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Feb 23, 2024 | 
countryroadsmagazine.com | Alexandra Kennon
In 2019, when Carlos Detres and his wife Aryn first opened We Bite Rare & Unusual Plants, their carnivorous plant-focused nursery in New Orleans, they were only supposed to operate from that space for three months. Three months turned into a year and a half on St. Roch, catering to New Orleans gardeners and plant enthusiasts with a taste for plants with a taste for flesh.
In 2022, Carlos and Aryn unfortunately decided to close their brick and mortar.
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Jan 30, 2024 | 
countryroadsmagazine.com | Alexandra Kennon
Jazz, sometimes referred to as “America’s classical music,” was born right in New Orleans. Blues, by most accounts, sprung up nearby—and from it sprouted Baton Rouge’s particular brand of “swamp blues”. Further Southwest, Louisiana French music, zydeco, and swamp pop emerged; all indigenous to Louisiana, too. Even Shreveport has a too-often neglected strain of country, gospel, and big band music history.
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Jan 30, 2024 | 
countryroadsmagazine.com | Alexandra Kennon
You can find Spotify Playlists to accompany your reading, featuring the artists and songs included in this article, here:
When it comes to the origins of jazz, today often called BAM (Black American Music), there is one point that historians and scholars across the spectrum generally agree on: jazz would not exist were it not for Congo Square.
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Dec 28, 2023 | 
countryroadsmagazine.com | Alexandra Kennon
Louisiana may be lacking in mountains, but those familiar with West Feliciana Parish are quick and enthusiastic to champion the unexpected natural beauty of the Tunica Hills—whose rugged bluffs and ravines and hardwood forests seem more akin to the geography of the Appalachian states than Louisiana’s swamps and prairies. “Where else in Louisiana can you go from swampland in Cat Island to almost 400 feet in elevation?” asked West Feliciana Parish President Kenny Havard.
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Nov 30, 2023 | 
countryroadsmagazine.com | Alexandra Kennon
It’s hard to imagine that the artist George Rodrigue—famous for his Louisiana-inspired paintings, especially the Blue Dog series—never won an art competition during his childhood growing up in New Iberia. According to his son Jacques, George had felt such contests were “rigged” back then in the ‘50s, with awards usually going to relatives of the judges.
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Nov 30, 2023 | 
countryroadsmagazine.com | Alexandra Kennon
When Baton Rouge Ballet Theatre Artistic Directors Molly Buchmann and Sharon Matthews set out to stage The Nutcracker for the first time in 1982, they wanted to find a way to connect the classic Tchaikovsky score to Louisiana. They had the idea that a Louisiana Clara was listening to the score on an old wind-up gramophone, Buchman explained, recalling their excitement when set designer Nels Anderson found an antique gramophone cone to bring the idea to the stage.
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Oct 26, 2023 | 
countryroadsmagazine.com | Alexandra Kennon
This month, a velvet cloak of darkness settles over the prairies and bayous of Louisiana. Fog creeps between cypress trees. A twig snaps, then something howls, just beyond your eyesight in the distance. Could it be the Rougarou making his way toward you? Or just a Border Collie in a Superman costume? Whether you’re in the market for chilling frights or festive family fun, Halloween activities for any taste (and not just candy corn or chocolate) abound all over the state.
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Oct 26, 2023 | 
countryroadsmagazine.com | Alexandra Kennon
The neutral ground of Norman C. Francis Parkway—which until 2021 was Jefferson Davis Parkway—is a bustling pedestrian thoroughfare in Mid-City New Orleans. Besides joggers, dog walkers, and chatting neighbors, the stretch still contains a concrete elephant in the room: the large central pedestal that from the time of Jim Crow until May of 2017 housed a monument to president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis.
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Oct 26, 2023 | 
countryroadsmagazine.com | Alexandra Kennon
From the 1967 Bogalusa to Baton Rouge March, to the sit-ins organized by Southern University students in 1960, to Freedom Fighters strategizing over bowls of Leah Chase’s gumbo—civil rights history was made all across the Louisiana landscape. The Louisiana Civil Rights Trail marks many such locations, reminding visitors of the courage and tenacity that carried Black Louisianans through the eras of slavery and Jim Crow to today.
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Sep 27, 2023 | 
countryroadsmagazine.com | Alexandra Kennon
A lot of West Texas towns welcome you with warm drawls, cowboy hats. Not Marfa, which pops up like a nearly-forgotten film set from the expansive Chihuahuan Desert, around sixty miles from the Mexican border. Marfa doesn’t pretend to owe you a thing. Which begs the question—that perhaps gets answered, but on the other hand maybe not, beneath that big sky over all that red dirt—what brought you all the way out here, anyway?
