Souled American – Honing the art of self-cultivation
No Depression: “You can magnify beauty, take it apart, see how it got to be so damn pretty. You take a song and you look at it real close, and what happens? Well, first of all, you have to slow it down a bit to really hear what’s going on. And once you’ve done that, you find you don’t need so many chord changes, you don’t need so much activity. It just gets in the way. Of the beauty.”
— From Make Me Laugh, Make Me Cry: 50 Posters About Souled American, edited by Camden Joy
Think of Loretta Lynn traveling the South, pleading with DJs to spin her first record, sleeping in her car every night and babying her one good dress. Or of George Jones, dodging the drunken brutality of his father and playing on the street for coins, thrilled when he realizes that people like him. Such is the stuff that country music legend is built on.