Farahn Morgan

It’s the Saturday before Christmas and I’m backstage, sitting on a plastic folding chair at the National in Richmond, Virginia. The “rec room,” as the black lettering on the frosted glass door calls it, reminds me of a student lounge or a band hall. There’s a pool table between two spinet pianos in … Continue Reading

The Panasonic table radio in my grandparents’ living room held a strange fascination for me. During the day, I’d stand in front of it, studying its matte silver facing and smooth faux-woodgrain finish. At night, with the sun hidden behind the arched backs of the Eastern Kentucky mountains, I’d … Continue Reading

There’s a reason the American pastoral has endured in art as it has, tenuously, in life. Paint me a landscape with rolling hills, with cattle grazing in distant fields and a black horse with his white-streaked nose looking curiously up at the fences. Paint in the foreground a woman who spent her … Continue Reading

On a crisp Friday morning in early October, before the first frost, mom and I set out from our home in deep Southwest Virginia to visit the Dollywood theme park in East Tennessee. We’d been there once before, years ago, when I was five or six years old. Dolly’s Eagle When She Flies album had just … Continue Reading

Last year, at a birthday party in the Shenandoah Valley, a friend told me about a yard sale that lasts four days and spans six states and almost 700 miles along the US Route 127 corridor. “The World’s Longest Yard Sale,” it’s called. She and her boyfriend had set out from Michigan and taken on the … Continue Reading

Already, there are things I know I would change if I could. So much of it is just time. Then, there’s the weather. For the better part of April and almost all of May, it rained. The trees swayed under cloudbursts like women washing their hair, tossing their heads back in the rinse. Pollen gathered … Continue Reading

Jimmy and I are sitting at a plastic high-top table in the Bristol Casino bar. He’s wearing jeans, a faded Florida Gators hoodie, and a navy ball cap with an unfamiliar gray, triangular logo. It’s a Saturday night in Virginia, and some local bluesy act is playing too loud on the makeshift stage … Continue Reading

One night in July, standing in the Eastern Kentucky bottom where my uncle keeps his garden, I tell him I’m looking for someone in the mountains who has the old remedies. He stops working and crosses his sun-baked hands atop the handle of his garden hoe. “That’s going to take time,” he tells me, … Continue Reading

In the summer of 1991, I was five years old and living in my grandfather’s American dream. Together with my mother, we spent the warm season in China Grove, a farm town 35 miles northeast of Charlotte, North Carolina, fixing up a white one-bedroom house with a red-brick porch and a Rose of Sharon … Continue Reading

“Over or under?”  The old timers are taking bets on how much juice there’ll be after we run the Dale variety sorghum, tall and straight and stark naked in the front field, through the hundred-year-old press they’ve rigged to a 1952 Ford 8N tractor.  “He says eighty gallon. I say sixty. Where you … Continue Reading