White Soul from the Black Hills: Whatever Happened to Jim Ford?

TWENTY YEARS AGO I drove around the American South in pursuit of something I called "country soul." By that term I meant the late '60s/early '70s music of black and white southerners, a sound that blended Memphis and Nashville, Delta and Appalachia, gospel and hillbilly. Country soul's holy grail was Muscle Shoals, Alabama, but its domain stretched from Macon, Georgia, to Shreveport, Louisiana. So did I. When my book Say It One Time for the Brokenhearted was reissued in 1998 it bore the new subtitle Country Soul in the American South.