the the newsletter of the
Center for the Study of Southern Culture • Spring 2010
the university of mississippi
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harles Reagan Wilson’s list of achievements spans decades, continents, and organizations. Most recently, the Kelly Gene Cook Sr. Chair of History and Professor of Southern Studies became the third recipient of the University of Mississippi’s Distinguished Research and Creative Achievement Award. The award was presented May 8 during the university’s commencement ceremony. “This award honors Dr. Wilson for his scholarly contributions and his role in anticipating, inspiring, and facilitating a field of interdisciplinary research known as Southern Studies,” said Alice M. Clark, vice chancellor of research and sponsored programs. “Dr. Wilson’s scholarship on Southern religion, memory, and culture has elevated observances of life in the South to an area of academic inquiry.” Formerly director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, Wilson published his first book, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920, in 1980; it was reprinted with a new preface in 2009. According to his successor as Center director, Ted Ownby, “In that book Wilson helped anticipate a movement in the past generation that studies memory as both politics and psychology. Baptized in Blood posed an essential question that scholars of the post–Civil War American South are still answering: if Confederates claimed they were fighting a war in which God was on their side, how did they interpret defeat?” “I haven’t received other research awards, thus making this one especially meaningful,” Wilson said. “Receiving this award is a humbling experience because there is so much excellent research going on across campus in so many departments and programs.” Wilson joined the University of Mississippi faculty in 1981. During his tenure, he has published four monographs on Southern history, edited or coedited eight books of essays, published 41 scholarly articles, and made 62 presentations at conferences, symposia, workshops, or lecture-
David Wharton
Charles Reagan Wilson Named Recipient of Distinguished Research Award
Charles Reagan Wilson ships. The Encyclopedia for Southern Culture (which he coedited with William Ferris in 1989) received the Dartmouth Prize from the American Library Association as best reference book of the year. Wilson regards the 24-volume New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture as his main achievement. Volumes of the encyclopedia began publishing in 2006 and will be finished in 2012. The total value of the research projects conducted continued on page 12
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’Tis the Season Published Quarterly by The Center for the Study of Southern Culture The University of Mississippi Telephone: 662-915-5993 Fax: 662-915-5814 E-mail: cssc@olemiss.edu www.olemiss.edu/depts/south
IN THIS ISSUE Spring 2010
1 Charles Wilson Receives Award
2 Director’s Column
3 Southern Studies on the Road
3 Living Blues News
4 Gammill Gallery Exhibition Schedule
4 SST Student Photographs
5 2010 F&Y: “Faulkner and Film”
6 Lawn in August to Be Unveiled
7 Center Seeks Funds for SST Students
8 Continuing Center Projects
8 Contributors
9 Southern Studies Alumni News
11 MIAL to Celebrate Mississippi Artists and Writers on June 5 in Jackson 12 In Memoriam 14 30 Years of Sacred Harp in Oxford 15 All-Day Singings in Mississippi 16 Movie Director Jodie Markell to Show Teardrop at October Williams Festival 17 Reading the South: Reviews & Notes 25 Southern Foodways Alliance News 28 2010 Delta Literary Tour Portfolio 30 2010 Book Conference Portfolio 32 “Life Never Touched Him ’til the First Monday in March” 34 Southern Culture Catalog 35 Catalog Order Form 36 Address Section/Mailing List Form/ Friends Information and Form
REGISTER STAFF Editor: Ann J. Abadie Graphic Designer: Susan Bauer Lee Mailing List Manager: Mary Hartwell Howorth Editorial Assistant: Sally Cassady Lyon Lithographer: RR Donnelley Magazine Group The University complies with all applicable laws regarding affirmative action and equal opportunity in all its activities and programs and does not discriminate against anyone protected by law because of age, color, disability, national origin, race, religion, sex, or status as a veteran or disabled veteran.
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I write in the midst of what many faculty members term Thesis Season, a pretty dramatic time when students are finishing PhD dissertations, MA theses, final papers, internship reports, and Honors College theses, and faculty are doing their best to inspire or require improvement. There’s plenty of reading and rereading, late nights and nervous students, and plenty of sentences, paragraphs, and entire manuscripts that need revision. Students are often torn between trying to do their best and trying to enjoy a round of celebrations and appreciations that mark the end of the spring semester. Thesis season, at this university as on many campuses, immediately follows spring conference season, and numerous annual events compete for the attention of students and other conference-goers. The Oxford Conference for the Book, the Porter Fortune Jr. History Symposium/Future of the South Conference, Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and numerous other events took place in a short stretch in February and March. One reason for this concentration of conferences is that another season, football season, takes command of hotel rooms, roads, and restaurants during so much of the fall that many events in town squeeze into the spring. By far the most notable event of the 2010 spring conference season was the death of Barry Hannah, who passed away just a few days before the Oxford Conference for the Book that featured him and his work. People at the conference repeatedly wondered if Barry would have liked being honored, and speakers had the difficult job of modifying their comments to deal with his death. The conference was not a wake, but it became far more a tribute than the roast some may have been planning. So the talks ranged from youthful stories to appreciation of Barry’s work and teaching to tributes and memories from close friends. It was good to have so many people talking about Barry Hannah and his fiction, and the conference schedule helped give a structure to conversations people were wanting to have. If there were recurring themes, they concerned the originality of Barry’s fiction, the passion he showed for good sentences and paragraphs in his own work and the work of other writers and student writers, and the uniqueness of the life he chose to live. In some ways we can be overwhelmed with seasons, as sports and media want us to organize our lives around the start, middle, and end of their seasons, with special time reserved for championships, supposedly major events, and prize ceremonies. The crop seasons still govern the lives of many people, although lots of us organize our lives more around eating, rather than producing, according to the seasons. (I won’t forget a moment in Italy when the streets closed because of the start of artichoke season. I would be happy to close down the Oxford square for fresh strawberries.) Others organize much of their lives around hunting and fishing seasons, which are governed both by nature and decisions by wildlife officials. Religious seasons give shape to the passing of the year, with the growing complexity of Southern religion simply adding more seasons to the old concentration on the fall as revival season. Festival season begins in midspring and reaches a peak right around the end of the school year. Allergy and tax seasons seem to intrude into the work and possible joys of the spring more than they should. Thesis season only slightly precedes graduation season, and, of course, most students are trying to finish theses and internships so they can enjoy graduation. Graduation season comes with its own rituals for both faculty and students—calls for papers to judge for awards, reminders to rent caps and gowns, warnings against doing anything late, applying for jobs and graduate school, sending recommendation letters, and hearing good and bad news. And the end of graduation season leads immediately to summer, a season with such promise that college faculty understand why people outside academia suspect that we never really grow up. Among other things, summer means book season, reading them more slowly than usual and trying hard to write them. At the Center, we’re hoping this summer to wrap up the Mississippi Encyclopedia, and faculty, staff, students, and alumni are wondering how to mix scholarly productivity with the other possible pleasures of summer. Ted Ownby Spring 2010
The Southern Register
Southern Studies on the Road In the past few weeks, Charles Reagan Wilson gave the keynote address at the Southern Forum on Agricultural, Rural, and Environmental History at the University of South Carolina. Adam Gussow gave a paper on his research on the devil figure in the blues at the Delta Studies Conference at Arkansas State University, and he was a featured participant at the Hill Country Harmonica: A North Mississippi Blues Harp Homecoming at the Foxfire Ranch in Waterford, Mississippi. Nancy Bercaw participated in a discussion on the legacy of the Civil War at Rhodes College, and Ted Ownby gave a paper on the 1970s at the Organization of American Historians convention in Washington, D.C. Amy Evans Streeter traveled to Pennsylvania to talk about SFA oral history work at the Heritage Philadelphia Program, which is run by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Katie McKee participated in a discussion on teaching Southern literature at the Society for the Study of Southern Literature in New Orleans, and Jimmy Thomas gave a talk on the history of Lebanese and Syrian immigrants to the Mississippi Delta at a conference at Southern Illinois University. For a project on tourism in the South, David Wharton recently photographed Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile and Prichard, Alabama; birdwatchers on Sanibel Island, Florida; and events at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
Living Blues News The June 2010 issue of Living Blues will feature Detroit harmonica legend Little Sonny on the cover, and we will continue celebrating our 40th anniversary with a look at blues musicians in the 1990s, including Stevie Ray Vaughan, Robert Cray, R. L. Burnside, and Junior Kimbrough. The issue will also look at the clubs in which James Brown got his start and feature the Living Blues Radio Charts and over 60 CD/DVD reviews. Furthermore, on June 9–10, 2010, Living Blues teams with Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, to present Blues and the Spirit II: A Symposium on Chicago Blues and Gospel Music, which will commemorate the centennial of Howlin’ Wolf’s birth and the 40th anniversary of Living Blues magazine. The program will include: • Panels and presentations with blues and gospel scholars, musicians, writers, and industry representatives. • Special panel with the founding editors and contributors of Living Blues magazine on the occasion of its 40th anniversary. (Early registrants will receive a reproduction of the Vol.1, No. 1 edition of Living Blues with Howlin’ Wolf on the cover.) • Blues and the Spirit Awards honoring Barry Dolins, director of the Chicago Blues Festival, and Howlin’ Wolf’s daughters, Bettye Kelly and Barbra Marks. • Wednesday evening reception and pro jam with an all-star array of blues musicians from Wolf’s generation and from the contemporary Chicago music scene. • Thursday evening motor coach transportation and entrance to Chicago Blues Festival opening (tentative) and symposium after party at the legendary Rosa’s Lounge. Additional details and registration are available at www. dom.edu/blues. Make your travel plans now! A one-year subscription to Living Blues is $27.95 and may be purchased on our Web site: www. livingblues.com. A sample copy of the magazine is also available. Please send an e-mail to info@ livingblues.com and request your free copy today. Mark Camarigg
The Southern Register
Spring 2010
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Southern Studies Student Photographs Currently on exhibit in the Gammill Gallery is Work and Play: The Southern Weekend, a selection of 72 photographs by students in the fall 2009 Southern Studies seminar on documentary photography and oral history. There were 16 students in the class—Ross Brand, Novelette Brown, Cory Cox, Nathan Gregory, Eric Griffis, Ben Guest, J. Bingo Gunter, Jamison Hollister, Tyler Keith, Meghan Leonard, Amanda Lillard, Xaris Martínez, Ferriday McClatchy, Kathryn
Cathryn Stout, Serving It Up, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Luncheon, Memphis, Tennessee
(left) Ross Brand, Trevor and Mischa in Canoe, Wacissa River, Florida (right) J. Bingo Gunter, Football Player, Oxford High School, Oxford, Mississippi
McGaw, Cathryn Stout, and Mary Amelia Taylor. Their semester-long assignment was to photograph (and record interviews with) Southerners engaged in various weekend activities. Not surprisingly, many of the photographs show people having a good time in and around Oxford: football Saturdays in the Grove, concerts, college-town nightlife, et cetera. Others, however, reveal different sides of the Southern weekend and range from Memphis to north Florida. They include images of religious activities, people going about their routine weekend chores, and families relaxing at home. In addition, a number of the images explore the world of weekend work, often undertaken out of necessity and in many cases so that others can spend their weekends enjoying themselves. The exhibition will run through June 15.
Exhibition Schedule The Gammill Gallery, located in Barnard Observatory, is open Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m.– 5:00 p.m., except for University holidays. Telephone: 662-915-5993.
June 16–August 13, 2010 The Spirit of New Orleans Bruce Keyes August 16–October 15, 2010 Town and Country: New Color Photographs David Wharton October 18–November 19, 2010 Taco Trucks and Crepes Trailers: Modern Texas Foodways Photographs from Austin and Houston Angie Bennett Mosier November 22, 2010–March 31, 2011 Florida Cowboys Bob Stone
David Wharton Page 4
April 5–June 15, 2010 Work and Play: Photographs from the Southern Weekend Southern Studies Documentary Students
Spring 2010
The Southern Register
Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference “Faulkner and Film”: July 18–22, 2010
The photograph of William Faulkner, taken in February 1944, on the poster for the 37th annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference—“Faulkner and Film”—could easily pass for a pinup of the Hollywood screenwriter at work: basking in the sun in shorts and shades with a typewriter and blank sheet of paper at hand, as if words were ready to write themselves as soon as the auteur removes his pipe and gives the command. But like most representations of Faulkner, including especially his own, this one is deceptive. In fact, the appearance masks a particularly turbulent time in his career. Still locked into a binding seven-year contract with Warner Bros., he is about to embark on two major film projects, To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, interrupted by brief forays into a half-dozen others. He is also contemplating two versions of A Fable, screenplay and novel, the second of which will take him nearly 10 years to complete. In the midst of all this, he will soon receive a letter from Malcolm Cowley that, two years later, will result in the publication of The Portable Faulkner. “Faulkner and Film” will take us behind the photographic mask of ease and explore more deeply than ever before the complex relationship of film and fiction it conceals. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Faulkner was working both sides of the street, not as completely separate media, one for love and the other for profit, but as two manifestations of artistic expression in which he took great interest. Leading off the conference will be two lectures describing the general scene of Faulkner in Hollywood. Robert
Hamblin, director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University and author of Faulkner and Hollywood: A Retrospective from the Brodsky Collection, and Lee Caplin, film producer and exclusive representative of the Faulkner literary estate, will provide an overview of Faulkner’s long and occasionally tumultuous experience in Hollywood. Matthew Ramsey and Deborah Barker will lecture on the two major versions of Faulkner in film: as screenwriter and as novelist. Ramsey discusses Faulkner’s 1936 screenplay The Road to Glory, and Barker a film made from two of his novels, Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun. The resulting films of screenplay and adaptation will be shown.
