A Southern Gallimaufry
Welty illustrated the cover for this musical piece written by her English teacher at Jackson Junior-Senior High School:
“O Mos-qui-ta, Mos-qui-ta,
you bi-ta my feet-a!”
(“Mosquito”, by Flo Field Hampton, arranged by Harry L. Alford.
Crystal Springs, Mississippi: Flo Field Hampton Publishing Co., c. 1926
Special Collections, University of Mississippi.)
What compels great writers to write for children? For whatever reason, many do, and some titles are familiar: C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series, Tolkien’s The Hobbit, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, and T.S. Eliot wrote Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a childhood favorite of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber.
More obscure are Joyce’s, The Cat and the Devil, Twain’s, Advice to Little Girls, Woolf’s, The Widow and the Parrot, Mary Shelley’s The Fisher’s Cot, and then we have these little-known children’s books by two of Mississippi’s brightest literary lights; Welty’s The Shoe Bird and Faulkner’s The Wishing Tree.
In 1927, Faulkner gave the story that was to become The Wishing Tree to Victoria “Cho-Cho” Franklin, the daughter of his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham. Faulkner was still infatuated with Estelle and had hopes of her leaving her current husband and marrying him, which she did in 1929. Faulkner typed the book on colored paper, bound it himself and included a lyrical dedication:
To Victoria
‘. . . . . . . I have seen music, heard
Grave and windless bells; mine air
Hath verities of vernal leaf and bird.
Ah, let this fade: it doth and must; nor grieve,
Dream ever, though; she ever young and fair.’
But Faulkner made copies for three other children as well, and when Victoria tried to publish the book decades later, copyright had to be worked out between the four. In 1964, Faulkner’s granddaughter Victoria, Cho-Cho’s daughter, got Random House to publish a limited edition of 500 numbered copies, featuring black-and-white illustrations by artist Don Bolognese.
The Wishing Tree is a grimly whimsical morality tale, somewhere between Alice In Wonderland and To Kill a Mockingbird. Dulcie, a young girl, wakes on her birthday to find a mysterious red-haired boy in her room who whisks her, the other children, the maid Alice, and a 92-year old man through a “soft wisteria scented mist” to find the Wishing Tree. They wish, and they unwish, and at the end they meet St. Francis who gives them each a bird–a little winged thought. The Wishing Tree is about the importance of choosing one’s wishes with consideration. “If you are kind to helpless things, you don’t need a Wishing Tree to make things come true.”
On April 8, 1967, a version of the story appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. Three days later, Random House released a regular edition, which went through three printings that year alone and no more. The book is now regarded as a literary curio from the man who put an Ole Miss coed in a cathouse in Memphis.
Eudora Welty finished what was to become The Shoe Bird in 1963 under the working title Pepe to fulfill a contractual obligation to Harcourt Brace—and to put a new roof on her house. She sent the final draft to Diarmund Russell in March, and he was enthusiastic: “totally charming—something all ages can read.” Eudora readied what was now entitled The Shoe Bird for publication in early 1964 with illustrations by Beth Krush, dedicating it to Bill and Emmy Maxwell’s daughters, Kate and Brookie.
The Shoe Bird is Arturo, a parrot who works in The Friendly Shoe Store “in a shopping center in the middle of the U.S.A.,” helping Mr. Friendly greet customers and bringing him a match for his end-of-the-day pipe. Arturo’s motto is: If you hear it, tell it. One day, a little boy who was leaving the store said, “Shoes are for the birds!” and after the store had closed Arturo, true to his motto, repeats the phrase and all the birds in the world—including a dodo and a phoenix—gather at the shoe store to be fitted for shoes. The Shoe Bird is a nice little story with lots of puns, but it’s heavy-handed with the moral of speaking for oneself instead of just repeating what others say.
Reviews in adult publications were “cordial but restrained,” while reception among children’s literature commentators was either negative or—as in the case of the influential Horn Book, nonexistent. Kirkus Reviews described the novel as uneventful and concludes: “the overly wordy result is so obscure that readers are likely to want to leave dictionaries as well as shoes to the birds.” An orchestral ballet was composed by Welty’s friend Lehman Engel and performed by the Jackson Ballet Guild in 1968. A 2002 choral piece was also commissioned by the Mississippi Boy Choir and composed by Samuel Jones.
As to what compels a writer to write for children, can it ever be as simple as to win over a childhood sweetheart or to roof a house? It’s never that simple, and never that easy.
The Rivers of America is an important series of books that started in 1937 with the publication of Kennebec: Cradle of Americans by Robert P. T. Coffin and ended in 1974 with the publication of The American: River of El Dorado by Margaret Sanborn. For the most part, the editors were successful in bringing the regional folk life of America to focus through the lenses of her rivers.
Constance Lindsay Skinner, a Canadian writer and historian initially conceived the series in the early 1930s. She was also the first series editor. In an essay that was included in early volumes of the series, Skinner stated, “This is to be a literary and not a historical series. The authors of these books will be novelists and poets. On them, now in America, as in all lands and times, rests the real responsibility of interpretation.” Skinner lived to edit only six of the volumes, but her criteria for authors and the freedom she granted them—a policy continued by subsequent editors—guaranteed not only the success, but the importance of the series.
