Midweek during an oppressively hot July in 2023, I was seated at my cubicle, fixated on my collection of paper airplanes made from sticky notes and thinking, why on earth is it so hard for me to find tornado footage? I work at a news station, one that has operated for what feels like eons, and I was working on a weather promo for the station. The task was proving to be more difficult that I’d thought. By then, I had searched high and low for just a few seconds of footage that I could insert into it, but came up short. We’d reported on dozens of tornados in the last few years, surely? So then, why was it so hard for me to find this footage?!
Desperate, I resorted to going into the far reaches of our digital archives. These go back to at least 2006. I knew I wouldn’t be able to use anything I found since anything that old was surely going to be in 4:3 aspect ratio and, for lack of a better term, crunchy. But still, I was determined to find something. I didn’t want to leave empty-handed. I scrolled and scrolled, paging through stories from 2007, 2008, 2009.
Eventually, I would find something.
Something usable? Goodness, no. It was, in fact, in 4:3 aspect ratio and rather crunchy. It was from 2010, after all. Television news stations in smaller markets hadn’t fully made the switch to the 16:9 we all know and love just yet. But it was something that continues to occupy my thoughts, just under a year later.
The Butterfly Effect is a movie I haven’t seen. I am, it has become apparent, one of those film school kids who has seen a shockingly small number of apparently important films compared to my peers. Despite that, I am aware of the general concept: a butterfly flapping its wings in Dubai can lead to a tornado in Nebraska. Small happenings, big consequences.
What I ended up finding was a news package by a long since departed reporter talking about a band from Vicksburg called Burning Windsor. On April 24th, 2010, the band, on their way to Memphis to perform in a Battle of the Bands at the still-open New Daisy Theater, got caught right in the path of a devastating long-track EF-4 tornado on I-55 in Holmes County that traveled for a total of 149 miles from Tallulah, Louisiana to Sturgis, Mississippi. They ended up stopped alongside an 18-wheeler with a tree toppled on top of it, debris battering their tiny Jeep. Eventually, the tornado would pass right over them, and they would be tossed clear off the road, their Jeep and the trailer carrying all of their gear completely trashed. Miraculously, they lived to tell the tale. They even managed to make it to Memphis, playing in the Battle of the Bands on borrowed gear. Whether or not they made it far in the competition, however, is unknown. One of the members of this band was able to capture the entire ordeal, which lasted just over 30 seconds, on their cell phone and provided that footage to the reporter. The footage itself was harrowing, even downright nightmarish as a person with a fear of natural disasters.
While I was watching the package, something in my brain activated. Not just the abject fear of envisioning myself being caught in a tornado, but my metalhead radar was going off. I can’t really explain it – it’s more of an if you know, you know kind of thing – but I like to think I can clock a heavy music enjoyer pretty well. Dustin Thomas, the member of the band who was interviewed for the package, fit that general vibe. As I watched, something else bubbled up inside of me: an intense curiosity. My burning desire to find tornado footage was quickly supplanted by my burning desire to find Burning Windsor. And just like that, the day’s project was cast asunder and replaced with a new one.
Moby Dick is a book I haven’t read. I am, it has become apparent, one of those writer kids who has read a shockingly small number of apparently classic books compared to my peers. Despite that, I am aware of the general concept: a guy is so obsessed with finding a whale, he goes near insane trying to catch it and it ends up killing him…I think. Like I said, I’ve never read the book.
Finding the band wasn’t hard at all, actually. A simple Google search gave me exactly what I was looking for: a Facebook page, a Myspace page, and another website, one called ReverbNation. On this page was simultaneously a treasure trove of information and very little: songs, past performances, vlogs, and Facebook links. I hit play on the playlist of songs provided and began listening.
I was right. The songs were insanely compressed, but there was no mistaking it – they were made by a metal band.
As the first song Live to Regret played through my not-super-great work headphones, I had a barrage of thoughts in quick succession. First: This song is dope! Second: Wait–these guys are from Mississippi? Third: Are they still around? What happened to them?
Poking around the bare profile, I could only gather a few things: they performed in Mississippi and Tennessee, but only four performances were listed, they had one album out, but only a few songs were on this page, a music video was made at some point, but the video is no longer available on YouTube, and they had a sizable number of fans, but a meager digital footprint. A treasure trove, but very little.
