Even though I'm not from the south, I spent a number of years in Savannah and came to wish I had some roots in the southern region of the country. The culture, the music, the food, the fashion, the manners, the literature, the sweet tea alone will make you wish you came from south of the Mason Dixon.
While at Sundance one of the films I'm most eager to view is Muscle Shoals. "In the crook of the foothills of the Cumberland Plateau, up in northwest Alabama, the land rolls out like a quilt unfurled, a patchwork of farms and small towns pieced together with barbed wire and kudzu. Here, the cities of Florence and Muscle Shoals flank opposite sides of the Tennessee River just before it jackknifes back up into the state from whence it came. Roots run deep here, where families are neighbors and neighbors often seem like family. It’s like so many other rural pockets of the south—except this one also happened to produce some of the most important American music of the past 50 years."
Currently producing music in Muscle Shoals is a sisterly duo that goes by the name of The Secret Sisters. "The sisters perform sweet, shuffling old-time country as The Secret Sisters, their sound an homage to some gauzy, gingham-checked past. Appearing onstage in crinoline-lifted dresses and bright red lipstick, the sisters seem plucked straight out of the 1950s. Their music is like a time capsule, which seems appropriate: Life in their “itty-bitty sweet hometown” can resemble one too." Not to mention the other Alabama resident, John Paul White, who has found recent fame and like The Secret Sisters, his band, The Civil Wars, made it onto the Hunger Games soundtrack.
The Secret Sisters - Tennessee Me
Aside from the music in Muscle Shoals, Florence specifically is also the fashion capital of the south, think Alabam Chanin and Billy Reid.
Even though I've been to Alabama I never made it to the Muscle Shoal region, I'm thinking a road trip is in order for 2013.
[quoted text from Southern Living]