During the 1940s and the 1950s when jazz music was as hot as hip-hop is today, Wilmington, North Carolina, was the place where jazz giants like Cab Calloway, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, and Louis Armstrong performed at a local jazz club and ballroom called The Barn.
Durham isn’t the city the blues forgot so much as a city that forgot its own blues history. For far too many years, Durham’s blues legacy was less than an afterthought – and it’s a legacy as rich as any city beyond Memphis or Chicago.
“To be born a Lumbee Indian is to be born a singer,” says Malinda Maynor Lowery in the opening scene of her 1997 documentary "Sounds of Faith." “We’ve been singing gospel music for 300 years.”
Daniel Coston knows a thing or two about North Carolina music. The photographer and writer has documented our state's music community since 1995.
While Mount Airy is best known as the hometown of American actor Andy Griffith (and the prototype for the fictional town, Mayberry), it has always had an underground.
Donaldson Toussaint L'Ouverture Byrd II aka Donald Byrd is probably most remembered as a Detroit City born Hard Bop maestro.
On February 28th, 1964, Thelonious Monk graced the cover of Time Magazine. The essay within, “The Loneliest Monk” by Barry Farrell, reinforces the imagery of the cover – painting monk as a mysteriously dark, but brilliant innovator.
Willie French Lowery was born in 1944 in Robeson County, N.C. During his career, he published over 500 songs and his groups “Plant and See” and “Lumbee” toured with the likes of the Allman Brothers, Linda Ronstadt, and Canned Heat.
Sister Lena Mae Perry says music is like medicine. She would know. At 80-years-old, Sister Perry has helmed the Branchettes, a celebrated gospel group from Johnston County, North Carolina, for decades.
From negro spirituals to the blues, Black Southerners historically have relied on music to document the social ills of America and resist state-sanctioned violence against Black bodies.