It was then that I sent the link to my work friend, the (at the time) only other person I knew in this big wide world that shared the same musical interests as me. He agreed that the songs were good, but despite living in Mississippi his whole life and being roughly the same age as the band members, he didn’t know much about them, although he did say he thought he went to Copiah-Lincoln Community College with one of the members.
It should be noted that at this time, I was totally unaware of the thriving heavy music community hiding in plain sight in the Magnolia state. Being from a painfully small town in Alabama – a heavy music lover isolated on a desert island, basically – I was fully under the impression that in order to find my people, I’d have to travel far to sprawling, skyscrapered cities with the population density of an anthill. Or, at the very least, above the Mason-Dixon. I’d seen tour posters of popular metal bands skipping the Dirty South states entirely so much that I had come to expect it–I still do, not much has changed on that front–so when I saw that a band just a short skip down I-20 was making this music, I was impressed. And when I saw where they were performing, I was shocked.
Listed on ReverbNation are four performance dates in 2010 and 2011 in areas all around the state – Hattiesburg, Raymond, Tupelo, and another in Memphis at the same venue they nearly died trying to reach that fateful day in 2010. All but one of those venues is still in operation: a place called Goodtime Charlie’s in Tupelo. To my surprise, there exists a website chronicling performances at this venue from 2006 to 2015, and when I saw the names of the bands that performed there, well, let’s just say I was sufficiently gooped. Several 2010s-era metalcore bands (the best era, according to some…and maybe me as well) played at this venue in little ol’ Mississippi: I See Stars, Ice Nine Kills, Secrets, and more. I could just imagine the crowds of emo-banged, deep-V-necked, stud-belted teens and twentysomethings two-stepping and chugging Monsters in this tiny metal-roofed building next to a ranch supply store and a gas station in the middle of nowhere.
According to a Facebook post, Goodtime Charlie’s would hold a farewell party on the night of Friday, May 29th, 2015 before closing for good. These days, the building serves as a bingo hall.
After this discovery, I felt a strange sadness. Loss, even. When I made it to the comfort of my home, tears were shed. And that’s not something I do very often. But why such a strong response?
Living in a painfully small town (population: ~17,000 – though people from smaller towns don’t hesitate to tell me that I lived in metropolitan bliss because my town has *gasp* a Walmart!!) can give you a myopic outlook. For a while, I liked to think I was above all that, a small-town girl with big-city ideals. But for most of my music-listening life, and especially in high school, I thought this subculture was totally absent from the south, save for the major metro areas of Atlanta and Nashville. Was my favorite band at the time, A Day To Remember, from (what some would consider) a small, insignificant Florida town? Well, yes, but they were an exception. Besides, everyone knows Florida is kinda its own thing anyway.
There were no emo, scene, or goth kids at my school, no straightedge hardcore kids, no skate punks. No one was starting bands in their parents’ garages or living rooms. I can’t say for certain there was no one else listening to heavy music, but I had such a deep, bodily fear of being made fun of (or “joked on”, as was the phrasing of the day) that I didn’t often disclose that information anyway. After all, at the time, people assumed I was mixed race (pejoratively) because, among other bullshit reasons, they thought I “talked like a white person” and had unconventional music tastes in the rare times I did tell them. I didn’t want to give anyone any ammunition to use against me. I had such a deep fear of being made fun of that as an adult, I realized I suppressed large parts of my personality just to fly under the radar. Make no mistake, I didn’t think I was the only person in the world who was into heavy music. I just figured that none of them lived in Selma, Alabama. However, I would eventually find one other person.
I have long since forgotten his name, but one day towards the tail end my sophomore year of high school, a guy sits next to me in my art class and goes, “So…you’re really into dubstep, huh?” He was an upperclassman and not in any of the cool-kid groups. I had never seen him hanging out with anyone else. I had never even heard him speak before that moment. Despite that, I knew who he was. We had that art class together. I also knew that people spread rumors that he was on steroids because he was muscular – probably unfounded, as most high school rumors are. I was confused at first, but soon realized he must have found my Facebook account from middle school where I was, in fact, really into dubstep. And really annoying about it. I hadn’t used that account since I was 12 – so by then, for 3 or 4 years – and was mildly weirded out that he was able to find it.
I told him that no, I wasn’t really into dubstep anymore. He asked me what I listen to. In that moment, I had to make a decision – do I tell the truth, potentially peeling off a scab to an awaiting salt shaker, or do I lie? He didn’t seem like the kind of person who would make fun of me for my music choices. His tone when asking about my dubstep affinity was more of an interested amusement, not a mocking sneer, and I had grown hyperaware of what those sounded like. So, I decided to tell him the truth. He nodded, thoughtfully, and replied, “Me too.”
