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Annual Songwriter Keynote

Upcoming Events

McMurtry HeadshotASK 2025: James McMurtry with Abe Partridge - Saturday, March 22, 2025

After a hiatus, the Annual Songwriter Keynote returns, live at the University of South Alabama on Saturday, March 22, 2025! This special event, which will be held in the Laidlaw Performing Arts Center (Mainstage Theatre), will feature an acoustic performance by critically-acclaimed singer-songwriter James McMurtry. Local artist Abe Partridge will open, following remarks from former ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Writer-in-Residence Frye Gaillard. Admission will be free, and all attendees will receive a free vinyl copy of IMC Volume Two, the latest compilation of live recordings from the IMC Concert Series. Ticketing details and procedures will be announced on Monday, February 3, 2025.

JAMES McMURTRY: One of America's most celebrated songwriters, James McMurtry has ten studio albums to his credit, each an indispensable cross section of American experience. From his John Mellencamp - produced debut, Too Long in the Wasteland (1989), to his most recent release, The Horses and the Hounds (2021), McMurtry has consistently turned his formidable wit and wisdom into incisive vignettes. Novelist Stephen King calls him "the truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation." The BBC's Bob Harris deems him "the most vital lyricist in America today." The dean of American rock critics, Robert Christgau, named McMurtry's 2004 tune "We Can't Make It Here Anymore" the best song of the decade. "Much attention is paid to James McMurtry's lyrics, and rightfully so," offers The Washington Post. "He creates a novel's worth of emotion and experience in four minutes of blisteringly stark couplets."

ABE PARTRIDGE: A musician, songwriter, visual artist, and documentarian based in Mobile, Alabama, Abe Partridge is a man of many talents. He's created an award-winning podcast (Alabama Astronaut); staged a major exhibition at the Alabama Contemporary Art Center (With Signs Following); published an art book documenting his ethnographic fieldwork (With Signs Following: Portraits + Stories from the Serpent-Handling Faith); painted the cover art for one of Charlie Parr's Smithsonian Folkways releases (2021's Last of the Better Days Ahead); and released two critically-acclaimed studio albums (2019's Cotton Fields and Blood for Days and 2023's Love in the Dark). As American Songwriter rightly notes, "Abe Partridge has established himself as one of the most respected songwriters and visual folk artists in the Southeast."

FRYE GAILLARD: An award-winning former journalist and Southern Editor at the Charlotte Observer, Frye Gaillard spent eighteen years as Writer in Residence at the University of South Alabama. He's the author of more than thirty books, including A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s (2018), Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America (2004), and Watermelon Wine: The Spirit of Country Music (1978). His byline has appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Journal of American History, The Bitter Southerner, Oxford American, and countless other publications. A 2025 inductee into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame, Gaillard has also won The Lillian Smith Book Award, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Museum Literary Prize, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Humanitarian of the Year Award, the Alabama Governor’s Award for the Arts, the Clarence Cason Award for nonfiction, and the Eugene Current-Garcia Award for literary scholarship.

ASK 2025 is co-sponsored by the Alabama Humanities Alliance, the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Department of English, the Stokes Center for Creative Writing, the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Department of Theatre and Dance, the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø College of Arts and Sciences, and the Independent Music Collective.

Past Events

Hood HeadshotASK 2020: Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers - Monday, March 2, 2020

We're thrilled to announce the third installment of the Annual Songwriter Keynote — Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers live at the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø on Monday, March 2, 2020! This special event, which will be held in the Laidlaw Performing Arts Center (Mainstage Theatre), will feature a musical performance by Patterson Hood, a short presentation on roots music by Peter Cooper from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, and a roundtable discussion that will include critically acclaimed singer-songwriter Will Johnson. Doors open at 7:00 p.m., and the show begins at 7:30 p.m. All attendees will receive a complimentary copy of IMC Volume One. This event will be free and available tickets will be distributed on a first-come-first-served basis at the door on the evening of the show.