SOUTHERN WRITERS, SOUTHERN WRITING GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE The 16th Annual Southern Writers, Southern Writing Graduate Student Conference is set for July 15–17, 2010, at the University of Mississippi. Both critical and creative pieces will be presented, dealing with all aspects of Southern culture. Topics for the conference are not limited to literary studies—we are interested in all interdisciplinary approaches to Southern culture. H. R. Stoneback, State University of New York at New Paltz, will give the plenary lecture. Contact William Boyle at swswgradconference@gmail.com for more information.
Illustrating the 2010 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha poster and program is a photograph of William Faulkner at the Highland Hotel in Hollywood in 1944 (Alfred Eris, photographer; Time & Life Collection, Getty Images). Flat copies of this poster and conference posters with illustrations by Glennray Tutor (1989– 1993), John McCrady (1994, 2003, 2005), and William Faulkner (2007) and with photographs by Martin Dain (1996, 2009), Jack Cofield (1997, 2000), Bern Keating (1998), Odione (1990), Budd Studios (2002), Phyllis Cerf (2008), and from the Cofield Collection (2001), the Williams Library (2004), and the Commercial Appeal (2006) are available for $10.00 each plus $3.50 postage and handling. Mississippi residents add 7 percent sales tax. Send all orders to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture with a check made payable to the University of Mississippi or with Visa or MasterCard account number and expiration date. Please use the order form on page 35. Credit card orders also may be made by calling 800390-3527. Some posters are available to view on the Center’s Web site, www.olemiss.edu/depts/south/our_catalog.html.
Ivan Delazari, professor of English at St. Petersburg State University, will present and discuss a Russian film, Noga, an adaptation of Faulkner’s World War I short story “The Leg.” Additional papers will enrich the mixture, as film and fiction begin to merge in Faulkner’s novels. Julian Murphet, professor in Modern Film and Literature at the University of New South Wales, describes a Faulkner who incorporates into his fiction filmic techniques that Hollywood failed to follow through on; Sharon Monteith describes the influence of Faulkner on French “New Wave” film directors; Robert Jackson takes us back to the prenovelist Faulkner and the impact of 1920s films on the young writer in the South. continued on page 6
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Lawn in August to Be Unveiled at Faulkner Conference Lawn in August, a project stemming from the Oxford-Lafayette County Chamber of Commerce’s 2010 Leadership Lafayette Program, spent five months restoring the historic east lawn of Faulkner’s home back to its original condition. The group also developed a new University of Mississippi Foundation account in order to encourage people to give to a more permanent funding source for the future of Rowan Oak gardens to sustain the historic and cultural attraction. Personnel at Rowan Oak and the University collaborated during the planning and participated with its implementation, with an unveiling scheduled to coincide with the 37th Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, July 18–22, 2010. “We are so pleased to have an opportunity to complete the restoration of Rowan Oak. The grounds have long needed work beyond maintenance, and these efforts from Leadership
Lafayette will help protect and preserve the best part of Rowan Oak, the grounds, trees, and plants that the Faulkners so loved,” Rowan Oak Curator William Griffith said. The Leadership Lafayette Program is a series of activities designed to assure the continuity of leadership in Oxford and Lafayette County. Activities promoting community knowledge and training to enhance leadership skills are blended with project-oriented sessions of interest to proven leaders, as well as the emerging leader. Leadership Lafayette started in the late 1980s and has graduated over 20 classes of leaders. The project has already drawn the support of a number of area businesses. These include Oasis Sod Farms of Clarksdale, Smith Building Supply of Oxford, and Magnolia Rental of Oxford. To find out more about the project or to learn how to participate, please contact David Flautt at deflautt@gmail.com.
Leadership Lafayette Rowan Oak Project workers include, from left, Brooke Newman Driskell, Peter Ross, Melanie Addington, Michael Dinkins, Stephanie Beebe, and Jeffrey Little. Group members not pictured are David Flautt, Andrew Stephenson, and Pamela Robertson.
Donald Kartiganer Page 6
Spring 2010
The Southern Register
William Griffin
In addition to these and other scholars announced in the winter issue of the Southern Register, 10 speakers and panelists have been selected from the “Call for Papers” competition: University of Tennessee, Allison Rittmayer, Phillip Davis, University of Tulsa, University of Sydney, Aaron Nyerges, Brian Crane, University of Montreal, Phil Smith, Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Stefan Solomon, Michael Holgate, University of Sydney, University of New South Wales, Matthew Sutton, College of William and Mary, Randall Wilhelm, University of Florida, and Deighton Zerby, Louisiana State University. Other program events will include a selection of films made from Faulkner screenplays or adapted from his fiction: To Have and Have Not (from the Hemingway novel), Tomorrow (from the short story in Knight’s Gambit), The Story of Temple Drake (from Sanctuary), Tarnished Angels (from Pylon), and Barn Burning. There will also be sessions on “Teaching Faulkner,” conducted by James Carothers, University of Kansas, Charles Peek, Emeritus, University of Nebraska at Kearney, Terrell Tebbetts, Lyon College, and Theresa Towner, University of Texas at Dallas; a discussion of “Collecting Faulkner” by Seth Berner; an exhibit by the University Press of Mississippi of Faulkner books published by university presses throughout the United States, as well as a display, with books for sale, by Seth Berner. There will also be guided daylong tours of North Mississippi, the Delta, and Memphis; a picnic served at Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak; and “Faulkner on the Fringe”—an “open mike” evening at the Southside Gallery. Discount rates for the conference are available for groups of five or more students. Inexpensive dormitory housing is available for all registrants. Contact Robert Fox at rfox@olemiss.edu for details. There are also a limited number of waivers of registration for graduate students. Contact Donald Kartiganer at dkartiga@olemiss.edu. Further information on the program, registration, course credit, accommodations, and travel can be found on the conference Web site: www.outreach. olemiss.edu/events/faulkner.
Center Initiates Project to Attract Funds for Graduate, Undergraduate Students Fund-raising efforts are under way to attract $150,000 in private gifts to support Southern Studies students for the 2010 and 2011 academic years, and the Institute for American Values (IAV) has provided the first $30,000 toward that goal. The IAV gift is funding specific research examining Southerners and money. Other gifts are needed to support fellowships for graduate students, scholarships for undergraduates, awards for students who produce superior papers and other projects, and student travel and equipment, particularly cameras and computers. “Our Southern Studies graduate students undertake a remarkable range of jobs,” Center Director Ted Ownby said. During 2009–10, graduate students provided assistance for the following: • Southern Studies 101 and 102 undergraduate classes • Living Blues magazine, Highway 61, Southern Foodways Alliance, William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, and Future of the South Conference • American Music Archive • Mississippi Encyclopedia and The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture • research on thrift and financial institutions in the South • project for the Society for the Study of Southern Literature • documentary films about Southern foodways and the Oxford square • project to digitize filmed conference material for the Center Web site • documentary music projects and a radio program on Southern musicians “Many of these projects receive funding from sponsoring organizations such as Media and Documentary Studies, Southern Foodways Alliance, and the American Music Archive, but not all,” Ownby said. “The Center could not pursue as many meaningful projects as it does without its graduate students, who make tremendous contributions.” The Southern Register
Jennifer Lawrence received the Elizabeth Brevard Scholarship for four years while an undergraduate majoring in Southern Studies and now teaches in Tunica as a Mississippi Teacher Corp participant.
The effort to raise money for students is off to a good start, Ownby said, pointing to the Southern Money Project funded by Institute for American Values. The idea came from Institute Director David Blankenhorn, a native Mississippian working in New York. He approached the Center with the idea of researching the ways Southerners think about thrift, savings, and debt and about how Southern institutions reflect their values about those topics. For example, an important discovery is that payday-lending institutions are especially common in Mississippi and other Southern states. The students are studying payday lending and casino gambling, as well as mutual savings banks and building and loans. Southern Studies undergraduates have Spring 2010
some resources reserved specifically for them. A part of the Ole Miss Women’s Council program, the Elizabeth Brevard Scholarship provides assistance. Kentucky native Jennifer Lawrence (BA 2009), now a Mississippi Teacher Corp participant in Tunica, was the Brevard scholar for four years. Other smaller scholarships and several paper prizes, the Gray and Coterie awards and the Peter Aschoff Award, also benefit undergraduates. The Chris Fullerton fund and the Julian and Kathryn Wiener fund provide assistance to graduate students, and a prize funded by the Lucille and Motee Daniels family supports graduate student paper awards. Established by the late Frances Patterson, another new endowment holds promise for the future. Beyond those funds, the Center relies on a changing array of funding sources to assist its students. “The program has experienced a great deal of success in funding assistantships,” said Michael Upton, director of development for the Center. “We are now appealing to Center friends and alumni to invest or continue investing in our students by providing funds to further their work, expand travel opportunities, and keep their equipment up to date. We’re also focusing on ensuring that the assistance we offer students is competitive with that of other institutions.” The new initiative is open both for contributions to existing endowments and funds and to new avenues of helping students. Anyone interested in contributing to student programs in Southern Studies should contact Ted Ownby at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, hsownby@olemiss.edu, or 662915-5993; or Michael Upton at the University Foundation, mupton@olemiss.edu, or 662-915-3027.
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Continuing Center Projects Work continues, and it takes new shapes, on three Center projects—the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, the Mississippi Encyclopedia, and the Center’s Web site. Look for new developments from each in the coming weeks and months. The next volume of the New Encyclopedia, volume 15, is Urbanization. Coming out soon under the editorship of Wanda Rushing of the University of Memphis, the volume will both revisit topics in the Urban Life section of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and take on new topics as well as new urban centers. Following Urbanization, we can start to look for Sports and Recreation, edited by Hardy Jackson of Jacksonville State, also due out in 2010. The NESC led to a new Center project, when managing editor Jimmy Thomas and Joe York of Media and Documentary Projects considered how to turn material from the encyclopedia project into programs for the radio. Using the work of some inspired graduate student assistants, Nelson Griffin, Jesse Wright, and Omar Gordon, the project took NESC entries from the Music volume, edited them, mixed them with music and interview material, and had encyclopedia editor Charles Reagan Wilson read the new text. Stay tuned for details, but we hope to hear the new spots in a radio program called Sounds of the South before the end of 2010. The Center’s other encyclopedia project, the Mississippi Encyclopedia, has moved into a new phase. With its articles complete and most of the editing finished, staff are working on one of the final steps in the encyclopedia process—the illustrations. The University Press of Mississippi received a grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission to help complete the project, and those funds are helping underwrite the gathering of, scanning of, and permissions for the illustrations. The Center’s Web site, www.olemiss. edu/depts/south, has some recent additions and is ready to add more. The most prominent addition is a section for Page 8
CONTRIBUTORS Ross Brand, a Florida State University graduate, is a first-year student in the Southern Studies master’s program. Mark Camarigg is the former assistant editor and current publications manager for Living Blues magazine. Kirsten Dellinger is an associate professor of Sociology and chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Mississippi. William Dunlap has distinguished himself as an artist, arts commentator, and educator since receiving his MFA from the University of Mississippi in 1969. Dunlap, the book about his work, was published in 2007. Joan Wylie Hall teaches in the English Department at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of a book on Shirley Jackson and articles on numerous Southern authors.