I was immediately skeptical. I asked him to name some bands, and he did, but I didn’t recognize any of them. So, I went through iTunes on my pink iPhone, listing band names off from my library of illegally downloaded mp3s that I had accumulated over the years. Some of them he recognized, some he didn’t. To this day, I still remember his reply of “God, no” when I listed Asking Alexandria. I can’t remember the rest of that conversation because the bell likely rang, ending class. We never talked again after that, and some months later, he would graduate and I would never see him again. Despite it being nearly a decade since that exchange, I still remember it.
It would be just as long before I would find another of my kind, not long after I started my current job in February of 2023. As a fresh new hire, I didn’t really have much to do, so I spent a couple of days shadowing one of my coworkers. As I do, she asks me a bunch of introductory questions, including what kind of music I listened to. By then, I had finally gotten my flight-or-fight response to stop activating when people asked the question, so I told her about an upcoming concert I was going to be attending: August Burns Red’s 20th anniversary tour. She nodded thoughtfully, and added their song Mariana’s Trench to the playlist we were listening to in her office. As it transitioned from the pleasant guitar intro into the heavy section of the song, she remarked “Oh – this sounds like the kind of music so-and-so listens to.”
That next week, I went out to lunch with my department, including the newly discovered metalhead. After we placed our orders and conversation lulled, he turned to me and said our other co-worker mentioned to him that we liked the same music. I lit up like a Christmas tree. We had a decently long conversation about the bands we both like, and I remember showing him Wildfire by Periphery, since their latest album would be releasing later that month. It was an incredibly validating conversation, and although I had just eaten some far-too-greasy fried calamari, I left the restaurant light on my feet.
The sadness and loss I felt last July was because I was wrong. Metalheads were everywhere – if they could exist in great numbers in Tupelo, or Raymond, or Hattiesburg, or Vicksburg, Mississippi in the 2010s, then they were likely all around me in Selma, Alabama. They were probably just forced into hiding like I was by their, at times, cartoonishly hostile peers – a hostility that I now have come to realize was a method of self-preservation in the pervasive bullying culture that infected our school system. There was a whole world waiting for me one state away, and probably just up the road in Birmingham. But, to my disappointment, I only found them years after they were already gone. This vestige of the past could have been my missing puzzle piece, but it had long since withered away.
There is a little more to the story.
When I googled Burning Windsor, aside from results about the band, I got lots of results about the 1992 Windsor Castle fire, an event that alongside a series of scandals surrounding The People’s Princess, Diana, would cause Queen Elizabeth II to label the year her annus horribilis, or horrible year. Despite that being the most prominent Windsor that burned, I would soon learn that is not where the band draws its namesake.
There are some prominent ruins near Port Gibson, about 40 miles south of Vicksburg, of the Windsor Mansion, which once sat on a sprawling 2,600 acre cotton plantation. The mansion, like many of the time, was built using slave labor by a new-money, cousin-fornicating planter named Smith Coffee Daniell, II. The mansion was completed in 1861, but Daniell wouldn’t be able to enjoy it since he died just a few weeks after its completion at age 34, probably of tuberculosis or something. It cost $175,000 to build, or roughly $6.2 million in today’s dollars. You’d be hard-pressed to find a home in Mississippi costing that much, unless you’re in the market for a plantation. If so, then I have good news for you – the Oakhurst Plantation in Inverness is for sale for a paltry $6.5 million.
In 1890, 25 years after the conclusion of the Civil War, Windsor Mansion burned to the ground. All that’s left these days are its stately columns, balustrades, and the wrought-iron entry stairway, whose final resting place is at Oakland Memorial Chapel at Alcorn State University. By the way, the irony of a staircase built by slave labor now sitting at the one of the oldest historically Black universities is not lost on me. Those columns feature on all of Burning Windsor’s merch: the cover for their first and only album From the Ashes, a t-shirt, and band poster.
2023, for me, was kind of a wacky year. By wacky, I of course mean utterly depressing. In February, I had christened it my year. I finally left my crappy previous job that was causing me tremendous mental strife, and it felt like the worst was behind me. The world was my oyster. Boy howdy, was I wrong.
