Kory & Kelsey Wells’ Decent Pan of Cornbread is a half-music, half-spoken word record that encapsulates the sensory images of small towns and the rural South, while sometimes leaving that behind. With published poet and prose writer Kory telling the stories and her daughter, Kelsey, a former Uncle Dave Macon Days Macon-Doubler Scholarship recipient, providing instrumentation and her own singing voice, these 16 short tales—and one instrumental track, “Dustpan Bill”—are tiny snapshots of simpler times getting more complicated.

Kory speaks a beautiful and descriptive Southern language, opening Cornbread with “New Frontier,” a story about a child moving and getting used to her new home: I don’t like Tennessee, but I turn and there’s the house that came here with me/Shaky on stacked blocks, but a steady place/A home.

Most stories are roughly 2:30 in length. Some, like “Intersection” and “Environmental Impact Statement,” lament the inevitable sprawl, changes and modernization of areas that once had only a few houses 10 miles apart. The draw of other stories lies simply in the diction itself, rather than the meaning, like in “This Will Be My Last Letter”: My mood as dark as night, though as I write/White blossoms ride the warm spring breeze in swirls is spoken over a beautiful cello’s sound delving deep.

Or “At the Old-Time Jamboree,” when a musician plays her instrument for a crowd: It’s a fiddle she warms up, grooving and greasing bow over strings/Tossing double stops and slurs like salt and soda, uh huh.

Kory’s characters are complex ones, sometimes flawed. A Southern kid is assimilated into Northern culture in “Acquired Taste.” A promiscuous woman says the lines between right and wrong are often blurred: There’s good and bad in this wayward world/But the line between—are thin as this ribbon in my hair/Easy to tug this way and that.

Regardless of the story, they all have strong conviction and an Appalachian tinge complimented perfectly by Kelsey’s fiddle and banjo.

Find Decent Pan of Cornbread on CD Baby.