“This is not merely a stellar book. It is absolute ballad put to page.” —Southern Living Lewis Nordan’s fiction invents its own world--always populated by madly heroic misfits. In Music of the Swamp, he focuses his magic and imagination on a boy’s utterly helpless love for his utterly hopeless father--a man who attracts bad luck like a magnet. Nordan evokes ten-year-old Sugar Mecklin’s world with dazzling clarity: the smells, the tastes, and most surely the sounds of life in this peculiar, somewhat bizarre, Delta town. Sugar discovers that what his daddy says is true: “The Delta is filled up with death”; but he also finds an endless supply of hope. An ALA Notable Book Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Fiction Award
Sugar, a little boy growing up in the 1950s, encounters death in its many forms as he discovers a dead man in the swamp, digs up a dead woman from under the house, and sits on a dead druggist in the drugstore
Splish splash rumba-rumba bim bam boom! It's bedtime at the swamp—except somebody's not ready. Somebody's still splashing in the water and the mud. Is there a monster on the loose? Kristyn Crow has taken every child's worst nightmare and transformed it into a frolic through swampland. With funny illustrations and a catchy refrain, this story won't scare little monster too much before bedtime.
Music of Louisiana was at the heart of rock-and-roll in the 1950s. Most fans know that Jerry Lee Lewis, one of the icons, sprang out of Ferriday, Louisiana, in the middle of delta country and that along with Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley he was one of the very first of these “white boys playing black music.” The genre was profoundly influenced by New Orleans, a launch pad for major careers, such as Little Richard's and Fats Domino's. The untold “rest of the story” is the story of swamp pop, a form of Louisiana music more recognized by its practitioners and their hits than by a definition. What is it? What true rock enthusiasts don't know some of its most important artists? Dale and Grace (“I'm leaving It Up to You”), Phil Phillips (“Sea of Love”), Joe Barry (“I'm a Fool to Care”), Cooke and the Cupcakes (“Mathilda”), Jimmy Clanton (“Just a Dream”), Johnny Preston (“Runnin' Bear”), Rod Bernard (“This Should Go on Forever”), and Bobby Charles (“Later, Alligator”)? There were many others just as important within the region. Drawing on more than fifty interviews with swamp pop musicians in South Louisiana and East Texas, Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues finds the roots of this often-overlooked, sometimes-derided sister genre of the wildly popular Cajun and zydeco music. In this first book to be devoted entirely to swamp pop, Shane K. Bernard uncovers the history of this hybrid form invented in the 1950s by teenage Cajuns and black Creoles. They put aside the fiddle and accordion of their parents' traditional French music to learn the electric guitar and bass, saxophone, upright piano, and modern drumming trap sets of big-city rhythm-and-blues. Their new sound interwove country-and-western and rhythm-and-blues with the exciting elements of their rural Cajun and Creole heritage. In the 1950s and 1960s American juke boxes and music charts were studded with swamp pop favorites.
A little frog is singing to himself in the swamp one night. His song doesn't seem complete, so he invites other animals to join in. Nothing sounds right until the littlest voice joins the song - that of a tiny firefly. A wonderfully illustrated picture book with the important message that small voices need to be heard too.
Florida has more swamps and marshes than any other state except Alaska. One-third of it is covered with cypress domes, wet prairies, mangrove swamps, sawgrass glades, pitcher plant savannahs, and other wetlands. Swamps in Florida are the last refuge of panthers, wood storks, black bears, and many rare plants such as the ghost orchid and hand fern. In this intimate account of a world of biological richness, Ron Larson offers everyone from bird watchers and canoeists to botanists and policy makers an introduction to Florida's forested wetlands.
With the rhythm of the familiar poem "Over in the Meadow", this vibrant book introduces animals native to the Okefenokee Swamp, and highlights much of the flora and fauna that is recognizable in swamps and bayous elsewhere. Colorful, detailed illustrations and additional facts round out this appealing, rhyming exploration of a fascinating eco-system.