Things started falling apart in March. Since I’ve been a working person with disposable income, I’ve been going to concerts to see some of my favorite bands, either in Memphis, Birmingham, New Orleans, or one time in Little Rock. Each time, aside from one, I’ve gone alone. Traveling alone as a woman doesn’t bother me (although, it probably should…) since I’ve always been a solitary person anyway, but the rare times that I have wished I was somewhere with another person has been in lines at concerts. I know I’m not the only one there alone, but it certainly always felt like I was one of a few. Every time I would show up to a venue an hour early to wait in line, desperately hoping I’d gotten there early enough to secure that coveted barrier spot, I would end up standing behind or in front of someone accompanied by a friend, or a group of friends, or a partner. I’d overhear their mostly mundane conversations and wish I could have someone to pass the time in line with.
In March, though, I had finally convinced my at-the-time best friend and podcast co-host to go to a concert with me. I had been unsuccessful in the past, even going so far as buying him a ticket to a show that was on my 23rd birthday, which I ended up spending alone anyway (and I had a whale of a time, but still). The concert eventually happens, the one I had excitedly told my co-worker about just one month prior, and it felt like he barely even wanted to be there. His girlfriend, who tagged along with us to Little Rock, was more enthusiastic about the trip than he was. I can only describe him as one of those moody preteens who gets dragged along to family vacations, frowning in every disposable camera picture that would eventually be placed gingerly in a photo album and lovingly labeled “Disneyland ’03”. I’m not even sure why he agreed to come.
Before our trip, I gave the both of them tips about the metal show experience – bring earplugs, stay hydrated, where to go if you don’t want to be sucked into a mosh pit – and told them I liked waiting in line for a while because it adds to the experience, and because of that sweet barrier spot. Once we got to our hotel, I told them I wanted to get in line at around 5, since the doors opened at 6 and this was a pretty major show in a pretty big city. My friend flat out told me no, with no protestation from his girlfriend. I tried to convince the both of them to join the line early, how it was part of the experience. We were going to be separated during the show since I had a mezzanine ticket and those had sold out by the time they bought theirs, so our line time would be the only time that evening we could spend together. My friend held fast, and since his girlfriend capitulated to him most of the time anyway, so did she. So, I ended up taking a Lyft to the venue by myself. I thought that finally, I would be able to experience this thing that brought me insurmountable joy with one of my favorite people, but that didn’t end up happening. Despite my best efforts, I yet again found myself standing between two groups of friends, alone.
Over time, I began to realize that our six-year friendship was one that I was putting the majority of the effort into. Eventually, the podcast ended at his behest and we stopped hanging out altogether. I spent the next several months spending way more of my free time alone than I used to. The isolation was really starting to wear on me by July when I stumbled upon that news package, although at the time I was still in denial that the friendship was really over.
There’s a refrain in the song “Live to Regret”: sometimes I feel like I’m alone in this / sometimes I feel like I am lost.
I’m not really one to cry over song lyrics, nor have I really ever been, but those two lines definitely hit home for me. Music has, for most of my life, been something that I experienced alone. There was no one around for me to gush about the latest releases of my favorite bands with. No one to have heated debates about whether one band’s body of work was better than another’s. No one to playfully chide about their affinity for a certain subgenre. No one to lament lineup changes or scandals or band breakups with. No one. And, on top of that, the one person I considered to be my best friend at the time was actively telling me how much they didn’t care about the one thing in the world I actually cared deeply about.
That July, things were tough. For lack of a better phrase, I was in the trenches. I did feel like I was truly alone. And then, all of a sudden, the community I was yearning for, the one I didn’t even think existed in Mississippi, died before I could even reach it. I was a day late and a dollar short once again. That’s why I cried on the way home from work that day, continued to cry at my desk frantically googling for more information, why tears streaked my pillowcase that night. It was a despondency I had never felt before.
Things got better after that, but it took a while. I continued to be isolated, and my happiness took a sharp nosedive in late October when my family dog Reo died at age 15. At that point, he was in my life longer than he was not, and I did not take it very well at all. I could have taken either my friendship imploding or my favorite creature on the planet dying if it was just one of those things happening, but both of them in such a short amount of time nearly did me in. But hey, when it rains, it pours.
All that culminated in me being positively miserable in Hawaii, one of the most beautiful places on earth, on Thanksgiving. I will not get that time back. It will probably be a very long time before I am able to experience Hawaii again. 2023 closed on a low note. Like Queen Elizabeth watching one of her many homes burn, it felt like my normalcy was burning. 2023 was, I can safely say, my annus horribilis.