Urbanization, the 15th volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, is set for release on June 7, 2010. Edited by Wanda Rushing and Charles Reagan Wilson, the volume contains 48 thematic essays on the ongoing remarkable growth of Southern urban centers, new immigration patterns, booming regional entrepreneurial activities with global reach, and mounting challenges that result from these. Essays also examine the Disneyfication of central Florida, crunk and hip-hop culture, and other recent developments. The 31 topical entries focus on individual cities and urban cultural elements, including Mardi Gras, Dollywood, and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. To order a copy, visit http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_ detail?title_id=1639. Hardbacks are $45.00, and paperbacks are $22.95.
films. One can currently watch numerous sessions from Center conferences, especially the Oxford Conference for the Book, and before long other films connected to the Center will be available. And some time this summer, one can look for an Opinions section for essays and other articles by Center faculty, staff, students, and alumni. Ted Ownby Spring 2010
Donald M. Kartiganer is Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies Emeritus at the University of Mississippi and director of the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. Colby H. Kullman is professor of English at the University of Mississippi. Among his publications are Theatre Companies of the World and articles on Tennessee Williams and other modern dramatists. Sally Cassady Lyon works at the Center, as the director’s assistant. She is a Gulfport native and Sewanee graduate. Panny Flautt Mayfield, an awardwinning photographer and journalist, is director of public relations at Coahoma Community College in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Ted Ownby, director of the Center, holds a joint appointment in Southern Studies and history. Edwin Smith is a communications specialist in the Office of Media and Public Relations at the University of Mississippi. Jimmy Thomas is managing editor of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. An alumnus of the University of Mississippi, he has worked for publications in Oxford and New York. Mary McKenzie Thompson is a retired high school teacher of English and creative writing from Clarksdale, Mississippi.
The Southern Register
Southern Studies Alumni News It has become relatively easy to write stories about the accomplishments by Southern Studies alumni, in part because contemporary technologies have turned out to offer excellent ways to keep up with those accomplishments, but mostly because alumni keep doing new and interesting things. New jobs and new schools. Several students have new positions in the Atlanta area. Courtney Chartier (MA 2003) has a new job in the Robert Woodruff Library at Emory University. As she finishes her dissertation in history at Yale, Robin Morris (MA 2001) will begin teaching as an adjunct faculty member at Agnes Scott College in the fall. Sawyer Riley (BA 2003) has a new position working for an Atlanta firm that distributes wines throughout the world, and Stephanie Little (BA 2009) is working on her chef skills in Oxford’s City Grocery before going on to culinary school. Nelson Griffin (MA 2009), who discovered his teaching talents during his years in Oxford, has a new position at a Suzuku school in Atlanta. One 2010 graduate, Alan Pike, is moving to Atlanta to start work in the PhD program in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University, while another, I’Nasah Crockett, heads to Vanderbilt to start work on a history Andrew Mullins
Robin Morris PhD. Andrew Mullins (BA 2009) is going into the American Studies graduate program at the University of Massachusetts– Boston. Ferriday Mansel McClatchy has just completed her MA program with an internship at the Oxford Visitors and Convention Bureau and is now starting an event planning firm in Oxford. After she finishes her thesis this summer, Blount Montgomery will be heading to San Francisco to take a position with the Episcopal Service Corps. In Austin, Odie Lindsey (MA 2007) has a new position at Austin Community College, and current student Duval Osteen has a position at the Center for American Amanda Brown Wallis
The Southern Register
Spring 2010
Peter Slade History at the University of Texas. In New York, Sarah Abdelnour (MA 2008) has a new title, Operations and Communication Associate, Admissions, at Teach for America. Among several Southern Studies alumni with recent law degrees, Amanda Brown Wallis (BA 2005) is practicing health law with a firm in Tupelo, and Allison Worley (BA 2006) has started her own practice in her hometown of Booneville, Mississippi. Appearances on campus. This spring, three Southern Studies alumni returned to the Center to participate in programs. In February, Renna Tuten (MA 2006), archivist with the Richard Russell Library at the University of Georgia, participated with her colleague Margie Compton in a session of the Blues Today Symposium, showing previously unseen 1940s and 1950s film footage of blues performers Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Junior Lockwood. In March, Jon Parrish Peede (MA 1992), Director of Literature, Grants Programs for the National Endowment for the Arts, visited campus to take part in an Oxford Conference for the Book panel on teaching the work of Barry Hannah. Peter Slade (MA 2002), assistant professor of religion at Ashland University, gave a brown bag lecture on the subject of his new book, Open Friendship in a Closed Society. Page 9
Organizers, leaders, and speakers. Teresa Parker Farris (MA 2005) is the president of the Louisiana Folklore Society. Jimmy Phillips (MA 1993) is the leader of the Oxford Songwriters Association, and Robin Yekaitis (MA 2006) is on the Oxford Mayor’s Committee on Disability Issues. Sarah Alford Ballard (MA 2003), who teaches English at Murrah High School in Jackson, and Susan Glisson (MA 1994), director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi, are on the Civil Rights Education Committee that meets to work out strategies of teaching the civil rights movement as part of the curriculum in Mississippi public schools. Current student Jesse Wright organized an event in Oxford for relief following the earthquake in Haiti. While teaching at Rust College, Chiquita (Willis) Walls (MA 1990) has, along with her husband, Benny Walls, started the Shape Note Singing Project Web site, www. shapenote-singing.org. Billy Stevens (MA 2002) gives lectures for the North Carolina Humanities Council on, among other subjects, the topic of his MA thesis, “Sincere Forms of Flattery: Blacks, Whites, and American Popular Music.” At the University of South Carolina, Bert Way (MA 1999) organized a conference, the Southern Forum on Agricultural, Rural, and Environmental History. Awards and awards and awards. Along with Professor Charles Reagan Wilson, whose award is discussed in an article on page 1, numerous Southern Studies alumni are recent award winners.
Robin Yekaitis and Renna Tuten
Congratulations to Caroline Herring (MA 1998) for winning the Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters award in Musical Composition (Popular). Congratulations to Kate Medley (MA 2007). She and April Grayson won the Elbert Hilliard Oral History Award from the Mississippi Historical Society for a project, “Opening Doors, Forging New Paths,” on the integration of University of Mississippi’s professional schools. Amy Wood (MA 1995) was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for her book Lynching and Spectacle. John T. Edge (MA 2002), winner of a James Beard Award in 2009, was nominated for
a James Beard Award in 2010 for article on race and barbecue. First year MA student Xaris Martínez has been accepted for an NEH summer seminar on the Civil War at the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah. And congratulations to current undergraduate Southern Studies major Katherine Watson, who was inducted this spring into the University’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Films. Films made in David Wharton’s spring 2009 class—A Soul-Reviving Feast by Miles Laseter, Sarah Simonson (BA 2009), and Melanie Young, and Tortillas de Maiz by Ferriday Mansel McClatchy (MA 2010), Alan Pike (MA 2010), and Duvall Osteen—both won Special Awards for Documentaries at the Oxford Film Festival in February. Thacker Mountain Radio: The Documentary by Mary Warner (MA 2009) showed at the Oxford event and the Crossroads Film Festival in Jackson. Joe York (MA 2007), who along with Wharton and Andy Harper helped teach filmmaking techniques to those students, is showing several of his documentaries at festivals. Cud is showing at the Reel Earth Festival in New Zealand, the Atlanta Film Festival, and the Going Green Film Festival in Hollywood. Smokes and Ears played at the Tupelo Film Festival and the Crossroads Film Festival, where it won the Ruma Award for the best Mississippi-made film. Several of York’s films screened at the Ozark Foothills Filmfest. All are films he made with the Southern Foodways Alliance. Ted Ownby
Sarah Simonson and Melanie Young
Ferriday Mansel McClatchy Page 10
Spring 2010
The Southern Register
Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Announces Winners The Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters (MIAL) has announced its award winners for works first published or shown in the year 2009. The award categories are poetry, fiction, nonfiction, visual arts, photography, music composition (classical/concert), and music composition (contemporary/popular). The award winners were chosen in a juried competition by out-of-state judges; winners must have significant ties to the state of Mississippi and must have been nominated by a member of MIAL. Presentation of the awards will be made at the Institute’s annual Awards Gala on June 5, 2010, at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson. Master of Ceremonies will be Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books in Oxford. D. C. Berry is the winner in the poetry category for his work Hamlet Off Stage. Berry taught at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers, where he was an English professor for 27 years. There he published hundreds of poems and several volumes and three times won the Excellence in Teaching Award, while being honored as a Charles W. Moorman Distinguished Professor in the Humanities. The 2009 fiction winner is Frederick Barthelme of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for his novel Waveland. Published by Doubleday, the novel is set in postKatrina Mississippi. Barthelme is the author of 16 books, including the PEN/ Faulkner finalist Elroy Nights. He is the director of the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi and is editor of the Mississippi Review. Winning the nonfiction category is Charles W. Eagles, the William F. Winter Professor of History at the University of Mississippi, for his book, The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss. This meticulously researched look at the events and circumstances surrounding James Meredith’s entry into the University of Mississippi is published by the University of North Carolina Press. In the Visual Arts category, the winThe Southern Register
ner is Charles Crossley, a native of Pike County, for the exhibition Charles Crossley: Textures-Shapes and Forms of Spirits presented by the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in 2009. Crossley is a founder of the McComb Studio of Art and Design and a roster artist for the Mississippi Arts Commission. His work is found in private and corporate collections worldwide. Michael Loyd Young has won in the photography category for his book Blues, Booze, and BBQ published by Powerhouse Books. Young grew up in Tate County, Mississippi, and is currently working on a second book that documents the hunting and fishing culture on the U.S. Gulf Coast. His primary interest as a photographer is photographing cultural symbols and exploring the impact they have on daily life. Violinist and composer Shandy Phillips, who grew up in Starkville, is the 2009 winner for Music Composition (Classical/Concert). A graduate of both the Juilliard School and the Boston Conservatory, Phillips won for Sonata No. 2, a sonata for flute and organ. In January 2011, the Starkville/MSU Symphony Orchestra will premier Phillips’s concertino for violin, viola, piano, and string orchestra. Spring 2010
Caroline Herring is the winner in Music Composition (Contemporary/ Popular) for her 2009 Golden Apples of the Sun album. This new work marks a departure from the country-influenced sound of her previous work with a darker and more haunting sound inspired by female folk singers from the 1960s and ’70s. Herring is a native of Canton, Mississippi. An MIAL Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to William Ferris, the Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History and senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A native of Vicksburg, Ferris is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where he served on the faculty for 18 years. A former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ferris is also coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and the author of the recently published Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues. A rare Special Achievement Award will be presented for The Passions of Walter Anderson: A Dramatic Celebration of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Artist. This interdisciplinary work combines drama, art, music, and dance in its tribute to Anderson and was first performed at the 2009 Oxford Conference for the Book. Each winner in the juried categories will receive a cash prize of $1,000.00 and a Mississippi-made gift. Past winners include Natasha Trethewey, Willie Morris, Richard Ford, Walker Percy, Samuel Jones, and Ellen Douglas. Mark Wiggs of Jackson serves as president of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. Jan Taylor of Jackson is treasurer, and Margaret Anne Robbins of Pontotoc is secretary. For more information about attending the Awards Gala on June 5, 2010, visit the Web site at www.ms-arts-letters.org. Mary McKenzie Thompson Page 11
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Wilson
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Patricia Aschoff, with her late husband, Peter, shortly after the arrival of their son, Edward
Patricia Edwards Aschoff
Dorothy (Dot) Falkner Dodson
Patricia Aschoff, widow of longtime Living Blues contributor and University of Mississippi Anthropology professor Peter Aschoff, was born in Louisville, Mississippi. She received her undergraduate degree from Chadron State College and her master’s degree from the University of Mississippi. She was a dedicated activist and teacher throughout her life, and her professional jobs included juvenile probation officer, director of the Cultural Center at the University of Northern Iowa, the fulltime director of the Domestic Violence Project for nine Mississippi counties, and a special education teacher in the Oxford, Mississippi, school system. She was a board member for the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence, a leading force in drafting Mississippi’s laws on domestic violence, and the first director to train Mississippi law enforcement on domestic violence procedures. Raised by her late grandmother, Elisha Edwards, Aschoff is survived by her son, Edward C. Aschoff, her father, her sister, Jean Conley, an aunt, Christine Edwards, and a cousin, Charlestene Daniel. Memorial donations can be made to the Domestic Violence Project, P.O. Box 286, Oxford, MS 38655.
