Since Oxford American began publishing more than a quarter of a century ago, the magazine has undergone a number of changes—including new leadership and relocation from Oxford, Mississippi, to Little Rock, Arkansas. One aspect that has not changed is the publication’s commitment to good writing, showcased this month in Volume 26 of the Southern Music Issue focusing on the Memphis music scene past and present.
Editor-in-Chief Sara A. Lewis, who has been with OA since 2017, the year of the Kentucky music issue, was named interim editor in chief after the departure of Danielle Jackson, who left to work on her book. In November, the Board voted to have Lewis continue as editor-in-chief and to serve as director.
Lewis calls the experience “a coming together of all of the wonderful professional experiences I’ve had at the OA: Being on the business side, hand-holding between editorial and the business side, but thinking about all that we can accomplish as an organization when every initiative is firing together from community service to events, to the print magazine, to online, to concerts. They’re coming out of the same pipeline.”
“That’s what I’ve always loved about working here,” she said. “One day working on editing a short film, the next day working on a podcast, and the next day working on a 12,000-word deeply reported piece.
“The nexus is so similar because, first and foremost, it’s telling a good story. There are so many avenues right now to tell a good story, even producing our live events and our concerts,” Lewis said. “That is part of the narrative of serving the mission. It’s part of the story that the Oxford American is telling about the Southern canon in general. I think we feel a lot of pride and commitment to establishing and amplifying bodies of work that are not being amplified and celebrated in other spaces.”
Of the regular issues readers eagerly anticipate—Southern food or film, for instance—the annual music issue remains a favorite. In fact, the earth may be tilting a bit to the west due to the stacks of past issues subscribers are unwilling to discard. In years past, these issues have focused on the music of individual Southern states, the Great Migration that took Southern music far afield, Country Roots, and most recently, the Ballads issue.
The 2024 Memphis music issue is the magazine’s first feature of an individual city, with the issue launch held at Memphis’ historic Stax Museum. This was the first time, Lewis said, that the staff was able to meet face-to-face the people who worked together so closely to make this issue happen. “To come in and realize how special the community is,” she said, and “to actualize all the things that we were trying to do throughout the year, and then to feel that palpability of the of the vibe was really awesome.”
According to Lewis, “this was probably the easiest issue we ever had in terms of covering as many genres as possible because of the diversity of Memphis.” The challenge, she added, was making sure they had covered the full range Memphis has to offer. “For this,” she said, “it was actually a harder job of curation because there were so many options for so many different genres. We were listening to music coming from the COGIC Church; we were listening to songs written before recordings existed, songs about Memphis that were re-recorded.”
Lewis says, “One thing that has not changed is our deepest commitment every year [not just to] giving a comprehensive take on any subject, but trying to find a balance between a fresh look at something you already know, and maybe exposure introduction to something that you don’t.”
While content for a Memphis-focused issue might have been predictable, capitalizing on Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Sun Record, and Stax, the challenge, according to Lewis, in light of all the films, biographies, books, articles, and essays written about Memphis icons was to ask, “What can we add to this conversation?”
Amid the conversation about Elvis and his estate, with the untimely death of Lisa Marie, Lewis said, “I was really drawn to the pitch we got from Elena Passarello, looking at how much of Elvis’s catalog was committed to movie soundtracks.” Passarello’s piece examined a bootleg recording called Elvis’s Greatest Shit to consider the number of hits generated to support his often-unremarkable movie career.
“Rather than take a snarky poo-pooing of a gold-lamé -suited Elvis,” said Lewis, “she took a nuanced and sensitive approach to somebody who was over-commercialized, who was one of the greatest talents of the twentieth century, who became a commercial project and, by default, has some song that were not created for the sake of being good art, but made for the sake of that commerce. [Passarello] looks at the places where Elvis and his special sauce continued to shine through and the places where they don’t. She emerges with the with a kind of equation or template for what makes a good Elvis song by examining the songs that are–or are they not–shit?”
Throughout the issue, readers are not only given new perspectives on familiar musicians, but also introduced to artists that may have escaped their notice. The stories and articles that make up the issue also create a sense of place across an arc of time.
Lewis pointed to two pieces in particular that speak about location, both of which she considered surprising. The first is a short story by. Troy Wiggins told in a series of flashbacks tied, she said, “to music that was happening at that time, and it’s intergenerational. But it’s tied to the mystical, ethereal feeling of the river. You’re coming over the river, and you get to Memphis, and it’s just undeniable. It’s magnetic. This piece is bookended by a man with a speaker on his bike on the banks of the river, and that, to me, speaks so much to place and world-building as much as any essay that we could have done.”
The other piece she noted as steeped in a sense of place is Robert Gordon’s article on the jukebox trade. In it, Gordon explores Memphis’ role, specifically as a place pressing records and distributing Wurlitzers that set the tone for music going out all across the country.
The narratives are woven together to tell the story of the Memphis music scene, past and present, that cuts across socioeconomic and racial lines. In “Making Good Citizens,” Alice Faye Duncan uncovers the story of A.C. “Moohah” Williams, a disc jockey at WDIA who cultivated the Teen Town Singers, students from segregated Black high schools in the Memphis area who performed on the Saturday morning radio show. She describes leading figures in recording and in radio who supported Black children’s educational opportunities as well as their musical aspirations.
Robert T. Darden explores the Holy Spirit-fueled music of the Church of. God in Christ (COGIC) and the East Trigg Aver. Baptist Church with a musicologist’s ear for detail, while for his article in the same issue, Will Skeaping tracked down hip-hop pioneer DJ Spanish Fly, who re-recorded “Cement Shoes” for the issue’s accompanying playlist.
For this issue, the editorial staff made the call to omit the accompanying CD, offering instead a download code for the soundtrack, as well as the option to purchase the 16-song vinyl record (available online or at discerning record stores.) What was not optional was the liner notes, short pieces on each of the songs included on the playlist.
The notes on the cover story, Al Green’s “The Letter” runsto full article length, tracing Al Green and Alex Chilton’s history with the song and beyond. The playlist opens the door for more of the variety of music represented by Memphis, including Lucero’s “Banks of the Arkansas,” Harlan T. Bobo’s “Must Be Memphis,” and the Gospel Writers’ “New Born Soul.”
The notes on “Frank, This Is It” produced in 1969 by Jerry Phillips, son of Sun Records’ founder Sam Phillips, includes an interview with Phillips in which he discusses his childhood spent in the studio, his songwriting, his own recent album release, and even his experience producing John Prine’s Pink Cadillac.
In this celebration of the music of Memphis, Oxford American readers can expect to find themselves going down rabbit trails, tapping into the rich vein of music packing the pages. Those with roots in other music meccas may take umbrage at Robert Gordon’s claim, “Nashville is where you go to make a hit that sounds like everyone else. Memphis is where you make a hit that sounds like no one else.” Readers steeped in Memphis will certainly identify omissions from the issue. Speculation can begin now on what will come in next year’s issue.
“We don’t rule anything out,” says Lewis. “These things that happen; it’s almost sort of like a zeitgeist or a pulse of the culture thing where the stars align. We figure out what we’re going to focus on. But I think one of the worst things we could do is go in and be prescriptive, and set too many boundaries on what we won’t do. Because we want to do everything. We could do every issue of music issue, but this gets to be special this way.”
