Love Language of The South

Experience love the southern way with television host, blogger, and cookbook veteran Stacy Lyn Harris as she shares her family's most treasured memories and recipes.

Leo Blokhuis is an award winning author and music journalist familiar to Dutch TV audiences as host of a prime time music show ‘Top 2000 a Gogo’. In his latest ‘sound book’ he writes of the period in the 60s and 70s when soul and country music traditions married together to create country soul and vice versa. The book part is 176 pages of Dutch text and since my near neighbours language is not one of the main languages that I can read I am unable to comment on Blokhuis’ writing skills. What I can say is that the text is interspersed with photographs of significant artists, record labels and a page on each featured song that lists studio details and participating musicians. Clearly a labour of love the book looks great and feels substantial.

"Love Language" was the eighth album by R&B/Soul crooner Teddy Pendergrass. It was his first record for Asylum Records after being a longtime artist on Philadelphia International Records. It did much better on the Billboard 200 than his last two records, peaking at #38. He had not reached the top 40 on the album charts since 1981's It's Time for Love. The album was composed and produced by Michael Masser, with the exception of the track You're My Choice Tonight (Choose Me) (#15 R&B chart, November 3, 1984), which was produced by Luther Vandross and featured Cissy Houston on background vocals and as "Solo Female Voice".

Nine-year-old Harry isn't like his friends at school. While they are playing computer games at home, he is down the allotment looking after his pigeons. Harry from Newcastle is embarking on his first pigeon racing season. Inspired by his dad's love of the birds, he is going to see if he can rear a team of winners and take on the more mature members of the South Gosforth Homing Society. He has to learn about how to keep, train and nurture the birds ahead of their first race. With fewer than 200 young fliers in the UK, Harry and his dad Shaun hope to inspire the next generation of pigeon racers by giving a talk at his school. On race day, Harry is up at 3am with the excitement of seeing his birds come back. Will he have a winner?

You may not be able to see the gorgeous landscapes behind Baby Grand, Stuart McLamb’s fourth record as The Love Language, but they’re so essential to the picture you’ll feel them in every note. Started in, of all places, a cavernous Virginia hammock factory, fragmentary demos came alive when splashed by sunshine during a move across the country to California, where the album was completed. “It was something just about being in a new city, and a new light,” McLamb says, “and reopening the sessions, and this demo that I thought was a throwaway, suddenly I’m really feeling it….”