Author Archives: Burgin Mathews

“Music is a language, and I’m saying things that can reach people.  I’m not a prophet.  I’m a destiny-changer.  It’s all right to prophesy, but the best thing to do is change things, if you’ve got the power.”      … Continue reading →

The city of Birmingham, Alabama, has inspired many musical tributes over the years, from the pens and instruments of natives and non-natives alike.  For a few of these Birmingham songs, the place name may be more or less inconsequential, offering … Continue reading →

Note: The following article, eulogizing Birmingham, Alabama’s Greencup Books, first appeared in the November 2009 edition of Pavo, the “online magazine” of arts and culture in the “Magic City.”  Like Greencup, Pavo is now also defunct and, I think, its … Continue reading →

Kirk Withrow is a head and neck surgeon at UAB.  He is a husband and father and an avid rock climber.  He is also, passionately, a cigar-box guitarist and prolific “garage luthier,” a creator and player of unlikely hand-crafted instruments.  … Continue reading →

Listen: There was a time—and these were great and glorious days—when country music teemed with Hanks.  Consider the following dialogue from Charles Portis’ 1966 novel Norwood: “I’m trying to get into show business myself.  Hillbilly music.  You probably don’t like … Continue reading →

Darwin Lee Hill is the host of “Darwin Lee’s Real Hillbilly Music Hour,” a vintage country show on AM radio station WHVW in Poughkeepsie, New York.  He has hosted the Sunday afternoon show for over fourteen years.  He has been … Continue reading →

Thirty years ago the Muppets made their first feature movie. In the years to follow they would make others—good ones, too (and some, a little later, not so good)—but that first one, the one titled, simply, The Muppet Movie, is … Continue reading →

Ernest Mostella was a fiddle maker from Alabama’s St. Clair County, a rare practitioner of African American fiddle traditions surviving into the 21st century. When I met him he was in his nineties and full of excited vitality, still operating … Continue reading →

I tell you what. We’ve played for bigger audiences, but we’ve never played for any greater audience, I guarantee it. – Mack Vickery, Live! At the Alabama Women’s Prison Johnny Cash started it with Folsom Prison. Playing prisons had been … Continue reading →

In a world full of sinners, hypocrites, whoremongers, and thieves, William Carlton (W.C.) Rice saw himself as a modern-day Noah: ordained by God to prophesy destruction, to call the unsaved and endangered to salvation, and to build with his own … Continue reading →