Dorothy (Dot) Falkner Dodson was the daughter of John Wesley Thompson Falkner Jr. and Sue Harkins. At her death Dot Dodson was the last surviving member of her generation of the J. W. T. Falkner family. She could remember her grandfather telling stories at family gatherings and roller-skating with her cousins in the ballroom on the third floor of J. W. T.’s home in
March 15, 1939–April 1, 2010
Spring 2010
March 10, 1920–January 23, 2010)
Cofield Studios
Edwin Smith
In Memoriam
Courtesy Edward Aschoff
and directed by Wilson is in excess of $200,000. Wilson also credited his successes to the continuing support he has received from history department chairs Bob Haws and Joe Ward, Center director Ted Ownby, Center associate director Ann Abadie, and College of Liberal Arts dean Glenn Hopkins. Admired and respected by his peers, Wilson holds memberships in the Southern Historical Association, American Society of Church History, American Studies Association, and Mississippi Historical Society. He has presented papers at conferences in Germany, Denmark, France, and Turkey and was a visiting professor at the University of Mainz last summer. Wilson is coeditor of the first important scholarly collection on religion during the Civil War, a revised edition of The Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, and the forthcoming Mississippi Encyclopedia. Wilson was also a primary scholar in the Religion and Region series and Southern Spaces online documentary project. He is the author of Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis and a new collection of essays on Southern religious history due out in 2011. “Charles Wilson has been active and influential as a historian, an essayist, a great organizer, and editor,” Ownby said. “Collaborative works can be frustrating and time-consuming, but he has kept up an impressive record or publishing his own work and always having time for students and colleagues.” Sam Shu-Yi Wang, F. A. P. Barnard Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering, was the inaugural recipient of the Distinguished Research and Creative Achievement Award in 2008. Larry A. Walker, director of the National Center for Natural Products Research, was the 2009 recipient. Award recipients receive a $7,500 monetary prize and a personal plaque. Pharmaceutics International Inc. sponsors the annual award. CEO Syed Abidi is a University alumnus.
Dorothy (Dot) Falkner Dodson The Southern Register
Tom Rankin
Barry Hannah, 1998
Howard Barry Hannah
Tom Rankin
Oxford. Her father was the brother of Murry Falkner, the father of William Faulkner, Dot’s first cousin. She was the wife of John Oliver Dodson and mother of four children: Damaris Dodson Grantham of Atlantis, Florida; John Anthony Dodson of Highland Falls, New York; Charles Michael Dodson of Highland Falls, New York; and Jeff Dodson of Tallahassee, Florida. She had one grandchild, Dodson Grantham of Atlantis, Florida. Dodson worked for a number of years as a librarian in the U.S. Documents Library at the University of Mississippi Law School.
April 23, 1942–March 1, 2010 Barry Hannah, one of Mississippi’s most distinguished contemporary writers, died of a heart attack at his home three days before the 17th Oxford Conference for the Book, dedicated to him. The author of eight novels and five collections of short stories, Hannah was writer in residence and director of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Mississippi. His first novel, The Southern Register
Geronimo Rex (1972), won the William Faulkner Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award. Airships, his 1978 collection of short stories about the Vietnam War, the Civil War, and the modern South, won the Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award. The following year, Hannah received the prestigious Award in Literature from the American Institute of Arts and Letters. He subsequently published seven novels Spring 2010
and three story collections and won a Guggenheim, the Robert Penn Warren Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story. His 1996 collection High Lonesome was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Sick Soldier at Your Door, begun as a novel and completed as a collection of stories, will be published posthumously. Hannah was born in Meridian, grew up in Clinton, and earned a BA from Mississippi College and MA and MFA degrees from the University of Arkansas. He joined the University of Mississippi faculty in 1982, after serving as professor and writer in residence at Clemson University, Middlebury College, the University of Alabama, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He was also writer in residence at the University of Montana– Missoula, Memphis State University, and Texas University–San Marcos, where in 2004–05 he held the prestigious Mitte Chair of Creative Writing. His students remember him as someone who encouraged imaginative thinking and good sentences. Survivors include his wife, Susan Varas Hannah of Oxford; daughter, Lee Hannah McDonald of Tuscaloosa, Alabama; sons Howard Barry Hannah Jr. of Knoxville, Tennessee, and Ted Hannah of Leeds, Alabama; stepdaughter Shannon Magill White of Lake Charles, Louisiana; stepson David Morgan White of Ponte Verde, Florida; sister, Dot Hannah Kitchens of Jackson, Mississippi; brother, Bobby Hannah of Destin, Florida; foster brother, Ralph Marston of Richardson, Texas; and grandchildren Ike, Isabelle, and Nick Hannah. Memorial contributions may be made to Barry Hannah Award in Fiction c/o Yalobusha Review, Department of English, P.O. Box 1848, University, MS 38677-1848; to Friends of Pete, c/o Lele Gillespie, 1013 South Lamar, Oxford, MS 38655; or to the ASPCA Gift Processing Center, P.O. Box 96929, Washington, DC 20077. Page 13
30 Years of Sacred Harp in Oxford
Warren Steel
David Wharton
One of the first Sacred Harp recordings I ever heard was the 1970 Smithsonian Folkways recording of Stewart’s Chapel in Houston, Mississippi—only 50 miles southeast of Oxford. They sang loud, fast, and without restraint, each song lasting little more than a minute. I was viscerally struck by the passion, conviction, and raw emotion that these men and women of Mississippi brought to singing these old Sacred Harp shapenote hymns. What I didn’t realize is that I would be singing with them years later right here in Oxford. American shape-note singing is a tradition that goes back to the New England singing schools of the 18th century. Its purpose was to create an easy mnemonic device to sing written music and counteract the musical illiteracy of lined-out hymnody. Instructors developed a musical method that simplified the eight notes of the major scale to four simple shapes on the page with accompanying vocal syllables—fa, sol, la, and mi. Groups were taught to sing for the simple joy of singing, not for performance. To emphasize the point, the singers were organized in a square with the sections facing each other. Every singer would have the opportunity to lead a song of his or her choice in the hollow square. No individual singer is valued over another.
Leading the singing at a Sacred Harp program at Barnard Observatory this spring is Anne Steel (standing). Seated around her, from left, are Mary Amelia Taylor, Alan Spurgeon, Ross Brand, and Mark Tew. The tradition took root in the South and continued there long after it had been replaced by newer methods in the Northern states. With the publication of the Sacred Harp shape-note hymnbook by Georgians B. F. White and E. J. King in 1844, shape-note singing was cemented as a Southern musical tradition. Though its main area of popularity was in Alabama and Georgia, the tradition eventually spread west to Mississippi and took hold among the rural churches where impassioned singers would come together to sing for hours in fellowship.
Taylor United Methodist Church, located in the village of Taylor, Mississippi, has been the site of the annual Sacred Harp singing on the second Sunday in October since 1988.
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Church records show that the Pine Flat community here in Lafayette County had an annual Sacred Harp singing in the 1870s on the third Sunday in June. This singing still survives as a seven-shape gospel singing, a late-19th century tradition descended from the four-shape style. At that time, Sacred Harp singing was so popular in northern Mississippi that there was another singing that same third Sunday in nearby Pontotoc County. As the singers diminished and tastes changed, people stopped coming and the Pine Flat singers decided to change from the Sacred Harp to seven-shape gospel music. About 1968, an annual singing was started at Pilgrim’s Rest on the Lafayette-Yalobusha County line. As the church deteriorated and was taken off the electric grid, the singing was moved to Taylor. That singing continues the second Sunday in October at Taylor United Methodist Church. The earliest regular singing recorded in Oxford was at Antioch Primitive Baptist Church on Van Buren Avenue. It suffered from the same problem as the Pine Flat singing and was eventually discontinued, leaving no annual singing in Oxford. That would change when music professor Warren Steel, English professor George Boswell, and folklorist Bill Ferris worked together to reinstate an annual singing in Oxford. The Southern Register
ings. In 1980, Steel and Boswell initiated an annual singing in the City Hall courtroom on the Square. Steel saw
Warren Steel
Boswell began organizing events on the University of Mississippi’s campus, usually in connection with folklore meet-
Sacred Harp singing class, September 29, 1985, at Pilgrims Rest Primitive Baptist Church, Lafayette County, Mississippi, included adults, from left, Mark Davis, Fred Kendrick, Warren Steel, Toxey T. Fortenberry, Teresa Lanetta, Bernice Embry, John Van Horn, Suzanne Flandreau, Mary Chrestman, J. E. “Dude” Carter, Ruby Easley, Cleo Hawkins, Sheree Lence, Bob Lence, Emily Boswell, and George Boswell. Pilgrims Rest was the site of the annual Sacred Harp singing on the second Sunday in October from 1968 until 1987.
this singing as a continuation of the Stewart’s Chapel singing in Houston where the Folkways recording was made. Since then, every second Sunday in March, people come from all over the country to sing with Mississippi singers in Oxford. Difficulties in serving dinner forced the event to move onto campus in 2008, but it surely didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of the singers. The Oxford singing recently celebrated its 30th anniversary with no signs of diminution from lack of attendance. Students on campus have even reinvigorated monthly singings in Barnard Observatory every first Thursday from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. Curious community members and students should take advantage of such easy access to this rich musical tradition. Anyone interested in old American traditions, egalitarian gatherings, boisterous music, or idiosyncratic experiences will enjoy an all-day Sacred Harp singing. Everyone is welcome in the hollow square. Ross Brand
All-Day Sacred Harp Singings in Mississippi Summer and Fall 2010
Except where noted, all singings are in The Sacred Harp (1991 Edition). June 2010 • First Sunday: Sherman Baptist Church, Hwy 32, 10 miles west of Bruce. Info: Mark Davis, 601-932-9188. • Second Sunday: Oak Springs Church, Derma. • Saturday before Fourth Sunday: Newton County Convention, Macedonia Primitive Baptist Church, southwest of Decatur (Christian Harmony). July 2010 • July 4: Mt. Herman Primitive Baptist Church, north of Hwy 8, three miles west of Vardaman. • Saturday before Fourth Sunday: Chickasaw County Convention, Enon Primitive Baptist Church, south of Hwy 8, eight miles east of Houston. August 2010 • Saturday before the Second Sunday: Calhoun County Musical Association, Bethel Primitive Baptist Church, Bruce. • Fourth Sunday and Saturday before: Mississippi State Convention, Antioch Primitive Baptist Church, Hwy 21 between Forest and Sebastopol. Info: Mark Davis, 601-932-9188. The Southern Register
• Fourth Sunday and Saturday before: Pleasant Grove Convention, Calhoun County, location to be announced. September 2010 • Second Sunday and Saturday before: Black Mississippi State Convention, location to be announced. October 2010 • Second Sunday: Taylor United Methodist Church, Taylor. Info: Warren Steel. 662-236-5356. December 2010 • Saturday before Second Sunday: Calhoun County Nursing Home, Calhoun City. 1:30 p.m. Full listing of Sacred Harp singings in Mississippi is posted at www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~mudws/miss.html. Other singings in the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom are listed at www.mcsr.olemss.edu/~mudws/singings.html.
