This week: love (and one huge mistake) during wartime, a rootsy Carolina songstress, plus Mississippi “cotton country”!
The guests: Author Daniel Mason (The Winter Soldier) and singer-songwriters Alexa Rose (Low and Lonesome) and Zach Day (Mississippi Heat)
The time: Saturday, November 3, 7 p.m.
Your hosts: Jim Dees and house band the Yalobushwhackers
Click here for more information about Thacker Mountain Radio Hour—celebrating the music and stories of the emerging South.
Featuring
Daniel Mason
Daniel Mason is the author of The Winter Soldier (Little, Brown), “part mystery, part war story, part romance.” Lucius Krzelewski is a 22-year-old, upper-class medical student pressed into surgery (he’s never lifted a scapel) under brutal conditions in 1914 World War I. Fortunately, he is guided by Sister Margarete of St. Catherine’s, a nurse who teaches him the surgical skills he lacks. They become lovers. One of their patients is a shell-shocked soldier who can only communicate by drawing pictures. Lucius becomes obsessed with finding a cure for this patient, whom he dubs the "winter soldier."
With Margarete’s sudden disappearance, Lucius’s world is plunged into mystery before he eventually returns to Vienna, haunted by the fates of Margarete—was she even a nun?—and the winter soldier.
Mason is a psychiatrist and author of the novels The Piano Tuner and A Far Country. His work has been translated into 28 languages and adapted for opera and theater. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, he is currently a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford University.
Alexa Rose
Alexa Rose is a rootsy alternative-folk singer from the Carolina mountains. Her latest release is the full-length LP Low and Lonesome. The album was recorded in Asheville, NC, where Rose won that city’s Brown Bag Songwriting Contest in 2016. Her previous release was North.
As one reviewer wrote: “Carolina songstress Alexa Rose crafts clever lyrics and boot-tapping mountain magic in her own brand of modern folk.”
Zach Day
Singer-songwriter Zach Day was born in Jackson, was raised in Greenville, and now splits his time between Hazlehurst and Austin, TX. His rootsy Americana style combines blues and country music in a blend he calls “cotton country.” His latest CD is Mississippi Heat. His previous CDs include Southern Pride and Highway Outlaw.
