Alabama Beat: Words and Music in the Deep South

The three poems currently appearing in the Poetry section of Swampland are by Mississippi born Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey (published by permission of the author). Trethewey won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection  of poems entitled Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Trethewey is currently an assistant professor of English, poetry, and creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She will appear on the Alabama Public Television program Bookmark hosted by Don Noble on this Sunday, March 30, at 11 AM CDT.

I'm looking forward to meeting Ms. Trethewey on Tuesday, April 1 at Athens State University. She will be speaking and reading her work at 1 pm on Tuesday at ASU in Athens, Alabama. I will be posting a feature on Trethewey following her appearance.

More great happenings in Alabama this spring include a number of blues events sponsored by the Alabama Blues Project. Blues legend Buddy Guy will be at the Saegner Theatre in Mobile on April 10, and the inimitable B. B. King will perform at the Montgomery Performing Arts Center on April 29.

Good news from the Alabama Music Hall of Fame. Shoals recording artist Donnie Fritts was inducted into the  Music Hall of Fame on February 22, 2008. The ceremony will be aired on Alabama Public Television in April. Fritt's latest album is One Foot in the Groove. Is that not TOO COOL for words!

Some of you may recall my feature on the Alabama Adventure Weekend in April of last year. Well, it is almost that time again and I can't wait to join designers Alabama Chanin, Billy Reid, and other artists and performers in the Shoals area for a fantastic weekend on April 18-19. 

Alabamians who live in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, can now listen to the local station WLAY-AM on 92.3 FM. WLAY-AM is a radio station licensed to Muscle Shoals, Alabama. It signed on 1933 and is one of the region's oldest frequencies. Like most early radio stations, it began as a full service AM (meaning it catered to all genres of music and community information, operating live). The station holds an especially impressive pedigree of disc jockeys:Sun Records founder and the universally agreed "Father Of Rock N Roll", Sam Phillips began his career in the music industry at WLAY-AM. The station's early, diverse format of Country and Blues is widely regarded as the cornerstone of Phillip's inspiration to combine the genres at Sun Studios in Memphis, TN. Rick Hall, owner of FAME Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals and producer of ground-breaking recordings by Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and countless others also began his tenure as a music industry mogul as a DJ at the station. Quinn Ivey (producer of "When A Man Loves A Woman") was a disc jockey at WLAY-AM when he discovered Percy Sledge. It has often been said that WLAY-AM was the birth-place of the Muscle Shoals Sound because it was a meeting place for so many of the songwriters and artists responsible for the unique style of music developed in Northwest Alabama. Because of this, the original sound board used at WLAY-AM is a permanent fixture at the Alabama Music Hall Of Fame. LIke Dub's Burgers that can only be enjoyed in Athens, Alabama, WLAY can only be heard in a limited broadcasting area, but anyone can hear excerpts from the programming on MySpace.

This spring marks my one year anniversary with Swampland, and I have had a fabulous year. The Alabama Adventure Weekend piece was my debut article for the web site. Since then I have watched Swampland grow and mature and take its place with the best of what can be found on the www. I am proud to be a member of the team. Thanks to everyone at Swampland and to each and every one of you out there in cyberland.

--Penne J. Laubenthal

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