The series’ editors sought out a wide cross section of poets, novelists, historians, and illustrators to produce living literary portraits rather than historical tomes. The illustrators included many famous and soon-to-be-famous artists, including R.E. Banta, Ross Santee, John Steuart Curry, Nicolai Fetchin, John McCrady, and Andrew Wyeth. George Annand and Rafael Palacios were the series’ principal cartographers. Annand drew the maps for nearly half the forty-nine Rivers books published in the first eighteen years of the series, including the two “Mississippi Rivers” The Lower Mississippi and The Yazoo.
Skinner wanted the Rivers of America books to create popular literature reflecting the regional history of America. For Skinner, it was imperative to incorporate a Southern region into her work, partially to confirm that a distinct and vibrant population still resided in the South. As she wrote to a potential author during the series’ planning stages, “I had been sure there was this solid ‘backbone’, a sound folk-core, or the southern backcountry would have gone back to timber and wild animals.”
For the South to work in Skinner’s series, its character had to stem from the people’s relationship with nature, specifically with the natural history of the rivers of the nation. Cecile Hulse Matschat’s Suwannee River: Strange Green Land (1938) remains a best-selling volume, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), a landmark in American environmental writing.
Of Skinner’s original vision of twenty-four volumes, three focused on Southern rivers, the Suwannee, the Arkansas, and the Lower Mississippi, designated to portray the Mississippi River south of St. Louis. (The Upper Mississippi: A Wilderness Saga, by Walter Havighurst, the second volume in the River series, was published in 1937). All told, however, only seven rivers in the South are covered in the series: the 
Tennessee—two books, both by Donald Davidson The Old River, (1946) and The New River (1948), inclusive of the profound changes wrought by the Tennessee Valley Authority—the Santee, the Arkansas, the St. Johns, the French Bend, and in Mississippi, the Lower Mississippi, and the Yazoo.
Skinner died in 1939. Nearly a year later, in 1940, the publisher, Farrar & Rinehart, announced the editors of the Rivers of America series, Stephen Vincent Benét and Carl Carmer. Four Rivers titles were published under their editorial guidance in 1940 (The Wabash, by William E. Wilson; The Arkansas, by Clyde Brion Davis; The Delaware, by Harry Emerson Wildes; and The Illinois, by James Gray). Three more titles followed in 1941, The Charles, by Charles Bernon Tourtellot; and the The Kaw, by Floyd Benjamin Streeter, and The Brandywine, by Henry Seidel Canby, which included the first illustrations of the young Andrew Wyeth.
The Lower Mississippi
A book on the Lower Mississippi is named on the first page of Constance Skinner’s “Rivers of America Journal,” a preliminary plan for the series, dated August 17, 1935. Written as “New Orleans & Lower Mississippi,” the author Skinner designated for the volume was Edward Larocque Tinker. Tinker today is best known as a scholar of Latin American culture, but he wrote several books about New Orleans, including Lafcadio Hearn’s American Days (1924) and Closed Shutters: Old New Orleans – the Eighties (1931), but for whatever reasons did not take on the Lower Mississippi volume.
The editors then committed to a contract with Lyle Saxon, writer and journalist who reported for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, who had written Father Mississippi in 1927. However, Saxon apparently reneged on the project (likely because he was directing the Federal Writers’ Project Works Progress Administration’s Guide to Louisiana (1941). Carmer came to New Orleans to cancel the Farrar & Rinehart contract with Lyle Saxon for the Rivers book on the Lower Mississippi where he met a family friend, Betty Carter, wife of Greenville, Mississippi journalist Hodding Carter II. At the time, Carter was in New York City, working for the progressive newspaper, PM.
While he was at Harvard, in response to an invitation and subsequent encouragement from an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Hodding Carter had written five chapters of a book which was to analyze the racial and political situation of the South. (Carter’s work was not accepted.) Showing Carmer the material Hodding had written for Knopf, Betty was able to interest Carmer in Hodding as the “perfect” candidate for the writing of the Mississippi work. In July, 1940, Hodding Carter signed the contract for Lower Mississippi, receiving a $400 advance. In September, he resigned from PM and returned to Greenville and his newspaper, the Delta Democrat-Times.
The Carters did much of the research for the book at the Tulane University library. In November 1940 the National Guard was called to active duty. Hodding’s regiment was moved to Florida, and he became a correspondent for the Democrat-Times. He had offers for such work from two other newspapers and from the Associated Press, but he concentrated on writing the Rivers book. Reviewing its early chapters, Carl Carmer observed that the book would be one of the two most significant volumes of the series. He advised Carter not to worry about the June 1, 1941 deadline established in the contract, noting that the book was too good to hurry. The Lower Mississippi was published in the fall of 1942 to favorable reviews.