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Movie Director Jodie Markell to Screen Teardrop at Williams Festival October 15–16 The 18th annual Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival promises an exciting kickoff to the 2011 Williams Centennial Year with the presentation of director Jodie Markell screening her movie of the Williams screenplay The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond. Featured at the October 15–16, 2010, festival sponsored by Coahoma Community College, Markell will speak about her experiences directing the unproduced 1957 work with its setting in the Mississippi Delta and Memphis. She also will talk about her lifelong interest in Tennessee Williams since her portrayal of Laura Wingfield in a high school production of The Glass Menagerie. “Coahoma has been hosting this wonderful conference since 1993; we are elated and honored to welcome Miss Markell to our campus,” commented Vivian Presley, CCC president. “An accomplished actress and theater professional, she is a native of Memphis and brings a unique understanding of Southern culture to the screen,” Presley continued. Prior to the movie’s December 2009 screenings in Memphis, New York, and California, Markell commented, “As a young actress, I saw a number of productions of Williams that did not feel true to me. . . . Williams plays were being presented like awkward, dated, and dusty museum pieces. As a Southern woman, I felt a calling to reclaim Williams and bring his visually poetic world to the screen with as much vibrancy and authenticity as I could achieve in the hope of inspiring a new audience to rediscover this original American voice.” While studying acting in New York City, Markell was introduced to Teardrop and says she was struck by the lead character, Fisher Willow, a young woman struggling to find her voice and trying to understand how to connect with someone she loves. “I related to Fisher’s call for understanding,” she says. Markell says she realized she needed a cast of “thoroughbreds” to handle the unique rhythm and musicality of Page 16
Jodie Markell (inset) Teardrop movie marquee Williams’s dialogue. Her first choice for the role of Fisher Willow was Bryce Dallas Howard, and Markell describes her as “the best of her generation.” The casting of Oscar-winning actress Ellen Burstyn, Ann-Margret, Chris Evans, Will Patton, and Mamie Gummer soon followed. Markell praises Williams’s “mysterious revelation of character” and his choice to leave many questions unanswered. She says, “He wanted us to revel in the mystery and with each well-chosen moment he reminds us that even in our own lives, every day, every moment is a mystery. In the end Williams wanted his work to speak for itself, and with The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, I wanted to give audiences a chance to listen.” Expected to generate additional interest and intensity during the conference are interactions of scholars and actors participating in panel discussions and presenting readings from Williams plays that continue to explore influences of the Mississippi Delta on his works. Interesting also will be the meaSpring 2010
sure of Teardrop’s heroine Fisher Willow with Tennessee’s other legendary ladies from the Delta: Blanche DuBois, Alma Winemiller, Lady Torrence, and Maggie the Cat. Kenneth Holditch will deliver the conference keynote address, and Colby Kullman will moderate the panel of scholars, including English professors Ralph Voss and Ann Fisher-Wirth; fiction writer Anna Baker, theatrical producer Robert Canon, and film critic and screenwriter Coop Cooper. Actors performing on stages and porch plays include Erma Duricko, Johnny McPhail, Alice Walker, Marissa Duricko, Tim Brown, Jeff Glickman, and Sherrye Williams. Rehearsing to take center stage also with monologues and scenes, fledgling high school actors across Mississippi will compete in the festival’s elite drama competition for $3,000 in cash prizes for their school drama departments. Markell will address the group, and Duricko will lead them through an acting workshop. Festival activities, receptions, dinners, and porch plays laced with blues and gospel music and Southern cuisine take place in Clarksdale’s Tennessee Williams neighborhood. Produced by Coahoma Community College and supported by grants from the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Mississippi Humanities Council, and the Rock River Foundation, the festival is free and open to the public. Reservations are required for food events. For festival updates, visit www.coahomacc.edu/twilliams or telephone Coahoma’s Public Relations Department: 662-621-4157. Panny Flautt Mayfield The Southern Register
Reading the South Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America. By R. Barton Palmer and William Robert Bray. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. 353 pages. $30.00 cloth. Deserving of “box office success,” Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America concerns itself with the 15 Hollywood films, all of which are commercially produced plays except for one novella, made “during roughly two decades of the early postwar era from 1950 to 1968.” The story that R. Barton Palmer and William Robert Bray are most eager to tell evaluates the impact that these films have had on American culture. Maurice Yacowar’s Tennessee Williams and Film (1977) and Gene D. Phillips’s The Films of Tennessee Williams (1980) contribute significantly to an understanding of these important films by Williams; however, neither book focuses on the considerable influence these films have had “on the forms and history of American filmmaking.” Inevitably, comparing the films with their dramatic originals is essential to any critical discussion of these masterworks. Interested in what lies behind the differences between these two art forms, Palmer and Bray, “unapologetically promote a consideration of the adaptation as a cultural artifact of inherent interest and value” as they “trace how the texts of Tennessee Williams served the commercial cinema of the 1950s and the 1960s, suiting its often desperate hunger for particular kinds of materials. Alive with the facts of various production histories thanks to their thorough research and result-
ing survey of various archival material, including much previously unexamined correspondence, Palmer and Bray are brilliantly successful in their quest. What was it about The Glass Menagerie that breathed life into a moribund theater when it opened in Chicago in December 1944? How did A Streetcar Named Desire break with Broadway tradition in 1947 by probing sexual desire and graphic violence? When Williams’s inventiveness embraced the comic and the primitive in The Rose Tattoo (1950), what was the critical response to its celebration of “Dionysian bawdiness”? By considering Williams’s career on Broadway as well as his enthusiasm for film and Hollywood, chapter 1 places his personal story within a “historical survey of the American cinema in the early postwar period that identifies those particular conditions then prevailing in the industry that made Williams’s
sensational and challenging properties attractive.” When in 1950 The Glass Menagerie was adapted for the screen and directed by Irving Rapper, Williams’s career developed in a new direction as he dealt with the concept of “the woman’s picture,” sometimes thought of as the “weepie.” Barton and Bray deal with this phenomenon in chapter 2, asking if the changes made to the play’s original form “reflect in some ways the lessons about Hollywood dramaturgy and generic conventions Williams surely absorbed both during his brief employment at MGM and as an eager filmgoer during several decades of viewing the commercial product.” How did he handle the imagined concluding triumph of Laura Wingfield over her fears and her mother’s overly protective nature as the film complied to the strong sense of uplift demanded by this female-focused genre? Chapters 3, 4, and 5 focus on the films of Streetcar, Tattoo, and Baby Doll and the challenges they faced by the “thematizing of sexuality” in a Hollywood under the heavyhanded censorship of the Production Code Administration and its ally, the Catholic League of Decency. The dialectical struggle that resulted was one of “accommodation” and the bending of the code until its eventual demise in 1968. In dealing with the rape of Blanche by Stanley in the Elia Kazan directed film of Streetcar (1951), how did Williams and Kazan remain intransigent (even if in a passive aggressively manner) to the demands of the PCA? What was the outcome? What is the difference between what Williams termed “taste” and “vulgarity” when considering the sexual liberation of Tattoo as a film directed by Daniel Mann (1955)? Was “redeeming social
Book Reviews and Notes by Faculty, Staff, Students, and Friends of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture
The Southern Register
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Reading the South continued significance” ever to be found in the play? Why did Baby Doll, directed by Kazan in 1956, achieve more notoriety than any other Williams movie? How did its “white-trash aesthetic” place it in a class with Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre, and how did this go over with the censors? Palmer and Bray note that from the outset the movie Baby Doll was “a collaborative confection.” Chapter 6 deals with three of Williams’s films that were significantly accommodated to one of 1950s Hollywood’s most important genres, “the family melodrama”: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, and Suddenly, Last Summer. In Richard Brooks’s film of Cat (1958), Maggie is made a more sympathetic character, Brick endorses Maggie’s lie and finds renewed masculinity in her trust, and Big Daddy heals Brick’s psychic wound enabling Brick “to accept the Abrahamian demand to be fruitful and multiply.” In the filming of Sweet Bird (1962), Brooks, again the director, turns Chance into a “man on the make” rather than promiscuous or a hustler, and Chance and Heavenly remain “whole” at the end of the movie, capable of having a family life together now that they have successfully cast off her evil father. Sam Spiegel’s direction of the film of Suddenly (1959) turns Williams’s play into “a clear-visioned morality play, its finale both an acknowledgment of horrifying evil in the world and a demonstration that this evil need not destroy the innocent.” Obviously, significant accommodations were made to make these “family melodramas” conform to Hollywood ideas of what would be popular with the public and sell seats. The chapter concludes with a short consideration of Williams’s Period of Adjustment (1962), asking whether or not this film is “a harmless trifle.” Chapter 7 celebrates “the transference of notable literary works of the Southern Renaissance to the screen” and underscores the significance
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of the featured works of Tennessee Williams as being decisively influential in this genre’s most successful production, The Long, Hot Summer (1958), which proved to be an adaptation of several William Faulkner texts. Palmer and Bray are particularly skillful at showing this film’s “shameless borrowings from the era’s most successful Broadway playwright,” Tennessee Williams. Here we also find insightful critical consideration of Williams’s movies The Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots (1970, directed by Sidney Lumet), This Property Is Condemned (1966, directed by Sydney Pollack), and The Fugitive Kind (1959, directed by Sidney Lumet). Concluding chapter 8 considers how Williams’s properties “became increasingly irrelevant in the 1960’s” as Hollywood lost its traditional audience and began to woo younger and hipper viewers, who were less likely to be pleased by what Williams had to offer. Here we find discussions of Williams’s The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, Summer and Smoke, Boom!, and The Night of the Iguana. Iguana is considered as perhaps the most artistically successful film made from his works. Barton and Bray explain that “as a sophisticated exploration of American modernity and its discontents, it anticipates the more celebrated works of that second wave of auteurs, the directors of the Hollywood Renaissance in the late sixties and early seventies.” How fitting an end to Hollywood’s Tennessee is Maxine’s response to Shannon as they descend to the beach, “I’ll get you back up, baby. I’ll get you back up.” Quoting Williams’s own words, Palmer and Bray celebrate Williams’s characters “who are learning to reach the point of utter despair and still go past it with courage.” A companion volume by Palmer and Bray is to be hoped for, because the films produced since the 1970s, as Palmer and Bray note in their preface, testify “to the still growing popularity of a playwright who, at the time
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of his death [1983], had seen his star fall for almost two decades.” In the present volume, these texts appear in an appendix intended only as a reference guide for those interested. Certainly, these later adaptations are worthy of a book-length study of their own, and Palmer and Bray are the critics up to the task. Indicating that space limitations precluded treatment of much of “the interesting, but critically irrelevant, material discovered while researching Hollywood’s Tennessee,” Palmer and Bray allude to the existence of masses of back-up gossip, amusing stories, and surprising trivia surrounding these 15 films. May this archival material, much of which is of popular interest, eventually finally find its way into print perhaps in a less formal, more anecdotal volume. As they say in Hollywood of a film that has the potential to earn a fortune, Hollywood’s Tennessee “has legs.” May it inspire a sequel. Colby H. Kullman
Memphis and the Paradox of Place: Globalization in the American South. By Wanda Rushing. New Directions in Southern Studies Series. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 272 pages. $59.95 cloth, $21.95 paper. Those who are planning a trip to Memphis any time soon, grappling with theoretical questions of how the “global” and “local” are related, or just wanting to know more about the social and cultural dynamics of understudied Southern cities should read Wanda Rushing’s book Memphis and the Paradox of Place: Globalization in the American South. Those who do read the book will see Memphis with
The Southern Register
True Places
Northern Money, Southern Land
A Lowcountry Preacher, His Church, and His People
The Lowcountry Plantation Sketches of Chlotilde R. Martin
Stanley F. Lanzano A documentary photographer’s vivid study of the daily and spiritual lives of an African American coastal community 124 pp., 91 illus., cl, $39.95
Yoknapatawpha, Images and Voices A Photographic Study of Faulkner’s County George G. Stewart Foreword by Robert W. Hamblin
A haunting photographic guidebook to an imaginary place synonymous with Southern fiction
Edited by Robert B. Cuthbert and Stephen G. Hoffius An enchanting mix of gossip and history from the era when parts of the Old South got new owners 272 pp., 81 illus., cl, $34.95
Learning the Valley Excursions into the Shenandoah Valley John Leland Meanderings through a storied Virginia region with a look at its significance from prehistory to the present 144 pp., 8 illus., cl, $24.95
120 pp., 84 illus., cl, $49.95; pb, $24.95
Uptown/Downtown in Old Charleston Sketches and Stories Louis D. Rubin, Jr. A series of briskly paced renderings of the Holy City’s dual identities, written by an acclaimed native son
Flannery O’Connor, Hermit Novelist With a New Preface by the Author Richard Giannone A compelling study of O’Connor’s fiction as illuminated by the teaching of the desert monastics 312 pp., pb, $29.95
128 pp., cl, $29.95 New in paper
City of the Silent
The Southern State of Mind
The Charlestonians of Magnolia Cemetery
Edited by Jan Nordby Gretlund Rich insights into Southern life, letters, and culture in the new millennium
Ted Ashton Phillips, Jr. Foreword by Josephine Humphreys Afterword by Alice McPherson Phillips
A guide to more than two hundred of the most famous, infamous, and influential individuals now interred in the iconic Charleston landmark 216 pp., 46 illus., cl, $39.95
256 pp., pb, $24.95
Understanding Tim Gautreaux Margaret Donovan Bauer An introduction to the works of a Cajun writer who finds optimism in his blue-collar tales 272 pp., cl, $39.95
800.768.2500 www.uscpress.com
