That’s what Patterson Hood called the “Duality of the Southern Thing. - Wright Thompson

When I tell my daughter, Wallace the story of the place she's from — when I play Muddy Waters or Son House or Skip James — I want her to see the complete picture. I want her to hear that music and know that people like us — planters and landowners, which we are — often caused the pain these musicians turned into beauty,

I knelt down. The dirt felt cool as it ran through my fingers. Nothing hits the nose quite like freshly tilled topsoil, carrying the scent of life and death. The ground around here smells rotten after a rain, gray buckshot petrichor, grabbing tires and axles and feet. I’ve lost shoes in this mud. Delta folks call it gumbo and it feels hungry, aggressive even, as if it actively wants to pull more living things down into its stinking maw.

I profile famous and successful athletes for a living and almost no one understands that success is merely a currency to spend on one big purchase.