Writing in The New York Times (Dec. 6, 1942), noted critic Horace Reynolds—who also took a strong interest in Faulkner’s first novels as well as the early publications of the Lomaxes—stated, “By responding to the realistic rather than the romantic aspect of his river, Mr. Carter has written one of the best books in the Rivers of America series. His astringent approach is fresh and welcome. He has dug below the surface ease and softness of the delta life to the savagery and pain which lie beneath them.”
“No river in America has been more over-romanticized than the Lower Mississippi,” Reynolds wrote. “Fiction, popular history and popular song have all combined to give it a personality which does not exist. The Lower Mississippi doesn’t look like the pictures or sound like the songs. It is a wilderness of muddy water and deep sky, with a thin wedge of flat land in between. Its great beauty is not easily discernible. To that beauty, which has been best described by Lafcadio Hearn, Mr. Carter is articulately sensitive. But he is no exploiter of the Southern tradition. A man of thought and conscience, he is troubled by the social problems of a section to the intensity of whose plight the phenomenon of a Huey Long is an index. His book cuts deep into the life of his valley.”
The book was illustrated by John McCrady. In a letter to the Carol Fitzgerald, author of The Rivers of America: A Descriptive Bibliography (1991), Matt Martinez, a friend of John McCrady’s widow, Mary, wrote that he had spoken to Mrs. McCrady about her husband’s role as illustrator of The Lower Mississippi: “To address your questions, Mrs. McCrady felt that Hodding Carter approached McCrady, but this was fifty years ago or so, so it’s a little hazy. Mr. Mc and Carter were boyhood friends in Hammond, Louisiana, in the late 19teens. and early 1920s…. I’m not sure of any causal information in terms of who approached who at that time, but the two men who are a big part of The Lower Mississippi had a personal history together that preceded their professional association.”
In his foreword to “John McCrady 1911-1968,” a catalog issued by the New Orleans Museum of Art in 1975, E. John Bullard, the museum’s director, observed, “During the 1930s John McCrady was recognized as the most important exponent of Regionalism working in the South. In his paintings, McCrady visually captured the unique aspects of rural Mississippi and Louisiana with the same authenticity and insight that Benton and Curry brought to their depictions of the Mid-West.” Life published a five-page spread on the artist and commissioned him to paint “the second in a series of dramatic scenes in twentieth century American history.” McCrady chose to paint the assassination of Huey Long and produced perhaps his best-known, and certainly his most controversial artwork.
The Yazoo
The second Mississippi river included in the Rivers of America Series is the Yazoo, However important the Yazoo seems to Mississippians—and the Yazoo Basin undeniably has the richest cultural heritage of any other section of the state—its choice as a subject for the Rivers series gives us some food for thought. Three other rivers, the Atchafalaya, the Tombigbee, and perhaps particularly the Red River (of the South) deserved consideration.
So why the Yazoo? The answer is Hodding Carter. Carter’s friendship—if not to say influence—with Carl Carmer, who by 1949 had become the principal editor of The Rivers of America, and would remain the series editor until the publication of the final book (The American: River of El Dorado, by Margaret Sanborn) in 1974. Carter must also have already had in mind Frank E. Smith as the author. Smith was managing editor of the liberal-leaning newspaper Greenwood Morning Call in 1946 and 1947. He was a legislative assistant to United States Senator John Stennis from 1947 to 1949 and was elected to and served as a member of the Mississippi State Senate from 1948 until 1950, when he was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives from Mississippi’s 3rd Congressional district.
In a June 1991 letter, Smith wrote, “I started on the Yazoo in 1947, when I was recommended to the editor by Hodding Carter, who had written Lower Mississippi a few years before. He was a friend and associate in newspaper work. I wrote two or three sample chapters, and Rinehart gave me a contract and a $1,000 advance.”
On January 7, 1948, Frank Smith signed an agreement with Rinehart & Company which called for delivery of a completed manuscript of The Yazoo in its final revised form on or before January 1, 1951. He was to receive royalties of 10% of the retail price on the first 5,000 copies sold; 121/2% on the next 5,000 copies. sold; and 15% on all copies sold thereafter. He was to be receive an advance on royalties of $750, $250 on signing the agreement, $250 on delivery of the manuscript, and $250 upon publication of the book.
“I forgot about the contract when I became involved in some personal endeavors,” Smith later wrote, “but was reminded of it in 1953, when Rinehart wrote telling me to produce the manuscript in three- or four-months’ time or return the money. I was busy at that time as a member of Congress, but I didn’t have the money to reimburse them, so I produced the manuscript, and it was published the next year with no revisions or deletions.”
Reviews of The Yazoo were overwhelmingly favorable. Reviewing in the Chicago Tribune, (May 16, 1954) Harnett T. Kane, author of Huey Long’s Louisiana Hayride: The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship 1928-1940 (1941) wrote, “The author is something of a rarity, a politician who can write. The 36-year-old Mississippi congressman had a role in the ending of Bilboism; he represents a new south. His style is non-lyric, non-emotional, almost matter- of-fact. a novelty in certain circles of regional writing.”
