The Arts

Who Will Write and Sing the New American Pie?

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The Big Picture – By Glynn “Cowboy” Wilson – MUSCLE SHOALS, Ala. – Who will write the new American Pie for this tumultuous time in history? Camping for a few days down by the Tennessee River and contemplating our future – or if we even have one – I doubt it will be Taylor Swift…

Does Southern Hospitality Still Exist?

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What about Christian charity? – “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which…

Wayne Perkins: The Story of a Swamper And a Sideman

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There for the Birth of Southern Rock, he took the Muscle Shoals swampy sound to London and blended that with the Rasta island beat, creating a new sound that transformed Reggae for mainstream audiences in Europe and America. – A Draft Book Proposal in Progress By Glynn “Cowboy” Wilson – MUSCLE SHOALS, Ala. – (Jan.…

Nobody Really Knows Me: A Rock and Roll Journey

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By Glynn “Cowboy” Wilson – BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Close to 300 friends and followers of Birmingham musician Wayne Perkins, many from the east side of town who came of age in the 1970s listening to the Alabama Power Band play at The Crossroads in Roebuck, nearly filled the Steiner Auditorium at the Birmingham Museum of…

Lilly Ledbetter of Alabama, Champion of Pay Equality, Dies at 86

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Staff Report – Lilly Ledbetter, whose lawsuit against her employer paved the way for the Fair Pay Act of 2009 and who dedicated decades of her life to fighting for equal pay, died in Alabama on Saturday, her family said in a statement. She was 86. The cause was respiratory failure, the statement said, and…

To Build a Fire by Jack London

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Editor’s Note: To Build a Fire is a short story by American author Jack London. John Griffith Chaney was his real name. He was born on Jan. 12, 1876 and died on Nov. 22, 1916 at the age of 40 on the sleeping porch in a cottage on his ranch in Glen Ellen, California. London…

The Secret But True Story of Network News and The Happy Pill

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Satire – Fiction – Film Proposal -  By Glynn Wilson -  WASHINGTON, D.C. — Here’s a movie script idea for Netflix or one of the other streaming companies. FADE UP FROM BLACK – A secret cabal of corporate executives are huddled in a conference room in a New York skyscraper. They are watching video clips…

Operation Zap: A Novel and Film by Aaron Murphy

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Editor’s Note: In 1992, while working as a staff writer and reporter for a chain of newspapers on the Gulf Coast, I stumbled onto a dangerous story involving electromagnetic fields and pulses being developed by Naval Intelligence in Pensacola, Florida. The stories I wrote about it were so controversial that a rogue agent working for…

Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken

By Robert Frost – Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim,…

A Visit from St. Nicholas

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By Clement Clark Moore – ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there; The children were nestled all snug in their beds; While visions of sugar-plums…

National Gallery of Art Reopens in Nation’s Capital

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By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — Where else in America can you see in person a painting by Leonardo da Vinci? No where. Ginevra de’ Benci is a portrait painting by Leonardo da Vinci of the 15th-century Florentine aristocrat Ginevra de’ Benci. The oil-on-wood portrait was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in…

Memorial Day Tribute: Eschol Wilson

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By Glynn Wilson – As Memorial Day Tribute, I am memorializing this here on the web to be archived in a more prominent and permanent place than Facebook. This is a picture of my dad, Eschol Wilson, who served as a corporal in the U.S. Army near the end of World War II. He was…

Penny Dreadful Showtime Series Ends With the Words of Wordsworth

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Spoiler Alert By Glynn Wilson – What would we do without television entertainment and literature in the age of COVID? While I’m not a huge fan of Hollywood monster movies, it was hard to resist John Logan’s Penny Dreadful, a Showtime series now on Netflix depicting the dark side of Victorian England in the 19th…

Prometheus the Poem By Lord Byron

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By Lord Byron (a.k.a. George Gordon) Titan! to whose immortal eyes The sufferings of mortality, Seen in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise; What was thy pity’s recompense? A silent suffering, and intense; The rock, the vulture, and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they…

Will The Arts and Music Survive the Coronavirus?

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Editor’s Note: Can you even imagine a world without the arts? No writing, no music, no movies, only factory work and no play? “Without the arts life would not be worth living.” You can quote me on that. Perhaps the saddest thing in the world today, now that we are all dealing with the novel…