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Linda and I toured Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi and a corner of Arkansas from June 19-23, 2007 to learn about William Faulkner and visit the origins of the Blues. Here's our itinerary:
Check out Linda's Southern Literary and Musical Roots Tour course work blog for a much more thorough version of our trip.
We toured the Memphis Rock n Soul Museum Saturday morning, right across the street from the Gibson Guitar factory.
Here's the Sun Record Company where Elvis was first recorded.
Gruhn Guitars is probably the coolest guitar store on the planet.
Tennessee Williams lived here.
Muddy Waters' cabin site at Stovall Farms. This excerpt from Robert Gordon's biography of Muddy Waters Can't Be Satisfied includes a description of life on Stovall Farms. This NYTimes book review describes Alan Lomax's original field recordings of Muddy Waters.
Thanks to this guy's recommendation . . .
. . . we enjoyed a great fried catfish lunch at the Stovall Plantation Farms gas station and diner.
Here we are in Helena, Arkansas broadcast live on Sonny Payne's King Biscuit Time radio show on KFFA radio. Helena was home to legendary blues musician Robert Lockwood, Jr. who, with Sonny Boy Williamson, first broadcast live on the "King Biscuit Time" show on KFFA radio November 14, 1941.
Sonny Payne braodcasts from the Delta Cultural Center.
W.C. Handy, the father of the Blues, composed "The Memphis Blues," "The Beale Street Blues," and "The St. Louis Blues," among many others.
The
The museum tour also includes the boarding house across the street from where the shots are said to have been fired.
Rendezvous Barbeque
B.B. King's Blues Club on Beale Street.
Night time carriage ride around Memphis.
Clarksdale is where many say Robert Johnson's Crossroads Blues takes its name. Listen to an excerpt here.
The Delta Blues Museum houses Muddy Waters' log cabin. Here's a link to a photo of the cabin before it was moved. We drove out to the original site at Stovall Farms on Friday.
Bluesman Robert Johnson's grave near Greenwood, Mississippi. Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters are both inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Mack Grimmett, Bolivar County, Mississsippi sheriff with snake. The sheriff escorted us on down to Po' Monkey's place.
"Po Monkey" Willie Seaberry's Juke Joint outside Merigold, Mississippi. Read about juke joints at What is a Jook Joint?
Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale
Burning off wheat stubble.
Linda on the front porch of the Fullilove sharecropper's shack at the Shack Up Inn on the old Hopsun Plantation, where the first mechanical cotton picker was put to use. Read more at Shack Up a Cotton-Pickin' Minute .
We left Bardstown and drove over to the The Abbey of Gethsemani, home of Jesuit monk Thomas Merton, Catholic spiritual writer, poet, author and social activist.
Continuing south to our literary destination of Oxford, Mississippi, we toured Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak, the University of Mississippi Library's Special Collections, and sought out various Faulkner residences in and around Oxford. Roy Blunt, Jr. was to be in Oxford at Square Books for a reading. We also ate (twice) at Ajax's Diner - pulled pork, catfish, and Lazy Magnolia pecan beer.
William Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak.
Linda with William Faulkner.
The Oxford, Mississippi courthouse.
We left Athens, Ohio this afternoon and headed south to the Talbott Tavern in Bardstown, Kentucky, about an hour west of Lexington. Bardstown, the bourban capital of the world, is also the home of Stephen Foster, composer of "My Old Kentucky Home."
The Old Talbott Tavern where Lincoln and Jesse James slept.
Sampling bourbon.
Stephen Foster's Old Kentucky Home.
Po' Monkey's Juke Joint featured in the photographic exhibit American Music by
Rolling Stone photographer Annie Leibovitz
At Night, Farmer Trades His Tractor for the Blues
By ERIK ECKHOLM
March 2, 2007 NYTimes
Inside Poor Monkey's
By Luther Brown, Delta State University
Trail of the Hellhound: Delta Blues in the Lower Mississippi Valley
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers allows you to search and read newspaper pages from 1900-1910 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
Chronicling America is a partnership between the National Digital Newspaper Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and The Library of Congress.
Double-Bind: Three Women of the Harlem Renaissance
The lives and careers of poets such as Jessie Redmon Fauset, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Georgia Douglas Johnson have, in the history that has been written since, been relegated to the precincts of specialists in African American literature. Yet, in the face of what must have been corrosive psychic costs, in terms of the circumscription of their true ambitions and selves, the achievements of Fauset, Bennett, Johnson, the other women poets of the Harlem Renaissance stand among the most heroic in the twentieth century American poetry.
Your class . . . determines everything: your eating habits, your speech patterns, your family relations. It is possible to move out of the class you were born into, either up or down, she says, but the transition almost always means a great disruption to your sense of self. And you can ascend the class ladder only if you are willing to sacrifice many of your relationships and most of your values — and only if you first devote yourself to careful study of the hidden rules of the class you hope to enter.
- Ruby Payne
From The Class-Consciousness Raiser
By PAUL TOUGH
NYTimes Magazine June 10, 2007 (PDF)
Excerpt: Understanding and Working with Students and Adults from Poverty
Generational vs. Situational Poverty and the Hidden Rules
A Framework for Understanding Ruby Payne
By Anita Bohn
Rethinking Schools Online - Volume 21 No. 2 - Winter 2006 (PDF)
Author's Poverty Views Disputed Yet Utilized Materials Have Guided Va., Md. Teachers
By Ian Shapira
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 15, 2007 (PDF)
Choose a state to find local poets, poems, events, literary journals, writing programs, poetry organizations - from the Academy of American Poets.
Summer Bummer
For as long as anyone can remember, well-meaning pedagogues have been sabotaging summer vacations by forcing high schoolers to read “Lord of the Flies,” “All the King’s Men” and “A Separate Peace.” These books may be the cornerstones of our civilization, but they’re certainly no fun.
By JOE QUEENAN
New York Times
June 3, 2007
Design For the Other 90% at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum
“A billion customers in the world,” Dr. Paul Polak told a crowd of inventors recently, “are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses, a $10 solar lantern and a $100 house.”
The world’s cleverest designers, said Dr. Polak, a former psychiatrist who now runs an organization helping poor farmers become entrepreneurs, cater to the globe’s richest 10 percent, creating items like wine labels, couture and Maseratis.
“We need a revolution to reverse that silly ratio,” he said.
To that end, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, which is housed in Andrew Carnegie’s 64-room mansion on Fifth Avenue and offers a $250 red chrome piggy bank in its gift shop, is honoring inventors dedicated to “the other 90 percent,” particularly the billions of people living on less than $2 a day.
From Design That Solves Problems for the World’s Poor
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
NYTimes May 19, 2007