Reading the South continued new eyes. As I was reading, I found myself making a mental list of places or events in Memphis that I wanted to visit again (or for the first time): The acres of “intermodal shipping containers” resting on trucking rigs or delivered by train to the Frank C. Pigeon Industrial Park or the huge FedEx warehouses near the airport— reminders of Memphis’s current (and historical) role as a critical hub for the transportation and distribution of goods; the parade route and midway for the Memphis Kemet Jubilee (formerly known as Cotton Maker’s Jubilee) organized in recognition of African American’s exclusion from the white Carnival Memphis (formerly known as Cotton Carnival)— both rituals designed to enhance civic participation and community engagement, but also reflections of the “perpetuation and contestation of social power”; a stroll down the recently redeveloped Beale Street trying to imagine the “old” Beale street with its mixture of saloons, pool halls, grocery stores, bordellos, a bank, doctors’ and dentists’ offices, churches— all part of a “commercial and cultural center and the unofficial capital of Black America” in the first half of the 20th century; a visit to the Peabody Hotel knowing now that it went out of business in 1975 and was sold at auction for only $75,000, reopened in 1981, and recently host to a historic 2006 meeting between Chinese officials, Memphis cotton merchants, and FedEx officials working out the details of the sale and delivery of U.S. cotton to China; or a walk around Overton Park with the knowledge that a highway construction project nearly wiped out this old growth forest and neighborhood and that over the years shifting claims from a variety of groups have worked to save “our park.” This is an academic book informed by a sociological perspective that makes sophisticated arguments about the relationship between the global and local and the importance
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of place, but it is also written in an accessible style and will be tempting to Memphis history buffs, or anyone interested in knowing more about Southern cities. Rushing explains that she uses a case study method in order to adequately capture the “narrative power and human interest” that is part and parcel of Memphis’s dynamic history. It is fair to say that she does this very well. While there are many authors trying to tackle the complexities of globalization and its relationship to our daily lives, the resulting literature is often mired in unsatisfying abstractions and generalizations. This book is not. In the introductory chapter, Rushing provides a very helpful overview of the pitfalls of thinking about the South as a regional “exception” in the U.S. untouched by larger processes of globalization or through the opposite kind of lens that suggests that global forces result in the homogenization of local places and dynamics, making everything the same. Instead, she draws out the complexity of the meaning of place as it shifts over time in the face of unique disruptions (such the yellow fever epidemic in the 1870s or the sanitation workers’ strike in 1968) and in relation to global economic and cultur-
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al flows (immigration, slavery, deindustrialization, et cetera). This book captures the “dynamic tensions between the global and the local in a specific urban location” and calls for our careful attention to place and place building. Rushing writes that “We can think of ‘place’ as uniquely situated in networks of global relations and cultural flows, as well as embedded in accumulated local history and culture.” Each chapter exposes the reader to an in-depth study of the paradox of place in Memphis. Rushing explores the dynamic process involved in the creation and protest of two unique sites of Memphis commemoration: the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue in Memphis’s Forrest Park (a symbol of the Lost Cause) and the National Civil Rights Museum housed at the Lorraine Hotel, the infamous site of Martin Luther King’s assassination. The paradox is that “objects of commemoration are intended to convey authority, stability, and permanence, but they serve as reminders of disruptions, discontinuities, and divisions.” She examines the class and race dynamics surrounding “the creation, development, and preservation” of Overton Park as they relate to recent efforts to develop Shelby Farms. She provides a fascinating overview of the economic history of Memphis from the time that “Cotton was King,” through deindustrialization, to its current postindustrial redevelopment and recovery. And, of course, Rushing explores Memphis as a site of unique cultural innovation, especially in regards to blues, rock and roll, and soul music. In addition, she introduces us to organizations and festivals (Carnival Memphis and Kemet Jubilee) that have promoted commerce, civic participation, and celebration while also solidifying race, class, and gender divisions in the Memphis community. Memphis and the Paradox of Place: Globalization in the American South leaves the reader with a range of con-
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Reading the South continued crete and complex examples of the ways that global processes and historical change are played out in specific local contexts. Other scholars interested in studying globalization, the South, or the intersections between the two would do well to follow Rushing’s lead and prioritize the importance of a sociological understanding of “place” in their work. Kirsten Dellinger
Sources of Light. By Margaret McMullan. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. 240 pages, $15.00 cloth. Samantha “Sam” Thomas is 14 years old when she moves to Jackson, Mississippi, with her mother in the summer of 1962. A self-proclaimed Army brat, Sam is used to celebrating around the country every few years, but this move is more permanent: it follows the death of her father, who was killed in action in Vietnam. Her mother, Martha, takes a position teaching art history in a local college (those of us familiar with Jackson might assume this to be Millsaps), and the two tuck themselves into a leafy subdivision in an attempt to get on with their lives minus a father and a husband. But a quiet existence is out of the question, what with the deafening buzz of cicadas making it “nearly impossible to roller-skate, climb a tree, or generally do anything a person would want to do outside.” At her high school, Sam is an outcast dressed in her cousin’s tatty handme-downs, and her teacher, Miss Jenkins (“old and skinny, with peach fuzz hairs on her upper lip”), takes an almost instant disliking to her new pupil. However, it’s only a matter of time before she meets the boy of her dreams, Stone McLemore, two years older with a driver’s license, “Elvis
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lips,” and “a strong man’s neck, not a boy’s neck at all.” Unfortunately, Sam and her mother quickly discover that Stone’s parents do not share their same open-mindedness when it comes to the race issue, and after Martha Thomas gives an art lecture at the all-black Tougaloo College in town (her picture splashed across the front page of the Jackson ClarionLedger the next day), Sam and her mother are officially branded as agitators and become victims of threats and graffiti. Early in the novel, Sam’s mother befriends Perry Walker, a former war photographer for Life magazine and photography instructor at her college, who is white but lives in an all-black part of Jackson and came to Mississippi originally to encourage black people to register to vote. Though Sam at first resists his attempts at friendship (and courtship of her mother), Perry gives Sam a camera and teaches her about finding the sources of light. “A person can shoot from her head,” Perry tells her, “and she can shoot from the heart. The best pictures are both.” From that point on, Sam manages to hide behind her camera, the way Perry tells her to. Hiding is something Sam understands. “This I liked. This I got.”
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With camera in hand, Sam flits through the novel trying to sort out how she is a part of what’s happening in Jackson during 1962 and 1963. She’s confused by the role the Thomases’ black housekeeper, Willa Mae, must play when the two go shopping in town, her schoolteachers encourage their students “not to think so hard” about things, she’s afraid of rumblings from a new “country club KKK” known as the Citizens’ Council and the lists of people they watch, she’s jealous of her mostly well-off classmates, particularly the most popular girl at school (and Stone’s sister), Mary Alice, who wears a bra and doesn’t “even try to hide the outlines the straps made.” And then there’s Stone himself. One day they’re kissing in the hallway and then practically the very next, Sam sees Stone and his father protesting a black voter registration in McComb, and Mr. McLemore beating a black woman outside a drugstore in downtown Jackson during a sit-in riot. Sam can’t quite decide what side Stone is on (it’s difficult for the reader to decide, as well), and it will take a violent act caught on film that nearly crumbles Sam and her mother’s world for her to make that choice. Sources of Light is a book that will introduce young readers to the civil rights movement in a way history lessons just can’t: through the mind and heart of an extraordinary teenage girl who happens to brush up against perhaps the most important part of Mississippi’s past. By reading Sam Thomas’s experiences in Jackson during 1962 and 1963, young people can see, through her eyes and camera lens, the violence and the fear that became a daily part of life for adults, yes, but especially for children. Sam’s story comes at a time when those who witnessed the movement firsthand are growing older and many of the stories might be lost unless they are told immediately. I feel like it’s fair to say that I do have one problem with Sources of
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Reading the South continued Light. In the end, when the cicadas have started their chirping again, Sam and her mother have to leave Mississippi for good: Martha Thomas finds a position at a university in Boston when she doesn’t receive tenure at the Jackson college, and, in the book’s final chapter, we learn that the adult Samantha Thomas winds up a professional photographer in Chicago. It’s a shame that for Mississippi children reading this book, a happy ending means leaving Mississippi—a place that could really use their help. For those of us who have grown up here and love it here but desire a better Mississippi someday, my hope is that kids like Sam Thomas would stick around and continue to fight the good fight. Sally Cassady Lyon
Jason Wingate’s Legacies: A Novel. By John C. Broderick. New York: Vantage Press, 2009. 324 pages. $24.50 cloth. Rich in allusions to Shakespeare, Keats, and Mark Twain, Jason Wingate’s Legacies reflects the author’s long and varied career as an English professor, poet, scholar, and senior officer at the Library of Congress. John C. Broderick, who died in Maryland this January, was a specialist in Emerson, Thoreau, and other early American writers; but his correspondence with Willie Morris can be found in the University of Mississippi’s library archives, and William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha saga has more than one connection with Broderick’s single novel, published at the end of his productive life. Broderick was born in Memphis and graduated in 1948 from Southwestern (now Rhodes College); this proximity to Mississippi shortly before Faulkner’s Nobel Prize recognition
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could help to explain Faulknerian echoes in the elaborate structure and the tragic plot of Jason Wingate’s Legacies. Even though Wingate’s daughter says she’d rather be called Texan than Southern, Broderick’s Green Glade, Texas—with its family dysfunction, sexual passion, threatened landscape, and fatal greed— could be right down the road from Jefferson, Mississippi. There’s even a Confederate officer in Mrs. Wingate’s family tree. The novel’s most striking stylistic feature is its division into three parts, each with a different organizing principle and a new focus of attention. The seven segments of “Part One: Jason Wingate” are narrated by a series of townspeople, closely resembling Faulkner’s multiple perspectives in As I Lay Dying. Six of Broderick’s speakers are related by blood or marriage, and their monologues begin to reveal the terrible legacy of Jason Wingate’s 1966 suicide (shades of Quentin Compson in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury). The first segment, headed “Jason,” explains in his own words why the Harvard graduate and successful banker-businessman poisons himself because of his brother’s betrayal. Interestingly, the devi-
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ous brother Frank is the only other male narrator; five voices are women’s, ranging from the brothers’ wives to Laurice, who helps run the office at the Wingate lumberyard. While Harriet Wingate’s monologue is set just a week after her husband Jason’s funeral, Laurice narrates the seventh segment a few years after the suicide and two years after the grieving Harriet’s death from a sudden illness. Jason Wingate’s three children, grown to adulthood, are at the heart of the novel. The seven chapters of “Part Two: The Blind Princess” begin with “November, 1981” and end with “Curtain Call.” The section title alludes to a Tchaikovsky opera princess whose father won’t allow his subjects to mention the girl’s blindness; Jason Wingate told the story to Ellen when she was a little girl with the nickname Princess. Between November of 1981 and the following September, Ellen finishes writing a play titled Family Circle and sees it produced in Philadelphia and New York. Appropriately, the opening pages of Part Two sound like stage directions, starting with the lines: “Saturday evening in Green Glade. A large room in a large house, comfortably if casually furnished.” The rest of Part Two is related in the past tense from a third-person omniscient point-of-view, a notable contrast to the first-person narratives of Part One. Ellen Wingate tells her older brother Abner and younger brother Mark that she originally intended to glorify their father (she was his favorite child), but she changed his character into an “absent” and “very unsympathetic one” as she revised the manuscript. Abner’s epiphany that the daughter in the play seems to love her older brother leads to a startling confession by Ellen and, eventually, a surprising marriage for Abner. No wonder the actor Todd sees “a touch of Tennessee Williams” in Family Circle. Jason Wingate’s Legacies concludes with “Part Three: Wingate, Texas,”
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Reading the South continued
University Press of MississiPPi
whose title indicates Frank Wingate’s plan to rename Green Glade as a monument to his Texas-sized ambitions. This brief section, however, opens with a long Associated Press obituary on Frank’s death at 63, datelined “GREEN GLADE, TEXAS. April 23.” Broderick’s sly allusion to Shakespeare’s birthday affirms that the real legacy in the novel belongs to Frank’s book-loving victim Jason. Although Vice President George Bush and evangelist Billy Graham are expected to attend the funeral, their failure to appear suggests that Frank’s influence is already fading. Fittingly, the heartless Frank dies of a heart attack in the bank he stole from Jason. In 1988, six years after the events of Part Two, Jason’s children have left Texas and become a world-famous playwright, a popular actor, and—even more unexpectedly—a husband in distant California. Only the happily married Abner returns for their uncle’s funeral; he tells Frank’s longsuffering wife Bess about his love and courtship, a story that rivals the dramatic plot of Ellen’s Family Circle. Like the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Horton Foote, who died in 2009, John C. Broderick memorializes the complications of 20th-century family life in small-town Texas. On the first page of Jason Wingate’s Legacies, the title character observes that Hamlet is “all about identity” and that Shakespeare’s “momentous questions” are “far beyond my petty concerns.” Broderick makes these concerns paramount in his novel. Green Glade, Texas, could be down the road from Faulkner’s Jefferson; but it is also uncomfortably close to Hamlet’s troubled kingdom.
Celebrating 40 Years
Lost Churches of Mississippi By RichaRd J. cawthon A richly illustrated history of more than one hundred structures lost to disaster, demolition, or abandonment $35 hardback; $35 Ebook
Under Surge, Under Siege The Odyssey Of Bay sT. LOuis and KaTrina By Ellis andERson A survivor’s tale of the hurricane’s destruction and a community’s enduring determination $25 hardback; $25 Ebook
Losing Ground idenTiTy and Land LOss in COasTaL LOuisiana By david M. BuRlEy FoREwoRd By saRa cRosBy aFtERwoRd By t. MayhEaRt daRdaR and thoMas daRdaR How residents of a changing coastline reconcile sense of place with the Gulf’s encroachment $40 printed casebinding; $40 Ebook
Joan Wylie Hall
Mark Your Calendars!
