Betty and Elton on Venice Beach. Click on the pic for a slide show.

“I wrote about thing that I had been interested in, like women that call their babies ‘precious,’ and they grow up and are in wars and terrible things happen to them. I was writing motherhood songs, and they weren’t going over at all, so I thought, ‘Well, you want to hear about sex? I had a marriage for thirty-sex years. I’ll sing about sex.’ I started writing about sex, and it just picked up immediately. Elton didn’t like it at all, at first. He said, ‘You sing White songs that make people cry.’ But that’s how it started.”—Secretary turned ribald folk singer Betty White to Kevin Brockmeier in the early 1990s. Brockmeier interviewed White for a high school research paper. He recalls the interview in a profile of Elton and Betty White in the new Oxford American Southern Music Issue, on newsstands today. Elton and Betty’s “Heat” and “Jelly Behind Woman” are included on one of two companion CDs.

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“In addition to living by the principles in the New Testament, we have learned that some Old Testament practices, including recommended times of sexual abstinence, are still helpful today. For example, one such teaching tells couples to abstain from sex for seven specific days during a woman’s menstrual cycle. Another passage says to abstain for forty days after the birth of a boy and eighty days after the birth of a girl…we’ve found them to be healthy practice, both for our bodies and for our relationship.”—Michelle Duggar, mother of 17 (soon to be 18), on her birth control methods in The Duggars: 20 and Counting, a new family autobiography/guide to raising a ginormous family.

“Most black singers go zero to 100, rushing to the big payoff, but Al Green is like a souffle that takes 45 minutes to rise.”—Roots drummer/producer Amir “?uestlove” Thompson in Rolling Stone’s entirely frivolous countdown of the 100 greatest singers. Green comes in at #14 (Other Arkansans included: Johnny Cash (#21), Levon Helm (#91).

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