Fellow Mississippian Hubert Creekmore, reviewing in the New York Times (May 9, 1954) states, “Since Frank Smith is a Delta native and a Congressman, it is not surprising that his best passages are those dealing with political, and economic problems. His discussion of the sharecropper-commissary system is concise and understanding, and the survey of flood control and the touchy subject of the four dams on Yazoo tributaries is sensible.” Finally, Hodding Carter himself, in his review of The Yazoo in his newspaper, the Delta Democrat-Times (May 9, 1954), writes, “(Smith) is Mr. Yazoo, even Mr. Delta himself; attuned to and informed on its manifold problems.” Here it must be noted that both Creekmore and Carter take Smith to task, Creekmore “for the omission of a full and organized essay on the Delta planters” and Carter for Smith turning a blind eye to Parchman penal farm, “the nation’s worst such institution, where the lash, the convict trust system, and the lack of any real rehabilitation program conspire to breed worse criminals out of men who are to be returned to society.”
The illustrations in The Yazoo are by Janet Turner (1914-1988), a Missourian who graduated with distinction in 1936 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Far Eastern History. Her first postgraduate work was done at the Kansas City Art Institute, where she studied under Thomas Hart Benton and John de Martelly, the illustrator of The Wabash (1940), the eighth book in the Rivers series. In 1941, after five years of postgraduate work, she was awarded the Institute’s diploma. She attended Claremont College for two years, studying under Millard Sheets and Henry McFee, receiving a master’s degree in fine arts in 1947.
During her artistic career, Turner had more than two hundred one-woman shows, won more than a hundred awards, and saw her works displayed in every state of the United States and in more than forty foreign countries. Her works were purchased by prestigious museums and galleries around the world, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Seventy of her prints were purchased by the United States Information Agency for display in U.S. embassies around the world, and more than two hundred of her prints and paintings are held in some eighty college or museum collections.
In the early 1950s, Turner was living in Nacogdoches, Texas, teaching at Stephen F. Austin State College. In 1952, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to experiment with prints of Gulf Coast flora and fauna. She was primarily a printmaker at this time, utilizing different printmaking techniques in new and unique ways. Given her illustration of the Greenwood Leflore Hotel (below), it’s almost certain that Turner came to Greenwood sometime in 1953, though Smith wrote that they never met.
. . .
The first edition of The Lower Mississippi received four printings between 1942 and 1959 (1942, 1945, 1947, and 1959) ranging in price from $2.50 (1942-45), to $3.50 (1947) and $5 (1959). The number of copies printed is unknown, but according to WorldCat, the book is held in 887 libraries worldwide. Almost all are the first (1942) printing,
The Yazoo had an initial printing of 5,000 copies, and a projected reprint of another 5,000. How many copies Rinehart actually published is unknown, however WorldCat finds the 1954 edition in 507 libraries. The Yazoo was reprinted (in paperback) in 1988 by University Press of Mississippi. According to Frank Smith’s son Fred, University Press printed 1000 copies in paperback, and printed 50 special edition hardback copies, all of which were signed by Frank Smith and sold at Choctaw Books in Jackson, Mississippi.
When I go somewhere to take photographs, I sort of have something in mind, but it has to feel right or speak to me for me to actually make a wet collodion photograph. I may shoot some snapshots on film or take some documentary shots of things I am recording over time, but for the plates it has to be that feeling of connection with time and place, past and present.
This is a scanned copy of an 11×14″ red glass ambrotype I made at Poplar Springs Cemetery in Calhoun County in April of 2012. I had been staying in Bruce at my parent’s and decided to go up to Poplar Springs where my great-grandparents (Starling Monroe and Nancy Ruth) are buried..
After walking around the cemetery for a long while, reading the gravestones and making a few snapshots with a hand-held camera I decided I would not set up the wet collodion. I got in the car to back out of the cemetery entrance for some reason instead of driving through.
That is when I saw this image. It hit me: there it was the old fence I had noticed and not noticed my entire life of visiting there. I could see my relatives’ gravestones in the background but what grabbed me was the fence, the plants, the foliage: that feeling.
I pulled back in and proceeded to set up the portable darkbox, get the chemicals ready, and mount the camera on the tripod. In about 30 minutes I was looking through the camera’s ground glass at this image. In another 15 minutes I was washing the chemicals from the glass and feeling good about the plate.
In 2014 the cemetery caretakers in their infinite wisdom totally removed the fence and cleaned the bank off, destroying some of the visual reminders of 50 plus years of visiting this cemetery. Nothing lasts forever; that is one of the reasons I’m a photographer.
These days it’s difficult enough to think about a turntable at all, much less to think about one as a piece of furniture. But in the middle decades of the 20th century, they became mammoths.
These record players (for that’s essentially what they were, hi-fi or stereo) came in all sorts of styles to match your other furniture, too: Mediterranean, French provincial, Queen Ann, you name it. Furniture stores sold these primitive behemoths as well as recordings themselves, and it’s through the furniture business that Lillian Shedd McMurry, a former secretary and law student, fell down a rabbit hole and into the land of the blues.
