Salvation South

Salvation South has lots of music for you this week — and a touching story about an important value: standing by the folks who fought alongside you.

In the late 1960s, a soul band called the Chevelles came together in Milledgeville, Georgia. By the time they graduated high school, they already had a hit record and had performed at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater. But they never got their due. Here’s their story.

Salvation South contributor Russell Worth Parker helped write “Always Faithful,” the story of how a U.S. Marine major worked to get his Afghan translator out of the country when it fell last year. Today, the translator is building a new life in Texas with his wife and four children. (With a review of the book by J.A. Dailey)

In 2015, novelist Jonathan Odell, a Mississippi native, shared the stage with a legend of Southern literature, Pat Conroy, at Georgia’s Decatur Book Festival. In this lovely remembrance, he recalls how Conroy treated his fans like family.

In Salvation South’s story lineup this week, we do a deep dive into the Ring Shout — an essential piece of Southern culture. We throw in some Elvis Presley and Pat Conroy for a bonus.

The Ring Shout — an ecstatic and transcendent spiritual dance rooted in West Africa — rose historically through the South as a tool of Black resistance. Today, its cultural significance and power serve the purpose of collective healing and the expression of Black joy.

How a Yankee found religion in the music of the boy from Tupelo

Musicians as exciting as Willi Carlisle come along once in a blue moon.

“Salvation.” It’s right there in our name. It’s an elusive state attained via unexpected detours and poorly drawn maps. Willi Carlisle’s second album, “Peculiar, Missouri,” lays bare the peculiar path that this Arkansas man traveled to a place where he can see salvation waiting for him.

An Episcopal priest’s poem ponders what we mean when we ask the question, “And who is my neighbor?”

Atlanta’s Abra Lee is on a quest to recognize Black America’s greatest horticulturists.

A short story about a North Carolina country woman who takes a bus into a better, brighter life — but one that lasts only for a day.