No Depression: Roots Music and Culture Journalism

There’s the natural world, and then there’s the world of James Felice, one sweeping and surreal and limitless. His prodigious new album, Homeworld Blue, is more than four years in the making, the product of the tail-end of the pandemic when many were still holed up in the confines of their homes and limited to one especially valuable resource: their imaginations. Rec...

Editor's Note: Santi Elijah Holley has been awarded one of two No Depression Reporting Fellowships to write four in-depth features on a topic deeply impacting roots music today. Read his first chapter, which introduces spirituals as a foundational form of American roots music,

A voice as coolly effortless as Schaefer Llana’s didn’t come from nowhere. It was practiced and nurtured in church as a child, in college as a music student, and then as an engineer at Matt Patton of the Drive-By Truckers’ Mississippi studio Dial Back Sound. Though she’s since planted roots in Austin, Llana returned to Dial Back to make her debut album, the aptly titled F...

In 1998, the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay college student in Wyoming, shocked the nation. That same year, Rita Hester, a 34-year-old Black transgender woman, was murdered in Massachusetts. Their deaths reverberated across the United States, exposing the violence and discrimination facing LGBTQ+ Americans.

Shepard's death became a rallying point fo...