According to her nephew, recording artist John Webb (“Wilder”) McMurry, “My Uncle Willard, Lillian’s husband, and his family weren’t real musical folks. They all had furniture stores. Willard and a furniture store, my dad, Webb, had a furniture store, and my uncle Carl had Super Furniture Market in Jackson. Willard’s niche was used furniture stores and he would buy the pre-existing stock out of a bankrupt store and get it going again. So there was some stock in a hardware store Willard had bought on Farish Street that included 78s of black music, what would have been called “race music” at the time. Lillian had a lot of get-up-and-go, had played the piano early in her life and was interested in music. But she knew nothing about blues or secular music.”
Lillian selected a record and put it on the turntable The record she chose was Wynnie “Mr. Blues” Harris’s “All She Wants to Do Is Rock”, and according to an interview with Living Blues magazine in 1986, what she heard changed her life. “It was the most unusual, sincere and solid sound I’d ever heard,” she said. “I’d never heard anything with such rhythm and freedom.”
“So Lillian,” Webb continued, “being enterprising, set the rest of the records out on the counter and they sold like hot cakes. And she began to get more involved.” Lillian acquired more records and began selling them on a full-time basis. She made trips to New Orleans and Memphis to bring in more recordings and eventually the couple converted the hardware store into a record/furniture store called Record Mart-Furniture Bargains.
The store specialized in blues, gospel and what was then called “hillbilly” music. Between walk-ins and mail orders the business began to thrive. 
“The Record Mart became a very big mail-order business,” Webb said. “I didn’t know until recently how big a deal that was.” It wasn’t long before Lillian got the idea to record her own material using local talent. Lillian and Willard McMurry became the founders and owners of the Diamond Record Company, which released records on the Trumpet label. “God, I didn’t know what I was getting into,” Lillian said later. 
What she was getting into was a pioneering position in the roots music recording industry. The label’s first releases were gospel recordings by the St. Andrews Gospelaires, a 3-piece jubilee group from the Enoch Grove Baptist Church, and the Southern Sons, who were the most popular and influential gospel groups performing during the early 50s in the Mississippi Delta. McMurry made many trips to the Delta to sign up talent, and on one she signed up a “harp” player who called himself Sonny Boy Williamson. Sonny Boy Had garnered a devoted following through his appearances on “King Biscuit Time” over station WFFA in Helena, Arkansas.
McMurry signed Sonny Boy to a contract in December, 1950. She did not learn until years later that his real name was Alex “Rice” Miller. Miller had appropriated the name of another highly-regarded harmonica-playing blues singer because he had once been convicted of stealing a mule from a neighbor. He had whitewashed the mule, which was a sure disguise for the animal until the next inevitable Delta downpour. With McMurry riding herd on him, Sonny Boy Williamson (II) turned out a string of blues standards, including “Eyesight to the Blind”, “Nine Below Zero” and “Red Hot Kisses”, written by Lillian herself. Sonny Boy also wrote a tribute to McMurry’s car, which was recorded as “Pontiac Blues”.
Edward Komara, former head of the Blues Archive at the University of Mississippi, said, “The main thing I remember about Lillian McMurry is her toughness, which was a combination of a low tolerance for bullshit and a lion-taming instinct. This toughness was not something she had to develop while running Trumpet. She may have well had it since birth. She was also born with a pageant-quality beauty, as evidenced by the published photos of her in her 50s, taken during the Trumpet years. But musicians and record industry people alike learned she was much more than a pretty face.”
However she came by it, Lillian McMurry’s toughness became a key asset in the rough-and-tumble world of the independent record business. Sonny Boy Williamson, her biggest star, was hard-drinking, cantankerous and prone to drunken brawling. Williamson also carried a knife and a gun and freely used profane language, but only once around Lillian. Legend has it that when Williamson began cursing in the studio one day, Lillian told him to leave. When he refused, McMurry took his own gun, which she had taken the precaution to relieve him of, marched him outside and sent him on his way. A much-humbled Williamson returned a couple of weeks later, and McMurry took him back in.
According to Webb, McMurry had problems with other artists as well. “She had Elmore James under contract, but Elmore had problems sticking to it. At one point, she got a tip-off and had to go to Canton to bust up a recording session that Elmore had no right to do. There’s actually a tape recording of a telephone conversation between Elmore and Lillian where he’s asking about coming back, and she said, ‘Well, Elmore, would you stand hitched?’ meaning would he honor a contract. But he never followed up on it.”
Elmore James’s only Trumpet recording, “Dust My Broom”, became a nation-wide hit and a classic in the blues repertoire.
“She and Willard were visiting with my parents when I was in high school or junior high, and she was sitting there in the front room and I was dashing out the door with a vinyl copy of “Tommy” by The Who. And she said something like, ‘Oh, I thought the rock opera was an abortion,’ or an abomination or something like that. And I left thinking, ‘Well what does she know?’ but later I realized they recorded HER song wrong. She cut the original ‘Eyesight for the Blind’ but they did it in a minor key with a whole different feel and melody.”
