Art

From Hey Jude to Southern Rock: When Slide Guitar and a Beat from the Swamps Went Mainstream

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Outline of an Idea Emerges With First Snow of 2025 – “All of a sudden, there was Southern Rock.” – Jimmy Johnson, about the day Wilson Pickett covered the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” with Duane Allman on guitar, 1969. Tales from the MoJo Road – By Glynn “Cowboy” Wilson – ARGO, Ala. – A rare blanket…

Jackson Browne’s ‘These Days’ Remembered From ‘Those Days’

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Tales From the MoJo Road – By Glynn Wilson – ARGO, Ala. – Well, I’ve been out walking some, since I don’t do that much talking or partying anymore, these days. Out back there’s an old native trail through the woods they say was the original road from Trussville to Springville. I don’t know about…

The Year 2024 in Pictures: A Photo Essay

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The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – News photography is a dying field just like news itself. That started with the invention and release of the iPhone by Apple in 2006. But at least the New York Times still keeps the tradition alive with news pictures from all over the world. The Year in…

Artificial Intelligence, the Power Grid and News Work: Who Will Pay for Covering the Information Falling Through the Cracks?

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The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – To be brutally honest? Or to project an image of success at all times? Are you interested in pretense? Or the unabashed truth? Shakespeare never had any of his characters ask these questions. At least not to the best of my recollection. Of course the very idea…

Global Warming With Crows: How To Survive All Of It

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A Painting and Poem by Janet Mego – Hurt feelings. Cancer. Never knowing What’s the answer. Highway 43: rush hour Politicians: too much power. Record Heat Spoiled meat Tax breaks available to The Elite Severe depression Textbook obsession Making it on time to Your next session Climate change World War III Smog, fear, and pestilence…

Part 5: On Unfulfilled Hopes, Shattered Dreams and Covering News in Washington, D.C.

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The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — Within days of moving to the nation’s capital in 2004, I was the last reporter hired by States News Service operating out of a cool newsroom on Pennsylvania Avenue, a couple of blocks from the White House. It was right near a Metro tunnel,…

Part 4: On Unfulfilled Hopes, Shattered Dreams and the Big Easy

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The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — It was as hot as I believed hot could get when I landed at the Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans in the midst of the first August of the new millennium. Even in a summer Searsucker Suit the hot air hit you…

Part 3: On Unfulfilled Hopes, Shattered Dreams and Journalism

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The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — One of the themes that emerges from this life analysis is that kids need heroes to inspire and emulate. That’s why it’s so important for young women to have role models, along with African Americans and other minorities in America. All I can do…

Part 1: On Unfulfilled Hopes, Shattered Dreams

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The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — A person with character may pickup a few nicknames in a life. A famous Baptist preacher once called me “Cowboy,” and it stuck. That worked for a couple of decades, and I was locally famous as the only drummer to ever wear a cowboy…

Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If: A Father’s Advice to His Son’

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By Rudyard Kipling – If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal…

Part II: The Early Days of the Internet – What Went Wrong

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Editor’s Note: This is the second in a three part series on the death of the American Dream and the one last chance we have to save it. Part I: Death of an Empire – Did Trump’s Reality Show Presidency Finally Kill the American Dream? Part III: Government Regulations and Objective Journalism Redefined “We are…

Alabama Song Writer Grayson Capps on the State of the World and Religion

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Sunday Reader – By Glynn Wilson – So I’m following the light, doing what I do, and somehow with assistance from Mother Nature, my Cherokee ancestors and smarter aliens on some exoplanet, I made it back to North Carolina this week from a month-long trip to the Nation’s Capital just long enough to see Donald…

Will The Arts and Music Survive the Coronavirus?

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Editor’s Note: Can you even imagine a world without the arts? No writing, no music, no movies, only factory work and no play? “Without the arts life would not be worth living.” You can quote me on that. Perhaps the saddest thing in the world today, now that we are all dealing with the novel…

Appomattox Court House: Robert E. Lee Surrenders to Grant, Ending Civil War

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By Glynn Wilson – APPOMATTOX, Virg. — We didn’t make it here in time for Memorial Day, but National Park Service rangers and volunteers say nearly 500 people showed up for the playing of “Taps” and holiday weekend programs. I don’t know for sure, but considering that Confederate sympathizers seem to generate more engagement these…

Kodachrome on Netflix: Author Tom Wolfe Dies at 88

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The Big Picture –  By Glynn Wilson – So as I was watching the Jonathan Tropper film Kodachrome last night on Netflix, putting me in an unusually nostalgic mood about an obsolete type of photography film, when my email notification bleep went off and I saw that the writer Tom Wolfe died at the age…

Photo Essay: A White House Tour

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By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. – For the past three years I have chased a dream to visit the White House and stand on the same hallowed ground where so much American history has taken place in the nation’s capital. Finally, thanks to the helpful staff of Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, the Congressman from…

Photographer Rowland Scherman Was There

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He Shot Rock ‘n’ Roll Too EDITOR’S NOTE: We caught up with Scherman and got this story we ran on August 6, 2011 in The Locust Fork News-Journal. We re-run it here today because we are about to hook with Rowland again in New York on a trip to meet up with author and new…

Did the Comic Cowboys of Mobile Mardis Gras Go Too Far?

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By Glynn Wilson – MOBILE, Ala. — Some people in Mobile like to brag that Alabama’s port city held the first Mardi Gras celebration in 1703 and the first formally organized Mardi Gras parade in the United States in 1830. But there is little doubt that it was New Orleans that made Mardi Gras world…

A Look at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West Museum in Cody Wyoming

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Watch the video – By Glynn Wilson – “Buffalo Bill” Cody is a name that conjures up romantic images of the American “Wild West” in the 19th century. It’s almost unfortunate in the 21st century when there is a renewed interest in justice for Native Americans that the name of William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody…

Mardi Gras in Mobile Has Become a Circus

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By Catherine Bullock Rainey – Arts Editor – With the glamor of a Broadway show and the ambience of a carnival, Venardos Circus brings a whole new light to entertainment and the festivities of Mardi Gras. “We are proof that the circus is not coming to an end!” announced ringmaster and producer Kevin Venardos during…