>>RiverVueDispatches
Guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan--Twenty Years After His Tragic Death
(Aug 28th, 12:59)
Guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, called read more...
Hot Haitian Jazz and a Cool New Album by RIYEL (Watters, Atkins, and Abel)
(Aug 21st, 12:58)
Jazz trumpeter and Alabama native Ken Watters has joined with several read more...
Jimmy Dean--"Thirty Years of Sausage, Fifty Years of Ham"
(Aug 10th, 10:18)
Jimmy Dean, who died on June 13 of this year, would have been 82 read more...
Oldtimers Charades or "You Know Where She Sits in Church"
(Jul 30th, 15:48)
As Iapproach yet another birthday, Itry even harder to find the humor in aging. Here is my latest attempt. Southerners have read more...
Roadtrip to the Shoals: Billy Reid Couture, Trowbridge's Ice Cream, and Sweetwater Plantation
(Jul 22nd, 13:00)
I just bought my first Billy Reid. No, not Armani or Versace. Much better!!! read more...
The South has many voices--mine is but one--as well as many worlds. My world is part academe (and somewhat urbane) and part rural south where kudzu competes with cotton for supremacy
and where we in the Tennessee River Valley struggle for peaceful coexistence with the prolific and persistent wildlife.
In RiverVue, my aim is to capture a slice of this life, viewed through the lens of one "bred and bawn in a brier-patch" and refracted by many years of teaching and traveling.
RiverVue may be about attending a festival in Florence, Alabama, or a wedding in Florence, Italy. It can be about be about kayaking on Bear Creek or hiking up a mud soaked mountain
in the rain forest of Costa Rica.
RiverVue is about celebration, diversity, adventure, friends, family, fellowship, and food. There will always be food.
So mix up a mint julep and climb on for the ride.
As M.F.K. Fisher wrote in Serve It Forth: "When shall we live, if not now?"
-Penne J Laubenthal
Picture of the Day
>>RiverVue reviews
Review of: RIYEL (Ken Watters, Andre Atkins, Yves Abel)
RIYEL----Eclectic and Kreyol Jazz
Summit Records, April 2010 Released internationally on April 13, 2010,
Review of: SIster Schubert
SIster Schubert: Cast Your Bread Upon the Waters
Reviewed by Penne J. Laubenthal
>>RiverVue Fiction
There are no RiverVue fiction writings at this time
>>RiverVue Features
When The Saints Went Marching Out: Artists Remember Katrina, 24 August 2010
by Diann Blakely “I do not know much about gods, but I think that the river Is a strong brown god-- T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages” At first I thought it was the Dog Days: that period between July and September when it is not only horridly torrid, but Just Plain Weird Things Happen. Weeks of unutterable, obsessing coincidences have read more...
Young Man With A Horn: Ken Watters, Jazz Trumpeter Extraordinaire
"Ken Watters is one of the finest young trumpet players to come along in a very long while. His is a unique trumpet voice that utilizes the best of contemporary jazz motifs, shadings, and tone colors. He has a pure joy of expression in his read more...
>>RiverVue Conversations
Alabamian Lilly Ledbetter and the Fair Pay Restoration Act
by Penne J. Laubenthal Six months ago today President Obama signed into law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act. The signing of this bill was the culmination of a decade long campaignby
Conversations with Alabama Filmmaker Max Shores
by Penne J. Laubenthal Max Shores, a native of Winfield, Alabama, is a thirty-year veteran of documentary production. His documentaries tell compelling stories about life in the southeastern read more...
Read All RiverVue Conversations
>>RiverVue Poetry
Why GP Cries
by Harry Moore Beneath the seething August heat bolls of cotton crack, then burst in fluffy locks, green leaves twist, turn brown and fall. Black faces glisten as workers bend to knee-high stalks, plucking the soft fiber from prickly burrs, packing handfuls into the canvas sack they drag till it’s strutted, then read more...
Three Poems by Jeanie Thompson and "To an Outdoor Wedding" by Kathleen Driskell
Three Poems fromThe Seasons Bear Us by Jeanie Thompson --published by RiverCity Publishing Company Ona Bank of the Tennessee Late August While the sun stained the still river blood-red as a tapped vein, I dragged the canoe onto shore, and with afternoon my read more...