In the midst of my annus horribilis, however, I made another discovery. Weeks after learning about Burning Windsor, the disappointment fresh on my mind, I was scrolling through Nextdoor to see what the boomers were up to. I happened upon a post of someone asking about a house on Jefferson Street in Jackson. Someone in the comments replied that it was a newly-opened event venue for Urban Foxes. I had heard of Urban Foxes maybe once before, so I looked it up.
On their website, aside from many pictures of delicious looking baked goods, they had a page for shows they hosted. On first impression, this bakery looked to be the kind of place where you’d hear women with long brown hair quietly strumming an acoustic guitar and singing melodies about something boring and heteronormative like the smell of your toxic boyfriend’s Marlboro Reds, but I decided to give it a look anyway, and my metalhead sensors went off once again. The names of the groups definitely weren’t indie women (who, by the way, can make some great music that I just don’t happen to be very into). I would later find out that this unassuming bakery was a place where, on select Friday and Saturday nights, you will hear some of the loudest, angriest-sounding music played in what used to be someone’s living room.
I’ve already written in detail about the first show that I went to in Jackson in my article about the operators of Good Gigs JXN, who organize many of these events. (I did say the story about how I found them was long and a little meandering, and, well, here we are.) I found that show through Urban Foxes, although it would be held at Hal & Mal’s.
After I left the tiny brew pub that night, I felt the same way I did after having lunch with my new co-workers. At last, I had found what I had been searching for for what felt like my whole life. At the risk of sounding dramatic, I felt whole. By December, I felt like I could heal, even if just a little. I found a community, new favorite bands, and even made some friends along the way.
This community has been incredibly welcoming, even before I started JXN UNDERGROUND, and I can’t say enough just how grateful I am that I was able to find it when I did. Not only is the community great, but the music genuinely is, too. So many local bands are churning out bangers that have made it into my permanent rotation, and I’m just as excited to see them perform as I am Animals as Leaders or ERRA.
In a strange butterfly effect, a tornado in 2010 lead to me finding a missing piece of myself in 2023, and, ultimately, to you reading this article.
If you couldn’t figure it out by now, Burning Windsor primarily serves as the framing device for a story that is mostly about me – but the story doesn’t end there. After all, there is still the question: what happened to the band? Unfortunately, unlike my story of self-discovery, this one doesn’t have a neat, happy conclusion. Something that I’ve come to realize in stories about real people and real events is that they typically don’t play out in neat, 3-act structures. Even documentaries have to have story producers so audiences leave satisfied. Unfortunately for me – and all of you – a story producer has not yet found Burning Windsor.
When I was crying big wet tears at my desk last July searching for information, I found, yet again, a treasure trove and very little. Nearly every rabbit hole I went down, and have gone down since I began writing this, has come up as a dead end. What I have been able to glean so far from the scant little information that I’ve been able to find is that Burning Windsor likely formed in 2009 in Vicksburg made up of members Dustin Thomas on guitar and vocals, Meredith Spencer on bass and vocals, Ben Williams on guitar and vocals, and Nate Wright on drums. Eventually, Ben Williams was replaced by Zac Case in 2011 (meaning he was absent from the tornado incident) according to the band’s Facebook page.
The earliest that I can confirm that they had live performances was 2010. The gig that nearly cost them their lives was that April, but given that they were performing in a battle of the bands in Memphis and not somewhere locally, I can only assume that they cut their teeth in Vicksburg venues for some time before that. Aside from the shows listed on ReverbNation, I was also able to find an April 2010 Jackson Free Press magazine issue that listed a performance at Hal & Mal’s in Jackson, but this listing is only able to be seen in a Google search results preview because the magazine itself is restricted from view by the publisher, and I haven’t been able to find any other digital copy of it. Sadly, the Jackson Free Press is effectively defunct after its acquisition in 2022, so it’s unlikely the publisher will make it public. The latest performance I could find was again on ReverbNation and in June 2011 at the New Daisy Theater in Memphis.
The band released one album titled From the Ashes, possibly sometime in 2009. The band does have a still-existing Myspace page, as all bands did in that day, but after one very unfortunate soul over at Myspace HQ deleted a portion of the site accidentally, the page is barely functional. However, from it, you can see the full tracklist of the album, which had 7 tracks with thousands of plays on each of the songs. Four of these songs are available on ReverbNation, but the other 3 seem to be lost. There is a database called LostMyspace that has archived a large portion of the site, but its search function leaves a lot to be desired, and I was unable to find any Burning Windsor music on it.
