A city‑hall slush fund, a dissenting vote, and a rainy weekend in Tallahassee accidentally created Word of South, the South’s most unlikely laboratory for music and literature. In this episode of Salvation South Deluxe, Chuck Reece walks Cascades Park with co‑founder Mark Mustian, hears BJ Barham of American Aquarium and novelist Kristen Arnett blow up old ideas about who counts as Southern, relives Muscle Shoals legend Donnie Fritts’s last hurrah in a packed nightclub, and joins Tommy Prine as he reflects on his father John Prine’s legacy and what it means to be a Southerner now.

 

Word of South Festival Stage

Credit: Salvation South

 

At Cascades Park in Tallahassee, a music festival and a literary festival become something harder to define and more interesting to witness. Chuck Reese takes us inside the Word of South Festival, a gathering founded in 2015 by novelist and former city commissioner Mark Mustian, who turned a local political controversy into seed money for an experiment in pairing writers and musicians. What emerged was not a celebration of fixed Southern tradition, but a space where artists test it, stretch it, and sometimes overturn it.

Along the way, we hear from BJ Barham of American Aquarium, who argues that country music’s deepest roots are in protest and solidarity, not nostalgia. Novelist Kristen Arnett reflects on Orlando, queerness, and the parts of Southern life that older literary canons often ignored. M.O. Walsh explains how The Big Door Prize became, in part, a love letter to John Prine, and how Word of South creates collisions between books and songs that feel both accidental and inevitable.

The episode also looks back at one of the festival’s most memorable moments, a rain-forced 2018 indoor performance centered on Muscle Shoals songwriter Donnie Fritts, whose music and legacy still linger over the event. It closes with Tommy Prine on a balcony above the festival grounds, offering a definition of Southern identity that feels both simple and demanding: to be a Southerner is to open your heart to everyone you meet. In this telling, Word of South becomes more than a festival. It becomes a working model for a broader, more curious South.