An Our State Playlist: The Watsons: 40 Favorites
Each month, Our State senior editor — and resident soundtrack maker — Mark Kemp, a former music editor of Rolling Stone, curates a one-of-a-kind Spotify playlist featuring North Carolina songs and...
View ArticleStories of Somerset Place
Left: Across the walkway from Lake Hospital (left) and the Sucky Davis House (right) is the Colony House (center), where plantation owner Josiah Collins III’s children attended school. Today, it houses...
View ArticleThe First Family of NC Mountain Music
If it weren’t for the cast of characters, the old house in the black-and-white photograph wouldn’t be much to look at. Crowded together on the creaky plank front porch are 12 people from two...
View ArticleEntering Western North Carolina’s Lost Cove
The forest is swallowing up the old town. Nature’s demolition crew. Vines grow from the windows of two dilapidated homes. A lone chimney, made of rocks, rises from a hill next to the rusting shell of a...
View ArticleAn Our State Playlist: Carolina Chill
Each month, Our State senior editor — and resident soundtrack maker — Mark Kemp, a former music editor of Rolling Stone, curates a one-of-a-kind Spotify playlist featuring North Carolina songs and...
View ArticleAn Our State Playlist: Mighty MerleFest 2024
Each month, Our State senior editor — and resident soundtrack maker — Mark Kemp, a former music editor of Rolling Stone, curates a one-of-a-kind Spotify playlist featuring North Carolina songs and...
View ArticleSwimming Across NC
Earliest childhood memory: I’m bobbing and swaying in the gentle whitecaps of Kure Beach on Pleasure Island just south of Wilmington, safe in my father’s sturdy arms. My tiny hands hold tight to Dino,...
View ArticleSchool Spirit in Jarvisburg
For almost 40 years, the bell sounded at 8 o’clock sharp each weekday morning in the fall, winter, and spring. It rang out over sprawling, flat fields of corn and cotton, potatoes and peanuts,...
View ArticleThe Return of a Jazz Legend
New Orleans-born jazz legend Wynton Marsalis remembers the first time he ever traveled to North Carolina. It was the late 1970s, Marsalis was 15 years old, and he’d come for his first year of study at...
View ArticleMarching to the Beat of a Different Drum
One year ago, on a day much like today, United States Army and Marine Corps veteran J.R. Quintero knelt in the middle of the field at the American Legion Fairgrounds in Jacksonville and kissed the...
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