AE Feature

How Barbara Hendricks sang her way out of rural Arkansas, onto the world’s biggest opera stages and into the lives of refugees across the globe.

The images in Robbie Brindley's new book, "Kudzu and the Usual Erosion" were shot on 120 film on a Mamiya RB 67 camera — big enough to require a tripod and using a process that's "a lot more like fishing," Brindley told me. "You have to be very calm and patient.” 

"Beef" and the rest of the tracks on "Unsupervised," like Yoder's music with Little Rock outfit The See, are the sort of melody-driven pop rock anthems made for howling along to in a sweaty circle of friends at a concert — were they not concocted in a concertless era.

On Raye Montague, a Little Rock native whose accomplishments as an engineer are highlighted in "Overnight Code: The Life of Raye Montague, the Woman Who Revolutionized Naval Engineering.”

Live theatre returns to Arkansas this month and, while there’s not a full contingent of performances in the offing, it is a start. Here's how a few of the city's theatre companies are tackling a virus that’s turned their worlds upside down. 

Jukes has been a creative dynamo since he escaped from the clutches of North Little Rock’s Northeast High School in the early 1970s, and he’s been making compelling music and comics ever since, all without achieving what famous Arkansas recluse Charles Portis called “escape velocity” from Arkansas. That is not to say Jukes didn’t try.

The very word “play,” Lynett points out, is one we should learn to take more literally; theater exists to surprise, and one way to do that is to upend expectations or to get the audience to “laugh first” — two words which serve as a hallmark for Lynett’s eponymous theater company.

The 1979 record, laid down on tape for an Arkansas label called Symplex Records, was re-released in late January on Athens of the North, an Edinburgh, Scotland-based record label that specializes, its website reads, “in reissuing and officially licensing long lost, rare — and, above all, amazing — soul, disco, funk records.”

Bankroll Freddie on skirting death, homemade banana pudding and Megan Thee Stallion.

Finders, keepers.

We caught up with 2021 Grammy winner and UA Fayetteville professor Murdock to learn more about his trajectory as a teacher, the importance of representation and about what he’s blasting on his car stereo right now.

Ahead of Arkansas Youth Poetry Day, we talked with state poet laureate Jo McDougall about her work and about her drive to foster new young poets.

There is a Tiny Town of my dreams. Tiny Town is a real place, of course, in my hometown of Hot Springs. It is a unique tourist destination on Whittington Avenue, just northwest of downtown. I visited once as a child, and I remember it as this odd place, created as a labor of love, which is exactly the kind of thing I value now that I am older.

“Daddy’s Country Gold" is real deal country music, the kind that dabbles freely in blues and jazz and swing, and it funnels every ounce of charm and honeysuckle that Carper lends to outfits Sad Daddy and Buffalo Gals and amplifies it exponentially.

We talked with educator/performer Big Piph earlier this year about the pandemic and his new project "Far From Finished," during which he graciously indulged us in a set of extemporaneous “lightning round” questions. 

Hot Springs National Park turns 100 years old this year, as would have one of its most groundbreaking natives, songwriter and producer Henry Glover.

The Arkansas Arts Center has a new name to go with its $142 million new building in MacArthur Park. We talked with Executive Director Victoria Ramirez about the renovation and what it means for art in Arkansas. 

Weinheimer, along with bassist Chris Michaels and guitarist Charles Wyrick, will play a set on the front porch of Control Records in the Hillcrest area of Little Rock, 6 p.m. Thursday, March 4 for the neighborhood’s monthly Shop and Sip happy hour hang.

We talk with scholar and artist Dr. Nell Irvin Painter ahead of her discussion tonight as part of CALS' Six Bridges Book Festival.

We reached Chung in South Pasadena, Calif., via Zoom to compare notes on Ozarks living (“I don’t miss the ticks”), to discuss the merits of a family as a protagonist and to jinx him by invoking the work of noted Oscar hoarder Bong Joon-ho.