Dreaming in Clay on the Coast of Mississippi LOve and arT aT shearwaTer By chRistophER MauRER with MaRía EstRElla iglEsias The story of Shearwater Pottery and the Anderson family’s artful enterprise $25 paperback; $25 Ebook
March 20–24, 2011 8th Mississippi Delta Literary Tour
Down on the Batture
Based in Greenwood Visits to Indianola, Greenville, Clarksdale
By olivER a. houck An extended meditation on a lively slip of wilderness abutting the Mississippi River $25 hardback; $25 Ebook
March 24–26, 2011 18th Oxford Conference for the Book
www.upress.state.ms.us 800-737-7788
www.oxfordconferenceforthebook.com
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The NEW Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Southern Foodways Register Sponsored by
THE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF SOUTHERN CULTURE at the University of Mississippi Published by
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS Chapel Hill CHARLES REAGAN WILSON General Editor
The Center for the Study of Southern Culture is currently in the process of producing The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, consisting of new material based on recent scholarship and updated material first published in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. The New Encyclopedia is being released as a series of clothbound and paperback volumes, making each individual section of the original edition a handy, one-volume guide for those who are interested in a particular subject, as well as making the volumes more accessible for classroom study. The entire collection will contain 24 volumes in all. CURRENTLY AVAILABLE
Volume 1, Religion. Samuel S. Hill, editor. HB101.....$39.95 PG102.....$19.95
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Volume 12, Music. Bill C. Malone, editor. HB112.....$39.95 PB112......$19.95
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Volume 14, Folklife. Glenn Hinson and William Ferris, editors. HB114.....$39.95 PB114.....$19.95
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To order copies from the Center, visit our Web site (www.olemiss.edu/depts/south), call 1-662-915-5993, or complete the order form on page 39 of this issue of the Southern Register. To order the complete set from the University of North Carolina Press at great savings, visit www.uncpress.unc.edu/browse/page/583 or call 800-848-6224.
Southern Foodways Register The Newsletter of the Southern Foodways Alliance “I opened the safe, took a biscuit off a plate, and punched a hole in it with my finger. Then, with a jar of cane syrup, I poured the hole full, waited for it to soak in good, and then poured again.” –Harry Crews, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place
Cornbread Nation 5 on Sale at a Bookstore Near You! The fifth volume in this popular series from the Southern Foodways Alliance spans the food cultures of the South. Cornbread Nation 5, edited by accomplished writer Fred W. Sauceman, celebrates food and the ways in which it forges unexpected relationships between people and places. In this collection of more than 70 essays and poems, we read about the food that provides nourishment as well as a sense of community and shared history. Essays examine Nashville’s obsession with hot chicken and the South’s passion for congealed foods. There are stories of cooks frying green tomatoes over campfires in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee and bakers turning out tea cakes for Easter in Louisiana. In a chapter on immigrant cooking, we visit the Mississippi Delta where a Chinese family fries pork rinds in a wok and a Lebanese restaurant serves baklava alongside coconut cream pie. Alan Deutschman, a self-described “Jewish Yankee,” chronicles his search for the perfect country ham. Barbara Kingsolver extols on the joys of eating sustainably. Sara Roahen writes a veritable love letter to the venerable New Orleans Sazerac. Kevin Young delights with his “Ode to Chicken,” and Donna Tartt extols the virtues of bourbon. Cornbread Nation 5 is a feast, and if you’re not hungry or thirsty when you pick up this book, you will be when you put it down. Editor Fred W. Sauceman is an associate professor of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of four books, including the three-volume series The Place Setting, which explores Appalachian foodways. He directed and produced the documentary A Red Hot Dog Digest. Sauceman’s Food with Fred appears monthly on WJHL-TV, the CBS affiliate in Johnson City, Tennessee.
Film Festival Acceptances and Honors
The SFA has been making short documentaries for seven years now. Only recently have Joe York and Andy Harper, our colleagues at the Media and Documentary Projects Center here at the University of Mississippi, been regularly submitting those films to festivals and competitions. Over the last six month, the SFA film program has made up for lost time. Cud, Joe York’s portrait of a Georgia cattleman, underwritten by Whole Foods, was an official selection at the Reel Earth Film Festival in Wellington, New Zealand; the Atlanta Film Festival; and the Going Green Film Festival in Beverly Hills, California. Smokes & Ears, York’s homage to the Big Apple Inn of Jackson, Mississippi, has also been getting good play. That film, commissioned by the Fertel Foundation, was an official selection at the Tupelo Film Festival in Tupelo, Mississippi, and the Crossroads Film Festival in Jackson, Mississippi. At Crossroads, York won the Ruma Award, for most promising Mississippi filmmaker. Smokes & Ears will play on June 26 as an official selection of the New York Food Film Festival.
SFA Internships in Oral History
Mike Luster
Mitch Stauts
Sam Sneed
Jung “Kevin” Kim
Luster, a graduate student in Heritage Studies at Arkansas State University, is the recipient of this year’s guided internship. Rachel will be collecting barbecue interviews in Arkansas for the SFA’s Southern BBQ Trail. Two SFA Greenhouse micro grants were awarded this spring, as well. The SFA Greenhouse is a small-budget initiative geared to assist collectors in documenting food stories in their local areas. Rachel Bailey of Atlanta will be producing a multimedia piece on Atlanta’s Buford Highway to premier just prior to this summer’s field trip to Atlanta, June 24 through 26, which will celebrate the Global South. Emily Wallace of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is writing a paper on the refrigerated salads industry with a focus on pimento cheese, which will be presented at the SFA’s 2011 symposium, the theme of which is the Vegetable South. For more information, please visit www.southernfoodways.org.
addition to welcoming students from other institutions, the SFA is committing to making one in-house internship position available each year for a Southern Studies graduate student in an effort to establish an academic partnership with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, where the SFA is headquartered. The SFA awarded two in-house internships this year. Jung “Kevin” Kim, an undergraduate student in history at Swarthmore College, and Meghan Leonard, a graduate student in Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, will both be collecting oral histories for the SFA this summer. The guided internship is geared towards students who already have experience in the field of oral history. Individuals are invited to submit proposals to conduct oral history projects anywhere in the South. Amy Evans Streeter will mentor the interns from afar, guiding them through SFA methods and practices. Rachel Reynolds-
True to its mission, the Southern Foodways Alli-ance is as committed to teaching as it is to documenting. In an effort to mentor students in the field of oral history and initiate collaborations, the SFA has established an internship program oral history. A wonderful byproduct of these collaborations will, of course, be the addition of new maJoearchive. York terial to the SFA’s permanent Through these collaborations, as well as its regular schedule of collecting fieldwork, the SFA looks forward to collecting its 500th oral history interview this year. Two types of internships will be offered annually: in-house and guided. The in-house internship is intended for students with little or no experience in conducting fieldwork. In-house interns are invited to spend one to two weeks in Oxford working alongside the SFA’s oral historian, Amy Evans Streeter, to process existing materials and conduct their own interviews. In
Meghan Leonard
Rachel Reynolds-Luster
SFA Calendar Corinne Haxton Pavlovic
al barbecue culture, since the beginning. We’re proud to partner with the good folks at Union Square Hospitality Group, prouder still to produce a film on barbecue culture each year, one that USHG underwrites and we premier on the streets of New York City.
SFA 500: A Documentary Celebration September 26, 2010 1–5 p.m. Blue Smoke and Jazz Standard New York City
Potlikker NYC June 11 Hill Country Barbecue Market New York City Join John Currence, of City Grocery in Oxford, Mississippi; Ashley Christensen, of Poole’s Diner in Raleigh, North Carolina; and Elizabeth Karmel, of Hill Country Barbecue in New York City, for an evening of haute barbecue, cold beer, and a showing of the newest Joe York film, Cut, Chop, Cook, underwritten by Union Square Hospitality Group, an homage to Scott’s BBQ in Hemmingway, South Carolina. Big Apple Barbecue Block Party June 12–13 Madison Park, New York City The SFA has been a part of this event, a grand exposition of American region-
Corridor. With expert Southern Foodways Sherpas in the lead, we’ll explore the strip malls and reconfigured fast food bunkers where intrepid eaters feast on some of the region’s best (Chinese) barbecue and (Salvadoran) fried chicken. We’ll eat a Deep South dim sum lunch at Abattoir and explore Mexican cookery with Eddie Hernandez of Taqueria del Sol. Tickets are on sale now.
Join SFA Oral Historian Amy Evans Streeter and a host of SFA oral history subjects to celebrate the collection of our 500th Oral History and the making of the SFA’s 25th film. Look for more details soon at www.southernfoodways.org.
Summer Field Trip June 24–26 Atlanta, Georgia Exploring the Global South along the Buford Highway International Corridor
13th Southern Foodways Symposium October 21–22, Greenwood, Mississippi October 21–24, Oxford, Mississippi Save the date, and join us in Mississippi, where we’ll continue our examination of the Global South.
Travel the Buford Highway International
Southern Foodways Alliance name company address city telephone
M E M B E R S H I P Please make checks payable to the Southern Foodways Alliance and mail them to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture University, MS 38677.
state
zip
fax
❏ $50 student ❏ $75 individual ❏ $100 family ❏ $200 nonprofit institution ❏ $500 corporation
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, VISIT US AT OUR WEB SITE: www.southernfoodways.org or call Julie Pickett at 662.915.5993 or via e-mail at sfadesk@olemiss.edu
Mississippi Delta Literary Tour Portfolio Each year intrepid literary travelers from across the U.S. gather in the Mississippi Delta to explore the region’s writers, books, food, and lore. This year’s Mississippi Delta Literary Tour found 20 book-loving explorers roaming the Delta countryside in search of uncommon adventure. Their singular experience took them from Greenwood to Yazoo City to Greenville to Clarksdale, and all points in between.
Jimmy Thomas
Jimmy Thomas
Proprietor of TurnRow Book Company, Jamie Kornegay, welcomes the group. Each year the tour begins in this Delta bookstore in downtown Greenwood.
Delta Tour participants gather at the entrance of the B. S. Ricks Memorial Library, where they heard author Gerry Helferich’s talk on Yazoo City writers, JoAnne Prichard Morris’s on Willie Morris, and Teresa Nicholas’s on Henry Herschel Brickell.
Nicholas Basbanes
Jimmy Thomas
Nicholas Basbanes
Anne Ford from Atlanta, Georgia, and Tim Kalich, editor of the Greenwood Commonwealth, discuss the future of Delta newspapers. Kalich, along with Jim Abbott, former editor of the Indianola Enterprise-Tocsin, spoke to the tour group on Delta newspapers and history. (above) Yazoo City tour guide and host Sam Olden is pictured at the Sam B. Olden Historical Museum of the Yazoo Historical Society. The museum provides a historical account of Yazoo County and Yazoo City.
Jimmy Thomas
(left) Participants view the Henry
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Herschel Brickell Memorial/Yazoo Literary Walkway, which memorializes the famous Yazoo City literary critic and book reviewer as well as dozens of other writers that the small Delta town has produced. The walkway opened only a week before the tour’s visit.
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This unique headstone in Yazoo City’s Glenwood Cemetery marks the final resting place of writer Willie Morris.
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Jimmy Thomas
Jimmy Thomas
Tour organizer, Jimmy Thomas, poses with a bust of Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog in the children’s room at the William Alexander Percy Memorial Library in Greenville. Henson, the creator of Kermit the Frog and other famous Muppets, was born in the Greenville and was raised in nearby Leland.
Artists Bill Dunlap, Maggie Dunlap, and Linda Burgess discuss their art at an opening reception at the recently opened Gallery Point Leflore in Greenwood. Bill Dunlap was raised in Mississippi, and the Delta landscape is often the subject of his work.
Nicholas Basbanes
Nicholas Basbanes
The group stopped at the B. B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in the bluesman’s childhood hometown of Indianola. Since opening in 2008, it has become one of the state’s premier museums. King returns every summer to Indianola to play a free concert.
Each year, McCormick Book Inn in Greenville hosts the Mississippi Delta Literary Tour. Storeowners Mary Dayle McCormick (pictured) and Hugh McCormick have been selling books to readers across the Delta since they opened the store in 1965.
Nicholas Basbanes
The tour, en route to Clarksdale and guided by Luther Brown and Henry Outlaw from Delta State University, stop at Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church to see one of the reported graves of the “King of the Delta Blues,” Robert Johnson. The grave here at Little Zion is the musician’s most likely final resting place, although there are three possible sites.
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Spring 2010
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17th Oxford Conference for the Book Portfolio J. Bingo Gunter
(from left) Claiborne Barksdale of the Barksdale Reading Institute, Young Authors Fair novelists Watt Key (9th grade) and Ingrid Law (5th grade), and moderator Elaine Scott discuss readers and reading during the “Endangered Species” panel.
Among the fiction writers who presented readings at the conference were (from left) Steven Amsterdam (Things We Didn’t See Coming), John Brandon (Arkansas), and Donna Hemans (River Woman).
