this late in the century, to be a French fashion designer or a Canadian hockey player or a musician in the American South involves a tension between tradition and talent, custom and character. The great ones walk on air, if only because they must live in the gorge between past and future, between the culture that has made them and the private desires that will push them beyond it. In the case of Southern music, I'm thinking here of Elvis Presley -- and I'm not just thinking of his first recordings at Sun Studios in Memphis and the way he took bluegrass hero Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky" and turned it sideways, insinuating a want into the song that Monroe wouldn't have dreamed of. I'm thinking just as much of his alien hair, his flashy taste in clothes, of the mere fact of the guts and vanity it took to set himself apart and reach for a new look, a new sound, a new life.

As Presley's friend Carl Perkins tells Joe Tidwell in the current special music issue of the Oxford American, "People ask me when I think this Elvis thing is gonna fizzle out. I tell 'em, it ain't. Why should it? He's in the pages of history. If they forget him, then they need to tell George Washington to move over too." Perkins' remark is one of the little moments in this wildly inconsistent issue of the John Grisham-published Southern culture magazine that remind the reader just what's at stake in tackling the sonic contributions of the land of cotton: the idea of genius and community, the towering influence and inspiration of race, and the beat Southerners like Presley and Little Richard and their brethren made that sent the whole world dancing.

Oxford American editor Marc Smirnoff claims he hasn't set his sights on comprehensive coverage of so huge a subject: "Instead, we have strolled, unhurriedly, down various avenues." That a Southern magazine devotes an entire double issue, enclosing a compilation CD within, to Southern music is at once a no-brainer of the sort we depend on from our glossy journals and a big risk -- because, quite simply, so much has already been said. Just as current Southern musicians must contend with the ghosts of greatness, so must writers on the subject take on some truly fine commentary. The same bookstores peddling the current Oxford American just received shipments of the new fourth edition of Greil Marcus' unparalleled "Mystery Train," a book that's as much about American ambition as it is about American music. On the critic's role, Marcus writes: "Putting the pieces together, trying to understand what is novel and adventurous, what is enervated and complacent, can give us an idea of how much room there is in this musical culture, and in American culture -- an idea of what a singer and a band can do with a set of songs mixed into the uncertainty that is the pop audience. Looking back into the corners, we might discover whose America we are living in at any moment, and where it came from." That's a lot to ask. But I will say this: Putting the Oxford American's mundane feature on the overrated nouveau swing band Squirrel Nut Zippers next to "Mystery Train" is so unfair it's obscene, like pitting a paper doll against Mount Rushmore.

Smirnoff's admission that he's only known about such a thing as good country music for a whopping five whole months doesn't exactly inspire confidence. I get the feeling that this issue of the Oxford American came together more out of luck than skill. Still, any publication would be fortunate to print the essays of Peter Guralnick and Nick Tosches, as this one does. Tosches' piece on minstrel Emmett Miller is a cool, complicated history of the singer, "one of the strangest and most stunning of stylists ever to record." In his righteous essay, Guralnick lovingly accounts his youthful admiration of blues artist Skip James as a way of condemning the startling racism, the "language of sociopathy," in Stephen Calt's James biography "I'd Rather Be the Devil," in which Calt defames the musician as "the plantation equivalent of a successful drug dealer in a modern-day housing project."

But why must the Oxford American deface the intelligence and originality of Tosches and Guralnick (not to mention Miller and James, who contribute the two finest performances on the CD) with dopey little personality profiles of people like Kate Campbell, whose "When Panthers Roamed in Arkansas" is the most intelligence-insulting song on the CD? Similarly, thankfully short features about Cajun dancing or about the New Orleans funk band the Meters (ugh: "so viscerally funky that [their] grooves are practically guaranteed to put you in traction") bear the editorial stamp of an American Airlines in-flight rag, not of a publication whose boasting subtitle is "The Southern Magazine of Good Writing."

This issue's one wonderful conceit is its obstinate refusal to acknowledge the marketplace. Half the people profiled -- Janis Joplin, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Charlie Rich -- are dead and have no specific new product to plug. Few mainstream magazines (like, none) would be likely to publish Robert Gordon's superb look at Sun producer Sam Phillips' disruptive appearance on "Late Night With David Letterman" in 1986. Gordon's description finds one of the century's most unusual men in what's become the boringly usual circumstance of talk show guest. But Phillips slyly refuses to answer all the old dull questions about his old interesting past, expressing amazement that a gap-toothed man such as Dave could make a million dollars. Looking Dave in the eye, he tells him, "'You gotta work for this one a little while tonight, son." As Gordon puts it, "Sam has, naturally if not consciously, designated Dave the artist, and he is extracting from him a nervousness and a deference that is very unlike Dave's usual suave and cool performance. Sam is now producing Dave."

This kind of pushing, this kind of upset, is what great artists do. Placed in a chair countless others have sat in for the express purpose of telling stories we've all heard before, a real opportunistic genius will milk the situation, crack us up, make us nervous and, best of all, call forth surprise. Mostly, the Oxford American's "unhurried stroll" through Southern music could have used a little more hellhound on its trail. Too many of its pages are spent lingering on corners listening to neighbors with nothing to say about nothing.