One single snapshot of their Myspace exists on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and it’s from December 3rd, 2009. On this version, there are lots of broken Flash elements, but also some key information: we can see they created the page in March of 2009 (which is weird, considering the broken current version of Myspace lists the album as having come out in 2008, but that could be a side-effect of the site’s partial deletion), the lineup at the time including Ben Williams, and that they were signed to a label, Vocalgraffiti Entertainment, which brings up very little in search results. Since none of the subpages were saved by the Wayback Machine, that’s about all we can see.
The band made one music video for the song You’ll Crowd in the Darkness, but it has since been made private on YouTube. Despite that, you can see some of the making-of progress in a still existing vlog. They also have a still-existing BigCartel shop selling CDs, posters, and a t-shirt that I really want.
Based on the fact that their last performance and their final Facebook post was in 2011, we can only assume the band broke up around mid-late 2011, lasting just 3 short years. This is not inherently unusual. Small local bands like Burning Windsor might consider a three year run with one well-received album a decent run. From what I could tell, the members were definitely out of high school, but still relatively young. Given that all but one of the members is basically untraceable online, I can only assume that they had their fill of the touring musician life and simply went on to lead rather ordinary lives. It’s entirely possible that they’re still in Vicksburg, maybe even raising families, hopefully able to look back on that time in their youth fondly, remembering the good memories and friends made along the way. I can only hope Burning Windsor had a good ending, but there’s nothing to indicate either way.
It is, however, unfortunate that they broke up when they did. It’s not like no one was listening to their music – if Myspace is accurate, they had over 8,000 followers and their songs had a combined 28,000 plays. That’s not nothing, especially for a band from Vicksburg, Mississippi in the early 2010s. Until I can one day get ahold of even just one of the former members of Burning Windsor, their ending will remain a mystery to me.
Although I’ve been unable to track down most of the members of Burning Windsor, I was able to find one. Also available on their Myspace Page is the band’s Top 10, which lead me to another band called Bloodstyne. There is even less information about Bloodstyne on the net than Burning Windsor, but I was able to find out that before joining Burning Windsor, Zac Case was on guitar and backing vocals for Bloodstyne, at least up until 2009, based on a video of Bloodstyne performing at Recess 101 in Brookhaven. (Side note, after watching a couple of performances uploaded onto YouTube of this band, I’m sorta interested to know what happened to them as well.) After Burning Windsor, it seems Zac continued to be a musician in some capacity before joining Natchez band Sullivan’s Hollow in 2018, where he has been on guitars since. Sullivan’s Hollow is pretty active as a band, with their most recent performance as of writing being in April of this year. There’s an interesting profile on the band by Tom Scarborough in the Mississippi Free Press if you’re interested, but Zac does not feature much in it. I was able to find him on Instagram and reached out to ask a few questions, but as of writing, I have yet to hear back.
If anyone reading has any information about Burning Windsor or its band members, feel free to reach out via my Instagram or through the contact form on this site. I know the Vicksburg music scene is very tight-knit, and although I have as of yet been unable to find a conclusion to this story, I know someone out there likely knew the members of Burning Windsor back then.
If it isn’t very apparent by now, music is something that means a lot to me. It’s kinda funny, because after all these years, despite this being a passion of mine, I’ve never tried to learn how to play an instrument. Probably because these days, it’ll be on my dime, and music is probably one of the most expensive hobbies a person can have.
I won’t go insane trying to track down Burning Windsor like our old pal Ahab, and it probably won’t kill me either (I hope not, anyway…). I have yet to find out if this story will help track them down, but it would be nice to know what happened, even though it’s well over a decade later. In the grand scheme of things, will the world knowing about this band from Vicksburg be groundbreaking or even really that notable? Unfortunately, no. Although their album From the Ashes and their music video would be considered lost media, they don’t even meet the requirements to have a page made about them on the Lost Media Wiki. Which is unfortunate, because if anyone can find something, it’s lost media enthusiasts.
Mostly, I just want people to know that I care about this band, even if no one else does, even if the members don’t anymore. I often find myself singing Live to Regret in the shower or while washing dishes or just milling around my apartment. After all, in a weird and very indirect way, Burning Windsor helped bring me out of those trenches I was in last July. Like those stately columns in Port Gibson, I have been touched by fire, but thankfully, not consumed. Would I have found that Nextdoor post if I didn’t find that news package? Probably. But Burning Windsor let me know that no, I am not alone in this. I am not lost.
JXN UNDERGROUND 