Jamison Hollister
E. Ethelbert Miller (above), in a session with poets Beth Ann Fennelly and Mark Jarman, presented readings in celebration of National Poetry Month. Miller also gave a presentation on “The Craft of Writing the Political Poem” at the Lafayette County & Oxford Public Library.
Nicholas A. Basbanes, the author of A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books and six other volumes that have established him as the leading authority of books about books, presented the keynote address at the J. D. Williams Library. “Common Bond: A World of Books and Book People” was his title.
(right) Discussing the topic “Writing about Politics” are, from left, Todd S. Purdum, national editor of Vanity Fair and former New York Times correspondent; Curtis Wilkie, member of the journalism faculty at the University of Mississippi; and Hendrik Hertzberg, editor and writer for the New Yorker and author of Politics: Observations and Arguments, 1966–2004 and ¡Obamanos!: The Birth of a New Political Era.
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Spring 2010
The Southern Register
Jamison Hollister
Jamison Hollister
(from left) Ted Ownby, director of the Center, talked with two authors of memoirs that discuss the issue of race within their own families: Bliss Broyard (One Drop) and Ralph Eubanks (The House at the End of the Road).
Jamison Hollister
Jamison Hollister
“Teaching Barry Hannah” panelists were (from left) Jay Watson, Daniel E. Williams, John Parrish Peede, and Donald Kartiganer.
The “Barry Hannah as Writer” panel featured comments by (from left) Wells Tower, Amy Hundley, William Harrison, Mark Richard, and Darcey Steinke. Brad Watson (not pictured) also spoke during the session.
“Barry Hannah as Teacher,” moderated by fiction writer Tom Franklin (far left), heard from three of Hannah’s former creative writing students: (from left) authors Cynthia Shearer, Jonathan Miles, and Anne Rapp.
“The University Press of Mississippi at 40 Years” was the topic for seven panelists—former staff members JoAnne Prichard Morris and Seetha Srinivasan; current staff members John Langston and Leila Salisbury; and scholars Noel Polk and Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. As part of its anniversary festivities, the Press hosted a picnic at noon on Saturday and celebrated with cake and toasts during a party of Off Square Books that evening. Pictured here are, from left, Square Books owner Richard Howorth with three members of the Press staff: John Langston (art director), Leila Salisbury (director), and Steve Yates (marketing director).
The Southern Register
Spring 2010
Bruce Newman
Clint Kimberling
The 17th Oxford Conference for the Book was sponsored by the University of Mississippi, Junior Auxiliary of Oxford, Lafayette County & Oxford Public Library, Lafayette County Literacy Council, Della Davidson Elementary School PTA, Mississippi Library Commission, Mississippi Hills Heritage Area Alliance, Southern Literary Trails, and Square Books. The conference was partially funded by the University of Mississippi, a contribution from the R&B Feder Foundation for the Beaux Arts, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Southern Arts Federation, the Mississippi Humanities Council, the Oxford Tourism Council, the Lafayette Oxford Foundation for Tomorrow, and the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council.
Chancellor Daniel Jones (left) introduced John Grisham, who talked about “Literary Oxford” at the conference.
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Life Never Touched Him ’til the First Monday in March
Page 32
Barry Hannah’s classmates and fellow rabble-rousers tell tales about their friend during the “Surviving Geronimo Rex” panel. From left, Harry C. “Joe” Brown, John Quisenberry, Horace Newcomb, Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, Bill Dunlap, Wyatt Newman, and Noel Polk. Barry’s much celebrated first novel, Geronimo Rex, became a manifesto for our generation who came of age in mid20th century Mississippi, especially those of us who attended, or were attended to by that bastion of self-discipline and moral certitude, Mississippi College. In one slim volume, Barry captured Courtesy Harry C. “Joe” Brown
Clinton High School’s yearbook The Arrow, 1960
Barry Hannah, Most Musical, 1960
J. Bingo Gunter
I cannot recall a literary conference intersected by the funeral of its honoree, but such was the case for the 17th Oxford Conference on the Book (March 4–6, 2010) dedicated to Barry Hannah. By all accounts, Barry left this world quietly and gently, at home on Monday March 1st. Family, friends, scholars, students, peers, admirers, and the genuinely heartbroken and bereaved gathered for the conference’s ubiquitous panel discussions with titles like “Teaching Barry Hannah,” “Barry Hannah as Writer,” “Barry Hannah as Teacher,” and “Literary Oxford.” (Oh, for that Golden Age when Willie Morris, John Grisham, Larry Brown, and Barry might all be sighted on the Square in a single day!) I had organized a panel called “Survivors of Geronimo Rex” with no thought as to the irony that title would come to carry.
Harry C. “Joe” Brown – Beat Night Joe
Spring 2010
the sounds, smells, speech patterns, and dark humor of our great, mutual place, as well as the hypocrisy, mendacity, and wrong headedness that emanated from the pulpits, the press, and politicians of the time. He told his story using the most unexpected and thrilling combinations of common nouns, verbs, and adjectives. For a moment Barry seemed to literally give the English language a new lease on life. There was hope for us all. Three of the four people on Geronimo Rex’s dedication page came to Oxford. Horace Newcomb, Harry “Joe” Brown, and Wyatt Newman were joined by Peggy Prenshaw, John Quisenberry, and Noel Polk—all survivors of the early Clinton, Mississippi, days, Mississippi College, and lifelong friendships with Barry Hannah. On that very day an unusually cold, hard, and cruel winter subsided. Saturday was spring’s first day. On our panel a flowering of memory and recollection came forth. The floodgates opened wide with profuse testimony and hilarious anecdote. This was the stuff of Barry fiction. There was much laughter and the occasional tear. His spirit, if not rested, was certainly palpable. All rose The Southern Register
Harry C. “Joe” Brown
Clinton High School’s yearbook The Arrow, 1960
Barry Hannah with “Vanessa,” Joe Brown’s “midlife crisis” Jaguar XK-150
Dick Prenshaw and Barry Hannah, 1960 to the occasion. Only Barry’s seat at the table went empty. Working on this project had given me welcome cause to be more in contact with Barry than usual. At Big Bad Breakfast in October he was not well, but his humor was high and enthusiasm for the conference real. I called in late February to remind that we fully expected him to be on the panel. He said, “Sure, but in the background. I want others to shine.” I assured him that he best be there in the interest of self-defense. “These folks know the truth,” I said, “and if we do our job we’ll put the lie to the received wisdom that Barry Hannah is some kind of creative genius. Hell, all that business really happened! You just wrote it down!” Barry found this quite amusing and
said, “I think Geronimo Rex may be the only book of mine you’ve read, Bill.” I assured him it wasn’t but that I had read it half a dozen times and it was the only book of his I lived by. “I’ll be sure to take all my medicine,” he said. “Not only that,” I told him, “but you might want to fill your oxygen tank with nitrous oxide” because there was sure to be some serious laughing come Saturday the 6th of March. And that was the last sound I ever heard from Barry Hannah. Deep, rich, healthy laughter followed by “Okay, Bill. I’ll be there.” Barry is buried in the northeastern most corner of Oxford’s Memorial Cemetery. His grave, like the life he lived, is out on the edge. William Faulkner is there as well, back to the
John Quisenberry Spring 2010
Clinton High School’s yearbook The Arrow, 1959
The Southern Register
William Dunlap
Clinton High School’s yearbook The Arrow, 1960
Clinton High School’s yearbook The Arrow, 1960
Horace Newcomb
south and west in the old part called St. Peter’s. In between, there are fine and good souls too numerous to name. I have never associated, in either this life or the next, Barry Hannah with pyromania. (He just set the literary world on fire.) But the evening of his burial, a huge conflagration erupted just off the Square. The old Gin, one of Literary Oxford’s favorite but now defunct watering holes, was busy burning itself down. The place was empty and no one was hurt. A crowd gathered, silent and respectful. It all seemed appropriately symbolic—a funeral pyre worthy of a Norse god or Greek hero. As fire danced against the night sky and embers flew heavenward, it occurred to me to ask—what would Geronimo do? What would have been his parting shot? As of this writing, no cause for the fire has been determined. I have come to believe Barry Hannah’s soul is finally at peace.
Wyatt Newman Page 33
Southern Culture Catalog Civil Rights in the Delta
Photo Courtesy Memphis Commercial Appeal
Journalist Curtis Wilkie in conversation with Patti Carr Black, Emmett Till’s cousin Wheeler Parker, Sumner residents Frank Mitchener and Betty and Bill Pearson, Henry Outlaw of the Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University, and former Mississippi governor William F. Winter. March 29, 2006. Color, 60 minutes. DVD1148 . . . . . . $20.00 Friends . . . . . . . . $18.00
Scene at courthouse in Sumner in 1955 during the Emmett Till murder trial
“Are You Walkin’ with Me?” Sister Thea Bowman, William Faulkner, and African American Culture Overview of programs Sister Thea presented at the annual Faulkner Conference from 1980 through 1989. Produced by Lisa N. Howorth, Center for the Study of Southern Culture, 1990. Color, 30 minutes. DVD 1016 . . . . . . $25.00 Friends . . . . . . . . . $22.50 The Eleventh Oxford Conference for the Book Poster (2001) Poster features Richard Wright photograph by Carl Van Vetchen. M9903 . . . . . . . . . . $10.00 Friends . . . . . . . . . . $ 9.00 The Dain & Cofield Collection Posters High quality 18" x 24" duotone posters featuring timeless photographs of William Faulkner Dain Poster M1034 . . . $18.95
Faulkner’s Mississippi: Land into Legend Transforms the fiction of William Faulkner’s mythical Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha into the reality of Oxford and Lafayette County, Mississippi, with quotations from Faulkner’s writings correlated with appropriate scenes. The first motion pictures inside Faulkner’s home are presented along with rare still photographs of the writer. Narrated by Joseph Cotton. Script by Evans Harrington. Producer, Robert D. Oesterling, University of Mississippi Center for Public Service and Continuing Studies. 1965. Color, 32 minutes. DVD1069 . . . . . . $25.00 Friends . . . . . . . . . $22.50 William Faulkner Stamp Ceremony A 22-cent Literary Arts Commemorative stamp honoring William Faulkner was issued by the United States Postal Service during a ceremony at the University of Mississippi on August 3, 1987. The DVD of this program includes remarks by author Eudora Welty, Faulkner’s daughter, Jill Faulkner Summers, and others. Color, 34 minutes. DVD1231 . . . . . . $25.00 Friends . . . . . . . $22.50 William Faulkner and Eudora Welty This film features Eudora Welty at the opening session of the 1987 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. Welty reads from her story “Why I Live at the P.O.” and answers questions about her work and Faulkner’s. Color, 34 minutes. DVD1104 . . . . . . $25.00 Friends . . . . . . . . $22.50
Cofield Poster M1033 . $18.95 Faulkner’s World Exhibit Poster M1789 . . . . . . . . . . . . . $10.00
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The Southern Register
Books
All New, Limited Number of Copies Available The South: A Treasury of Art and Literature This richly illustrated volume includes wellselected texts and images from more than 300 years of life in the American South. Edited—and signed—by Lisa Howorth. 384 pages; 120 color, 100 black-and-white illustrations. Only a few copies of this 1983 publication are left. Cloth. B1006 .......... $150.00 Friends.....$135.00
Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference Proceedings Studies in English, Volume 14 1974 conference papers by Malcolm Cowley, Elizabeth M. Kerr, and David Sansing along with transcripts of discussions by Joseph Blotner, Evans Harrington, and others. Paper. B1020.............. $25.00 Friends......$22.50 Studies in English, Volume 15 1975 conference papers by Cleanth Brooks, William Boozer, Carvel Collins, Blyden Jackson, Richard Godden, and Elizabeth M. Kerr along with transcripts of discussions by Victoria Black, Christine Drake, Howard Duvall, Robert J. Farley, Lucy Howorth, Mary McClain, Phil Mullen, William McNeil Reed, Dean Faulkner Wells, and others. Paper. B1021.............. $25.00 Friends......$22.50 The South and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha 1976 conference papers by Daniel Aaron, Michael Millgate, Darwin Turner, John Pilkington, Evans Harrington, Shelby Foote, Linda Weishimer Wagner, Victoria Fielden Black, and Louis D. Rubin Jr. Paper B1022.... $15.00 Friends......$13.50 Cloth B1023.... $30.00 Friends......$27.00 The Maker and the Myth 1977 conference papers by Calvin S. Brown, Albert J. Guerard, Louis P. Simpson, Ilse Dusoir Lind, and Margaret Walker Alexander. Paper B1024.... $15.00 Friends......$13.50 Cloth B1025.... $30.00 Friends......$27.00
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