CREATIVE LOAFING — The best country music bands/acts in Atlanta.
BEST COUNTRY BAND/ARTIST BOA AWARD WINNER
Year » 2019
Type of Award » Poets, Artists & Madmen
Picked By » Critics
JOHN DRISKELL HOPKINS
Thirty years ago, the staff of Creative Loafing gathered together to publish its first “Best Of Atlanta” issue. The then-weekly newspaper had already been in existence for most of two decades, but we were too busy producing an alternative to the staid daily papers and the glossy city booster magazine to consider taking all that we had been reporting on and catalog the best of it in one issue.
In the end, we did, probably after one of the long breaks the staff used to take in the back parking lot of the West Peachtree location “for inspiration.” The result was our first Best Of issue. In fact, it was the first annual Best Of Atlanta ever published in this city.
To mark the 30th anniversary, we decided to also celebrate some of the people in this city who have been along on our journey. Doug DeLoach offers an excellent profile on Jimbo Livaditis, whose father John first started the Zesto drive-ins 70 years ago. Kevin C. Madigan takes a Civil Rights tour of Atlanta with Tom Houck, an incomparable force in Atlanta politics, whose future was shaped by his time spent with Martin Luther King Jr.
Chad Radford discusses Atlanta music with Glenn Phillips, the guitarist who first came to notoriety in the late ’60s in the Hampton Grease Band, still one of the most original and inexplicable bands to call Atlanta home — and the first band to play live Piedmont Park in 1968, inviting the then newly formed Allman Brother Band to join them at the pavilion the following summer. James Kelly takes a look back at Cabbagetown’s Fiddlin’ John Carson and the birth of country music at 152 Nassau Street, with Dayton Duncan, scriptwriter and producer with Ken Burns on the latter’s upcoming PBS series “Country Music.”
Hal Horowitz talks with Tommy Talton, a Capricorn Records session musician who helped define Gregg Allman’s solo sound. And on a darker note, Curt Holman looks at season two of the Netflix series “Mindhunter,” which reenacts the investigation of the Atlanta Child Murders.
Creative Loafing. We’ve either been pissing people off, pissing on the boring and uninspired in Atlanta, or marking the best this city has to offer since 1972.
Thank you for continuing to be a part of it.
