In February, Oxford American editor Danielle A. Jackson had just moved to Little Rock from Brooklyn after more than fifteen years in the city to take the role as managing editor of Oxford American magazine, working specifically with the music issue project. She says, “I basically came back home to take this role.”
For a publication that prides itself on being “the Southern Magazine of Good Writing,” covering all aspects of life and the arts in the greater South, the annual music issue remains a reader favorite. Since the magazine’s beginnings in Oxford, Mississippi, the special issue packaged with a curated CD has become a collector’s item destined to be well-worn.
Jackson said, “In early March, before the pandemic became what it was to become, we were planning a different issue. I’d already started laying the groundwork and soliciting writers for another state issue.”
The first state issue focused on the music of Arkansas, where the publication relocated its offices after a change in leadership and reorganization. Issues followed on Tennessee, Alabama, and more. Producing the special issue involved sponsors and partnerships for its multi-faceted programming.
“There’s the issue itself, of course,” said Jackson, “but we like to bring it live to people, with events in important locales. We like to have relationships with musicians who can write pieces or contribute songs to the compilation. All of that was in play for another state issue when the pandemic hit the US full steam in March. We all went home and really didn’t come back.”
Realizing how the pandemic would impact the issue, keeping them from promoting the issue and the state, the editorial team at OA was forced to regroup. Normally a quarterly magazine, they bundled the summer and fall issues to make a publication possible during the pandemic. They had considered a greatest hits edition at some point, so 2020 seems like the right year, an opportunity to bring some excitement to readers. Brittney Howard of the Alabama Shakes served as guest editor. They partnered with someone from outside to choose what those greatest hits would be. They also allocated resources behind some new pieces, including a piece Jackson worked on by Drive-by Truckers’ Patterson Hood, a previous contributor to the magazine.
“He’s a really talented storyteller. It was last year the middle of all that craziness: that was my first music issue,” said Jackson. She acknowledge the challenge of each issue, the impossibility of including all the good music of the area, a vast moving target.
Named editor of the magazine in May of this year, Jackson has guided the release of volume 23 of the Southern Music Issue “Up South” that hits shelves December 7. Jackson says the focus is the “Great Migration of the Southern Sound.”
The issue is published with two separate covers, one featuring Tina Turner performing at Madison Square Garden and one of Aretha Franklin from an outtake of an album shoot.
“We fell in love with both pictures, to be honest, and there are major stories in the issue about both artists that take into account their families’ movement and migration through the years and the scenes that they became a part of where they were influenced by a lot of other Southern expats. We also thought that [Aretha Franklin] was super introverted, very introverted on a calm cover, and [Tina Turner] was very extroverted in the hot pink cover.”
Both were hugely important artists OA hadn’t covered in depth before. Both have also been the subject of recent biopics. Turner, featured in a biopic Tina and a Broadway musical, has just announced retirement from the public eye. Respect, starring Jennifer Hudson and based on Franklin, is drawing early Oscar nods. These career retrospectives shine the light, says Jackson, on “ a constellation of other musicians and artists in their orbit. The issue feature an article by Zandria F. Robinson about Franklin’s performance of “Amazing Grace” in Watts, also the subject of a documentary. Maureen Mahon’s piece “Manhattan in East St. Louis” details the scene that influenced Ike and Tina Turner. The magazine also includes an insightful essay that explores deeply the career of Carolyn Franklin, Aretha’s younger sister, who wrote “Baby, Baby, Baby” and “Ain’t No Way” featured on the CD.
Not only are they covering the Great Migration reflected in August Wilson’s century plays and in Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, but on movement and migration in a broader sense, Jackson said. In her editor’s letter, she talks about the wider scope. This issue, she noted, moves “from the wave of movement in the 30s as result of the Dust Bowl from the Great Plains that influenced what California would become,” says Jackson. “We examine the movement from places further South than the southern states, such as in the Caribbean, all throughout the 20th century. These people influenced and made all those cities along the eastern seaboard, along with Southern–American Southern—migrants.”
She noted that San Francisco had a very prominent jazz scene, including The Fillmore, that was comparable to spots in Harlem and Kansas City. The issue addresses the influence of migrants from Mexico and an influential Cuban dance troupe, in addition to Southern migrants, examining the influences on major cities and energy points in American Music by people seeking refuge either as first-generation or second-generation Americans whose parents resettled from elsewhere, looking for hope.
“The music we now think about as American Music is the result of this unsettled quest to look for that,” said Jackson. “America as a whole culturally, our identity in cities and rural towns, is impacted by those who came, needing change, looking for something else. That’s the spirit we were trying to capture in the issue. It is incapsulated by ‘Up South,’ a phrase that Southern migrants made up to describe cities like Chicago and Detroit that had a whole lot of other Southern migrants.” Jackson mentioned a piece by Alice Randall in last year’s music issue in which she said that whenever people ask where she was born, she tells them ‘Detroit, Alabama.’
Randall, who makes her home in Nashville, has a piece in the new issue about growing up in Detroit among families of Southern immigrants in which she writes about watching the Lawrence Welk Show and the Johnny Cash Show on television when she was growing up, getting an understanding of the breadth of country music and the influences from so many genres and cultural expressions. She particularly remembered Cash’s guests—Louis Armstrong, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder and others, crossing the genre lines. These influences informed her decision to come to Nashville to become an artist and a songwriter herself.
Long-time readers will also welcome back the companion CD packaged with the music issue, replaced in 2020 by an online playlist. The decision to produce the CD again came as the result of a subscriber survey. Given a number of options, including a download card or vinyl record, people “resoundingly responded that they really wanted a CD,” she said.
Those who prefer to stream are given that access to the official compilation. The issue also includes about ten other playlists curated by the writers of the stories in the issue, including lists by Adrien Quesada of the Back Pumas, Leon Bridges, and Big Freedia.
Jackson says readers may not realize the cost of producing the CD. As a nonprofit, the publication does not sell the CD independently in stores, so they have used gratis licensing with individuals agreeing to license their music for the CDs.
“We’ve lost out on many songs because it has been untenable for some artists over the years to do that,” Jackson said. During production of the South Carolina Music issue, the artist Arjali of Diaspoura refused to grant licensing and wrote an essay about the complications and economics of the independent artists who rely on streaming income. As a result, the magazine leadership decided to find a way to pay artists and make it sustainable. “Even as a tiny arts organization, we believe in paying artists and crafts people for their labor. We want to carry that through everything we do, and we were able to do it this year,” said Jackson.
With the release of the “Up South” issue just in time for the holidays, subscribers may be scrambling for a copy of the issue with the other cover, as well as checking the music lovers and discriminating readers off their Christmas lists with subscriptions or single-issue stocking stuffers.
https://www.oxfordamerican.org