Spring is here and there’s nothing that celebrates Spring quite like a Southern festival…good music, good food, good company!

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, here’s a roundup of some of the best Southern food festivals for Spring and Early Summer 2008.

Highlights of the season include Charleston, SC’s world famous Spoleto Festival, the International Bar-B-Q Festival in Owensboro, KY, Tryon, NC’s Blue Ridge Barbecue Festival, and the Appalachian Evening Summer Concert Series and Appalachian Dinner in Robbinsville, NC.

According to a recent article on Foxbusiness.Com, the Southeastern United States is the best place to retire for those on fixed incomes. (The article goes on to list the American West and South and Central America on the #2 and #3 positions, respectively.)

As John Shelton Reed once said, “Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the U.S. to Europe’s wines and cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.”

Please feel free to enjoy our Southern Coastal Life MP3 Playlist which is filled with 30+ streaming songs that celebrate the pleasures of Southern food, fishing, surfing, and life spent on the water. (Additional music will be periodically added.)

Artists include: The Andrews Sisters, Andy Griffith, Van Morrison, Elijah and the Ebonites, The Weavers, Tom Waits, James Taylor, Carl Perkins, The Drifters, Dizzy Gillespie, Smiley Burnette, Fats Waller, Martha and the Vandellas, Hank Williams Sr., Tim McGraw, Jimmy Buffet, James Taylor, Ryan Adams, Stringbean, Little Milton, Louis Jordan, Dar Williams, and The Preservation Hall Band…good stuff!

You can listen to it here.

The award winning outdoor sportsman magazine Field and Stream, recently named the Charleston Jetties one of the best fishing spots in the Southern United States.

Considered by the magazine to be the third best fishing spots in SC, the Santee-Cooper Area took first place in the state, with the Lake Russell Area listed in second place.

Here’s the full list of notable fishing spots in the South after the jump…

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The Library of Congress has recently released 3000+ photos on the www for the enjoyment of the online community…some of them dating back as far as the mid-1800’s.

Here’s a few fishing related photos from their collection…

Shot in Louisiana in 1940, the last photo in the series looks just like a portrait of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.