Oxford American highlights Kentucky music, which is more than country and bluegrass

For many people, the musical landscape of Kentucky cuts a colorful but perhaps expected path through Southern culture. Country, bluegrass, folk and Appalachian roots music — talk to someone from outside the commonwealth, and those are likely to be the styles that they think define our state.

They would be correct, too, but only in part. Pick up the Oxford American’s annual Southern Music Issue, which this year is devoted to sounds of Kentucky, and you are confronted with a collage of inspirations varied enough to surprise the most versed scholars of Bluegrass-bred music.

You can sense the scope on the cover. Americana renegade Sturgill Simpson sits in the center, but surrounding him are country matriarch Loretta Lynn, primal indie roots-rock stylist J.D. Wilkes, hip-hop ambassador James Lindsey, and Lexington’s own jazz giant, Les McCann. Inside, the stories fill in the cracks dividing those artists with pieces on rock icons The Everly Brothers, punk pioneer Richard Hell, country maverick Dwight Yoakam, alt-country favorite Freakwater and many others.

It’s enough to make anyone retune their view of Kentucky music, just as the Southern music issue itself expands the notion of Oxford American as strictly a literary publication.

“The annual music issue is Oxford American’s most popular project,” said the magazine’s editor, Eliza Borné, who will visit Lexington next week for live events at The Burl and 21c Museum Hotel commemorating the issue. “I have no doubt about that. The music issues often sell out or come close, then become collectors’ items. Because the series has been running for so long — the Kentucky edition is our 19th installment — we hear from a lot of readers who spend months anticipating the issue. David Remnick, the New Yorker editor and Pulitzer Prize winner, once mentioned in an interview that the day his OA music issue arrives is his ‘favorite magazine day of the year.’”

One reason Oxford American’s Southern Music Issue is so popular, aside from the CD that comes with it detailing the work of the varied artists profiled, is that music and literature in this part of the country are so inseparably linked.

“In the early 20th century of Appalachian art making, no line was drawn between the Kentucky repertoire of ballads and literature,” said Rebecca Gayle Howell, Oxford American’s poetry editor and the James Still writer-in-residence at the Hindman Settlement School. For the Southern music issue, Howell authored a piece titled “The Lexington Cure,” a reflection from a personal perspective on the U.St. Narcotic Farm, the controversial incarceration/drug rehabilitation center on Leestown Road (now the Federal Medical Center), which, from the 1930s through the 1960s, housed some of the country’s most notable jazz artists, including Sonny Rollins, Chet Baker and Lee Morgan.

“If either tradition can be briefly contained, they are contained in a box larger than either, labeled ‘storytelling,’ Howell said. “From Paducah to Inez, across song and poem, novel and verse, Kentucky writers tell and retell the story of a particular place that holds a history as large as myth.”

The issue profiles many artists who have celebrated Kentucky culture, and some of the most sobering pieces deal with, in essence, escape. Such is the case with “Let’s Gather,” Harmony Holiday’s piece on Les McCann, who realized in high school that the best way to realize his musical aspirations was to leave the state.

“I’m always interested to talk to other creative people and how they have always wanted to either escape home or stay there for their art,” said Borné, the magazine’s editor. “I think we really get both in this issue. The Richard Hell piece is another example of an artist who felt like he had to move to a bigger city to make his art and be exposed to the cultural opportunities in New York and the influence he got by being part of that.

“But then, on the other side, we have people like Rachel Grimes and the Phipps Family, whose music is just so driven rooted in landscape, where the emotion of place is integral to the music. I think that theme and that tension is very strong in this issue on both sides.”

Howell, a Lexington native, finds a level of aural inspiration from the traditional sounds furthered in Kentucky that even the Southern music issue can’t fully contain.

“The Kentucky writers who have most influenced me are Sarah Ogan Gunning and Roscoe Holcomb. That famous praise by (Bob) Dylan of Holcomb, ‘an untamed sense of control,’ paired with Ms. Gunning’s absolute call to tell the truth — I want to live right in that space. I want to sing from there.”

This story was originally published November 22, 2017 at 3:54 PM with the headline "Oxford American highlights Kentucky music, which is more than country and bluegrass."