View This Email In Your Browser
Hi! Happy weekend.
I am SO excited about this week’s cover star, Rhiannon Giddens. Her new album is out today, and her new festival, Biscuits & Banjos, takes place in downtown Durham next weekend.
Not only does it mark an important milestone with Giddens’ return to Durham (she now lives in Ireland), it marks twenty years since her Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate, Don Flemons, was on the INDY cover; a feature that Giddens says “broke us out there as a band.” Our 2025 cover mirrors that 2005 cover.
That feels really special, especially as Giddens is a brilliant scholar of history and the throughlines between the past and present. (Last year, she premiered American Railroad, an impossible-to-describe touring podcast, music, and labor history show about the exploited army of workers who built the railway system.)
You can read my interview with Giddens here, along with a rundown of free Biscuits & Banjos events to seek out. While the festival is sold out, the free programming is just about as robust as the paid programming. That’s by design, says Giddens, who is bringing together acts young and old alongside scholarship on everything from biscuits to storytelling (Also: DJ parties!!) next week. Here’s an INDY playlist I made of some of the festival’s musical acts, if you want to get hype and/or familiarize yourself with the lineup. You can also dip into the archives:
- Shirlette Ammons on the impact of an audience’s gaze
- How Rissi Palmer became a breakout country star
- Adia Victoria on killing god to save herself (I truly think Victoria is one of the most slept-on contemporary musicians)
- Charly Lowry on dialysis and survival
Putting Black history front and center like this couldn’t come at a more precarious or symbolic time. Several weeks ago, the Pauli Murray Center was in the news when Murray’s biographical page was pulled from a National Park Service website; on Tuesday, it was back in the news when its $330k federal grant was rescinded.
The reason? The multi-year grant, which covered a staff salary and an upcoming exhibition, among other things, “no longer serves the interest of the United States,” according to its termination notice. A pretty chilling sentence for cuts supposedly just about fiduciary reduction.
I know that’s just one IMLS grant termination of many. If you’ve been affected by federal cuts and would like to help us document what is happening, shoot us an email. More below. Thanks for reading!
Before opening, the Wedgewood Cheese Bar faced one final hurdle: losing 200lb of cheese (story below). Photo courtesy of Sundholm Studio.
elsewhere in the culture section
On a lighter note, a Carrboro cheese shop is moving spaces and reopening in May as Wedgewood Cheese Bar, a Wes Anderson-esque space full of specialty cheeses, salty things, and wine. I hope people are going on dates to cheese bars.
Ideas for things to do this weekend: Flamenco, comedy from Craig Robinson (aka Darryl from ‘The Office’), Major the Bull’s birthday, and more.
“Finding America at Durham Bulls Athletic Park.”
Really wonderful music writing on Thelma & Louise, the 2008 financial crisis, and Alex, the new album from Daughter of Swords (aka Alex Sauser-Monnig of prolific trio Mountain Man): “The production and instrumentation—streaks of electric guitars, jolts of drum programming—also seem to have set Sauser-Monnig’s voice free. It stalks over Alex like a big cat, sometimes soft, sometimes snarling, always powerful. On “Dance,” it stretches and cracks with newfound confidence.” This is the kind of piece that makes me want to bang on a pot: “Save music journalism!”
Finally, Jane Porter has an exquisite feature on a Raleigh skatepark that was so much more than a skatepark. It’s a piece about something ending, but feels strangely human and hopeful? Read it here.
— Sarah Edwards —
Send me an email | Find me on Twitter
If you’d like to sponsor the Field Guide,
please contact [email protected]
You must be logged in to post a comment.