But the Trumpet label was short-lived. Even with such brilliant talent stock as Jerry McCain, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup and Willie Love, competition with labels having deeper pockets eventually proved to be too much. According to blues aficionado Dr. Woody Sistrunk, “One of the biggest reasons Trumpet ended was that a large record distributor in Texas went broke. And back then, it was not cash for sale. A lot of business was on credit, especially as records became hits. If a record became a hit, you had to get it to a pressing plant, and no one had a pressing plant except for the big labels. You had to have it pressed, and if you didn’t get paid by your distributors, or one-stops as it were for stocking juke boxes at the time, you simply didn’t have any money to pay them off,” Sistrunk explained.
“At the very end of Trumpet, Sonny Boy Williamson was the biggest artist that the label had. His contract was traded to Buster Williams’ Plastic Products in Memphis as a trade for some of the label’s debts,” Sistrunk said. “Williams then turned over Sonny Boy’s contract to the Chess Brothers with options, who in turn picked up Sonny Boy and ran with him.”
After only five years (1951-56) in the business, this was Trumpet’s last note. “That was it, except for another $50,000 that Lillian and Willard had to absorb, which they did strictly through hard work,” Sistrunk said. “A lot of people don’t realize how important their studio was. Many of the records were cut at the old State Furniture Company at 211 State Street on the corner of State and Pearl. For a long time, they would cut records in the back room on Sunday afternoons with someone else’s equipment. But by 1954, they had a studio at 309 Farish Street where they were cutting a number of things. That was another big expense during 1953-54, and that set them back some as well.”
Lillian McMurry was a scrupulous businesswoman, a meticulous bookkeeper and obsessive when it came to royalties. “For eight years, I maintained her Trumpet papers at the Blues Archive,” Komara said, “and she never let a single detail slip by. She fought hard and successfully for the artists whose financial estates she assisted. She continued until her death to assist her Trumpet recording artists, scoundrels though they sometimes were. She demanded honesty and got honesty and delivery of contracted promises from them during the recording sessions, and in return she made sure they received what was due.”
“She knew about artists’ egos and she protected them, plus she knew about artists’ sufferings and made sure they all got paid,” Sistrunk said. Vitrice McMurry Rankin, Lillian and Willard’s daughter, said, “Mom was always a strong-willed and fierce person who fought for what was right, treated the musicians with a great deal of dignity and fought for their rights. She was incredibly cagey, and could deal with copyright lawyers on a level of legal think so that she was able to win most of the suits she brought. “
“She was actually close to graduating from Jackson School of Law when she met my Dad and got married, which seems untypical of her that she wouldn’t have gone ahead and finished school,” Rankin said. “She had that kind of steel clamp of a mind that could handle thousands and thousands of legal ramifications and technicalities and argue to the death. I think some of the settlements she got were just to get her off their backs because she was so utterly relentless in her pursuing of these people who did so much bold-faced thievery. She would tend to spend $10,000 to make $10,000. Who knows ultimately if financially it was worth it, but ethically it was, because so many people were vindicated.”
But McMurry’s upstanding business ethics were often sorely lacking in other recording business personalities of the 50s. And the demise of the Trumpet label may have been in part to unscrupulous machinations on the part of other record labels. “Lillian told me that there were some people who wanted to press her out of the business,” Sistrunk said. “And one big label allegedly said, ‘If you stock her labels, we won’t let you stock ours.’ This was a big label, and every jukebox carried this label, and it seemed pretty ugly.”
After McMurry got out of the music business, she still maintained a studio. According to Sistrunk, “’From the Bottom’ and a lot of the later Sonny Boy Williamson songs were recorded there, and she was the one ‘at the knobs’ when Earl King did ‘Those Lonely, Lonely Nights’ for Ace Records. ‘Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woofie Flu’ could very well have been recorded there as well.”
The impact of the Trumpet label on American music has been profound and lasting. “You can’t describe Trumpet’s contribution to music history strictly within a blues niche,” Sistrunk said. “You’d have to describe it in terms of the music of Mississippi that was not being recorded, that being gospel with the Southern Sons Gospel Quartet, that being Lucky Joe Almond, Jimmy Swan and all the other hillbilly artists and that being Sonny Boy Williamson and Willie Love with the blues.”
“All of those folded together are basically what made rock-and-roll as we know it. It’s all incredible.”
Food–unlike guns, whores, or horses–rarely plays a significant role in fiction; food enters the narrative for a specific function.
Adam Gopnik lists four kinds of fictional food: “Food that is served by an author to characters who are not expected to taste it; food that is served by an author to characters in order to show who they are; food that an author cooks for characters in order to eat it with them; and, last (and most recent), food that an author cooks for characters but actually serves to the reader.”
As an example for a writer who uses food in fiction to illuminate character (and they seem predominate) Gopnik serves up a soupcon of Proust. “Proust will say that someone is eating a meal of gigot with sauce béarnaise, but he seldom says that the character had a delicious meal of gigot with sauce béarnaise—although he will extend his adjectives to the weather, or the view. He uses food as a sign of something else.”
