IF YOU LIKE… | THEN GET TO KNOW… |
The Allman Brothers Band | Atlanta Rhythm Section, the onetime Doraville studio session band that released more than a dozen albums, peaking with 1978’s Champagne Jam, or the Georgia Satellites, known for 1980s hits “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” and “Hippy Hippy Shake.” |
Ray Charles |
Willie Lee Perryman, aka Piano Red, aka Dr. Feelgood, was known for his raucous “barrelhouse blues,” while “Blind Willie” McTell, master of the twelve-string guitar, recorded under multiple aliases, including “Pig ’n’ Whistle Red.” |
R.E.M. |
Dreams So Real was part of the 1980s Athens alt-rock scene and, like Marietta’s Guadalcanal Diary of the same era, racked up plenty of college-radio airplay. |
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple | Youngblood by John Oliver Killens, who was born in Macon and cofounded the Harlem Writers Guild, chronicles daily life in small-town Georgia, while Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint was a critically acclaimed account of a lynching. |
Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find short-story collection | The stories in Mary Hood’s collection How Far She Went are set in the small-town South and won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, while Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,the acclaimed debut by ZZ Packer, draws on Packer’s Atlanta childhood. |
Pat Conroy’s The Great Santini | Instead of Conroy’s autobiographical novel about being raised by an abusive father, sample The Last Radio Baby, Raymond Andrews’s memoir of growing up in a Georgia sharecropping community in the 1930s and 1940s, or Be Sweet: A Conditional Love Story, Roy Blount Jr.’s bittersweet memoir about his mother. |
Anne Rivers Siddons’s Peachtree Road | A big family secret (bigamy!) is at the center of Tayari Jones’s Silver Sparrow, while Southern traditions are challenged in Susan Rebecca White’s Bound South. |
This article originally appeared in the November 2012 issue.
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