friend, drummer, and protector.

Source: Oxford American
Published: Jan 12, 2015
Length: 27 minutes (6,931 words)

Living on the Hyphen

“My life is conducted in Spanish, English, and Spanglish, and I have chosen these situations, but not entirely.”

Source: Oxford American
Published: Oct 15, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,131 words)

Excarnation in Texas

A visit to the Forensic Anthropology Center in San Marcos, Texas, which contains the largest of America’s five “body farms” — research facilities where families or individuals donate their bodies for scientific studies.

Author: Alex Mar
Source: Oxford American
Published: Sep 8, 2014
Length: 47 minutes (11,868 words)

Scout’s Honor

“It might have been the Friendliest Place on Earth.” The writer visits a national Jamboree for the Boy Scouts of America.

Source: Oxford American
Published: Jun 11, 2014
Length: 39 minutes (9,820 words)

Spinning Steel Into Gold

How the steel guitar established itself as an American instrument, and why there are few people who mastering it today:

When I ask about young players, many guitarists just shrug. In the last ten years, many of the greatest pedal steel players have passed away: Jeff Newman, Tom Brumley, Hal Rugg, John Hughey. These days, Dan Dugmore, Russ Pahl, Mike Johnson, and Paul Franklin are the main session players in Nashville. In a place where you can find a lead guitarist on almost every corner, and which has experienced a musical renaissance of sorts in the last decade, it’s surprising that all four still remain the go-to steel players in town, despite the generation gap. There just isn’t a new wave of young players coming up who can replace the quality of the old guard.

Source: Oxford American
Published: Apr 15, 2014
Length: 25 minutes (6,291 words)

Fan Letters to a Troubled Country Music Star

Joe Hagan stumbles onto old fan mail sent to 1970s country-R&B star Charlie Rich. The fans share their most intimate secrets with a musician who had his own troubled life:

I felt drawn to Charlie Rich. For me, he was part of the landscape of family road trips in the late 1970s, lonely days driving with my parents in a VW van through the muggy Southeast in summer, across Louisiana and Alabama, up to the Carolinas and Virginia, as my father, a Coast Guard officer, moved me and my sisters from one military station to another. In memory, the sun sets in a Polaroid-orange glow over an Interstate horizon as the opening piano rolls of “Behind Closed Doors” come through the radio. Years later, Charlie Rich’s voice seemed to plumb some blue depth in me, a subterranean loneliness. But he was long dead by then and, unlike Tara, I was in thrall to a forgotten singer, left to chase a ghost: Charlie Rich, the tragic soul man whose legacy was largely forgotten after his brief period of fame. He was a major American artist whose life had traced the history of rock & roll, r&b, and soul; the definitive missing link between Elvis Presley and Ray Charles.

Author: Joe Hagan
Source: Oxford American
Published: Jan 8, 2014
Length: 32 minutes (8,114 words)

Long Way Home

Rosanne Cash on life in Tennessee and memories of her father, Johnny Cash:

My second Tennessee began in 1967, when I was twelve years old. My parents had just separated the previous winter, and that first summer my mom let my sisters and me go to Tennessee to spend several weeks with my dad. He had just bought the big house on Old Hickory Lake in Hendersonville, about twenty miles from Nashville.

Dad was just emerging from the depths of his drug addiction, but he was clean and sober, if gaunt and a little shaky. He and June were not married yet, but she and her daughters, Rosie and Carlene, were around a lot and we befriended our soon-to-be stepsisters. The next several summers were glorious, each better than the one before. Dad had a little speedboat, and he taught all of us to water ski. He was the most patient teacher in the world. We jumped in the water, hooked our feet into the skis, and he gunned the engine. We fell and fell and fell. And then, eventually, we got up and he whooped and waved his arm at us as he pulled us around the lake. We did this every day for hours. Once I was sitting in the boat with him while he pulled one of my sisters up on the skis when the glove box popped open and money—bills of all denominations—flew out and away. My dad glanced at the currency as the wind carried it out of the boat, but never looked back, never said a word. That gave me an insight into my dad’s relationship with money: He let it fly and never looked back.

Source: Oxford American
Published: Nov 25, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,580 words)

The Secret Life of Nuns

The writer stays with the Dominican Sisters of Houston and learns about the life they lead and the work they do:

“‘I think a lot of them want some kind of sign,’ Pat says of the choice to wear the habit. ‘They want people to know.’ She also cites ‘that romanticism,’ as in (and this almost makes me blush) ‘those old nun movies, you know, all that parading around looking the same.’ The cloister was never an attractive choice for her, as it wasn’t for Carol or most of the other Houston Dominicans. ‘Some say we can be in the world but not of the world,’ she says. ‘Well, that’s not the way Jesus worked. So we like to be a little bit more involved here—and freer.’

“The active Dominican sisters who stuck it out after Vatican II—particularly of the generation now in their seventies—were drawn deeper into the social activism the order’s women are known for. It’s something I see in action over the course of the week. I accompany Sister Ceil, the Dominicans’ ‘promoter of justice,’ to a grassroots press conference announcing an immigration rally (Ceil also represents the sisters in the fight against sex trafficking, and at death-penalty vigils at the state penitentiary in Huntsville); and I visit Sister Maureen at Angela House, the transitional center she’s set up for women just exiting prison (a former cop and counselor, Maureen also works with victims of sex abuse by clergy). I also learn about the Dominican sisters’ long history of political engagement. Back in 1987, they declared the motherhouse grounds a public sanctuary for El Salvadorian refugees, potentially risking prison themselves for harboring illegal immigrants. And over the last ten years, Dominican sisters in Colorado and Michigan have done prison time for breaking into nuclear facilities and spraying them with blood in protest.”

Author: Alex Mar
Source: Oxford American
Published: Sep 5, 2013
Length: 49 minutes (12,273 words)