Similarly, Welty, in Delta Wedding, employs food to signify the collective character (social status) of the families as well as to highlight individuals. Though three main meals are described–a rehearsal supper, the wedding feast itself and a picnic afterwards–people are eating all the time on almost every page of Welty’s book. This listing could very well be offered as a textbook example of foods served in a well-to-do household in the South during the Coolidge administration.
Coconut cake, sugared almonds, cold biscuits with ham, sugar cane (likely left on the porch for the children to peel and chew), homemade fudge, wedding cake (made in Memphis), chicken salad, “Mary Denis demanded a cold lobster aspic involving moving the world . . . of course we moved it”, stuffed green peppers, hoe cakes and ash cakes, chicken broth, Coca-Cola, barbecue (most likely pork), the patty cake gift for George Fairchild (made with white dove blood, dove heart, snake blood and other things; he’s to eat it alone at midnight, go to bed and his love will have no rest till she comes back to him), licorice sticks, crusted-over wine balls, pink-covered ginger Stage Planks, bananas and cheese, pickles, a mousse (probably chocolate), chicken and ham, dressing and gravy, black snap beans, greens, butter beans, okra, corn on the cob, “all kinds of relish”, watermelon rind preserves, “that good bread” (likely yeast bread), mint leaves “blackened” (bruised) in the tea, whole peaches in syrup, cornucopia (horns of pastry filled with cream or fruit), guinea hen, roast turkey and ham, beaten biscuits (an “aristocratic” Eastern seaboard recipe: i.e. blistered biscuits), chicken salad, homemade green and white mints, fruit punch, batter bread and shad roe, ice cream, chicken and turkey sandwiches, caramel and coconut cakes, lemon chiffon pie, watermelons and greens.
As much as I want to call this a complete list of a Mississippi sideboard, it’s likely not. When it comes to Welty, who is subtle, understated, and knows food as few writers do, it’s easy to miss things, which is an excellent excuse (should you need one) to read Delta Wedding again, if not for the first time.
On July 15, 1975, Jackson was stunned by the brutal murder of a man whose cultural contributions to the city still reverberate.
Frank Woodruff Hains, Jr. was born July 7, 1926 in Wood County, West Virginia. After graduating from Marietta College in Ohio and serving two years in the military, Hains began a radio career that took him to Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he became active in both the Vicksburg Little Theater and the Jackson Little Theater.
A few years later he moved to Jackson, beginning his twenty-year career with the Jackson Daily News as literary critic and champion of the arts. He remained active in the Jackson Little Theater and was one of the founders of New Stage Theater in 1966.
In addition to his position at the Jackson Daily News, through his work as actor, director, and set designer for the local theaters as well as his contributions to the New York Times, Hains helped high schools and colleges in the area with their productions. In 1958 he received the National Pop Wagner Award for work with young people, and in 1970 the Mississippi Authority for Educational Television presented him with its Distinguished Public Service Award.
Hains was savagely beaten to death with a crowbar by a drifter from Indiana who had come to work in a blood bank near the offices of The Jackson Daily News and The Clarion Ledger. Two weeks later, this memorial written by his close friend Eudora Welty appeared in the combined Sunday Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News (27 July 1975):
IN MEMORIUM
For all his years with us, Frank Hains wrote on the arts with perception and clarity, with wit and force of mind. And that mind was first-rate — informed, uncommonly quick and sensitive, keenly responsive. But Frank did more than write well on the arts. He cared. And he worked, worked, worked for their furtherance in this city and state. He was a doer and a maker and a giver. Talented and versatile to a rare degree, he lived with the arts, in their thick.
So it was by his own nature as a man as well as in the whole intent of his work that he was a positive critic, and never a defeating one. The professional standards he set for art, and kept, himself, as a critic, were impeccable and even austere. At the same time he was the kindest, most chivalrous defender of the amateur. And it was not only the amateurs — it was not artists at all — who knew this well: his busy life, as he went about his work and its throng of attendant interests, was made up of thousands of unrecorded kindnesses.
I speak as one working in the arts — and only one, of a very great number indeed — who came to know at first hand, and well, what ever-present perception and insight, warmth of sympathy, and care for the true meaning, Frank in his own work brought to a work of theirs. The many things he has done in behalf of my own books I wouldn’t be able to even count; his dramatic productions of my stories are among the proudest and happiest events of my working life. He was a dear and admired friend for twenty years.
Frank gave many young talents their first hope, sometimes their first chance, and I am sure he never could have let any talent down. He didn’t let any of us down, but was our constant and benevolent and thoroughgoing supporter, a refresher of our spirits, a celebrator along with us of what we all alike, in the best ways we were able, were devoting our lives to.
What his work contributed — the great sum — had an authority of a kind all its own. I wonder if it might not have had a double source: his lifelong enchantment with the world of art, and an unusual gift for communicating his pleasure in it to the rest of us. Plus the blessed wish to do it.
We are grateful.