PATTERSON HOOD: An Alabama native whose father co-founded Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, Patterson Hood has spent the last several decades fronting the incomparable Drive-By Truckers. The band's much-anticipated twelfth studio album, The Unraveling, is out January 31st on ATO Records. While Rolling Stone calls DBT "the boldest, baddest Southern band in the land," it is Hood's incisive critical faculties that help make the music relevant. The Los Angeles Review of Books deems Hood "one of the sharpest observers of Southern culture and society." American Songwriter agrees, calling him "the truest voice of the modern South currently making records." "No Southern musical act over the last two decades," writes The Bitter Southerner, "has done so much to challenge and change the way their fans see themselves and their home."

PETER COOPER: Currently a writer and editor for the Country Music Hall of Fame, Peter Cooper is a man who defies easy categorization. A long-time music journalist for The Tennessean, a Grammy-nominated producer, a critically acclaimed songwriter and musician, a Senior Lecturer in Music History and Literature at Vanderbilt's Blair School of Music, and the author of Johnny's Cash and Charley's Pride: Lasting Legends and Untold Adventures in Country Music (2017) — it's no wonder that Nashville Arts & Entertainment Magazine named Cooper one of Nashville's "10 Most Interesting People." "Peter Cooper looks at the world with an artist's eye and a human heart and soul," writes Kris Kristofferson. "His songs are the work of an original, creative imagination, alive with humor and heartbreak and irony and intelligence, with truth and beauty in the details."

WILL JOHNSON: Austin-based Will Johnson was the long-time leader of Patterson Hood's favorite band, the legendary indierock outfit Centro-matic. The group released a dozen albums before calling it quits in 2014, prompting Jason Isbell to close Something More than Free (2015) with the Centro-matic tribute "To a Band That I Loved." "Will Johnson is one of my favorite songwriters on Earth," Isbell writes. While his band has certainly been missed, Johnson has found a host of other outlets for his creative energies. Among his many endeavors, Johnson has played drums for Monsters of Folk, has filled in on guitar for Drive-By Truckers, and has collaborated with Jay Farrar, Jim James, and Anders Parker to record the unpublished work of Woody Guthrie — all this while releasing a half-dozen brilliant solo albums of his own (including Wire Mountain in 2019) and developing a burgeoning reputation for his folk art. A long-time IMC favorite, Johnson is the only musician to appear on IMC Volume One twice: as a solo artist with "Alabama Crusade" and as part of the duo Marie/Lepanto, performing the Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster tune "Tenkiller."

ASK 2020 is co-sponsored by the Alabama Humanities Foundation, the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Department of English, the Stokes Center for Creative Writing, the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Department of Theatre and Dance, the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø College of Arts and Sciences, and the Independent Music Collective. PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Tennille.

Ritter HeadshotASK 2019: Josh Ritter - Thursday, March 7, 2019

We're excited to announce that our Annual Songwriter Keynote will feature Josh Ritter, live at the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø on Thursday, March 7, 2019. This special event, which will be held in the Laidlaw Performing Arts Center (Mainstage Theatre), will feature a musical performance, a reading, and an interactive Q&A. Doors open at 7:00 p.m., and the show begins at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free and available tickets will be distributed on a first-come-first-served basis at the door on the evening of the show. 

ASK 2019 is co-sponsored by the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Department of English, the Stokes Center for Creative Writing, the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Department of Theatre and Dance, the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø College of Arts and Sciences, the Independent Music Collective, and the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi. PHOTO CREDIT: Laura Wilson.

Darnielle HeadshotASK 2018: John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats - Monday, February 26, 2018

The Stokes Center for Creative Writing and the Independent Music Collective present John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats at ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø's Dramatic Arts Mainstage Theatre in the Laidlaw Performing Arts Center on Monday, February 26, 2018. The two-act event will feature a musical performance, a reading, and a short interview conducted by the Stokes Center's new writer-in-residence Adam Prince. Doors open at 7:00 p.m., and the show begins at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free and available tickets will be distributed on a first-come-first-served basis at the door on the evening of the show. 

ASK 2018 is co-sponsored by the Independent Music Collective, the Stokes Center for Creative Writing, the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø College of Arts & Sciences, the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Department of English, and the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Department of Theatre and Dance. PHOTO CREDIT: Jeremy M. Lange.