(Hains was buried in Big Tygart Cemetery, Rockport, WV)
This is an excerpt from Bitterweeds: Life with William Faulkner at Rowan Oak, a memoir written by his step-son Malcolm Franklin and published in an exclusive edition by The Society for the Study of Traditional Culture in 1977. Franklin, who became a herpetologist of all things, is himself a capable writer.
One of the most frequent questions that people ask me about Faulkner is about his writing routine and writing habits. Pappy really had no set routine. He worked in an apparently erratic manner. I do know one very important fact. He never carried a notebook or made any notes. He did not at any time carry a pencil or paper. He seemed to work largely from memory and observation.
He had a small portable typewriter that was presented to him by an old sailing friend, Jim Devine, whom he had known in New York in the late twenties. To this very day it remains in what is now known as Pappy’s Office at Rowan Oak. I always associate it with Pappy’s noisy periods, the ones that let us all know Pappy was at work. During what we referred to as his silent days, he used pen and ink. On such days you could not be sure whether he was writing or not. It was all very quiet. No telephone, no radio and no doorbell! These were forbidden items. All you could hear were the sounds from the woods beyond the formal gardens and the barnyard. The dogs would bark. A rooster who had lost the time of day might unexpectedly crow. Cows would occasionally let out a low moo reminding those in charge that milking time was near. Otherwise, only silence; for we were too far from the road and out of the way for the sounds of traffic to interfere.
Then there would be the times I would see Pappy walking along the driveway, perhaps headed for a walk down Old Taylor Road, in the direction of Thacker’s Mountain, some six miles away. It was not out of the ordinary for Pappy to cover the distance between Thacker’s Mountain and back in one afternoon. Quite often I would go along, riding the small quarter horse that Pappy had given me, Dan Patch. Pappy, of course, walked through the woods, and by the time I reached Thacker’s Mountain by the road, there would be Pappy sitting on top of one of the large boulders, perfectly still, not saying a word. I would ask, “Pappy, would you like to ride Dan Patch back and let me walk?” “No,” he would always answer, preferring to go through the woods rather than by the road. Upon returning to Rowan Oak he would not say a word. Instead he would go straight to the library, or to his bedroom, where he had a small writing table. And then you would know he was writing. Even in the silence.
Another trait of his which took him outdoors but was still connected with his writing was squirrel hunting. Every fall, on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and often on weekday afternoons, too, Pappy and I would hunt squirrels—always at least one mile from Rowan Oak. The squirrel we were after in particular was the fox squirrel. Unlike the ordinary gray squirrel, who carelessly slits about, the fox squirrel demands great patience from the hunter, for he will sit perched motionless on a limb for long intervals at a time. The hunter must outsit the fox squirrel. If he waits long enough, in absolute silence, the squirrel will show himself in a vulnerable position. It was during these long periods of utter silence that I believe Pappy did a great deal of his thinking about the plots and characters he was writing about. He never said anything about it. However, many times when we arrived back at Rowan Oak he would say to me, “Buddy, would you dress out my squirrels? Or have Broadus dress them out for me?” I would reply, “Certainly, Pappy,” and then he would disappear, and I would hear the typewriter going for the rest of the morning. Other times he would come on back and dress out the squirrels with me.
We would never have more than two or three each at the most. Pappy brought me up never to kill more than we would need. Further, to make our stay in the woods longer and more of a sport, Pappy and I had a pact where we would only shoot for the head. We kept an old tin tobacco box with a slit in the top. Either of us who hit a squirrel anywhere but the head had to put a quarter in the tobacco box. When it was full, we bought a bottle of bourbon with it. Preferably Jack Daniel’s. Despite the fact that there have been many stories told about Faulkner’s drinking habits, including the statement, in many cases, that he was an alcoholic, he was not. It is a fact that he was a hard drinker. But only on occasion. And during a period of twenty-five or more years of close association, I never observed Faulkner’s drinking heavily while he was actively writing.
Faulkner gave a well-deserved reply to columnist Betty Beale of The Washington Star, whose society gossip column was widely read. She asked for the largest number of words he had penned on one day. His answer, printed in the June 14, 1954 column, clearly showed his attitude when he was asked a stupid question He gave an absurd answer: That he had climbed to the crib of the barn one morning with his paper, pencil and a quart of whiskey, and pulled the ladder up behind him; when daylight began to fail, he realized he had torn off five thousand words. In our barn at Rowan Oak there was no crib overhead—only a hay loft with no retractable ladder.
When he had completed a particularly long and involved piece of writing he would take a Sabbatical, indulging heavily in his favorite bourbon. Perhaps it might last a month or six weeks. Quite often the last week of his binge I would spend driving him around Lafayette, Marshall, Yalobusha and Panola Counties. In the summertime we would drive in my jeep. In the wintertime the excursions would take place in a closed car. He would sit there in the front seat, viewing the countryside. But sometimes he would carry on a very animated conversation with me in which he showed his love for and knowledge of that section of North Mississippi. He would point out places he had drawn on for certain incidents in his books or stories. Thus, I know exactly the location of As I Lay Dying, which is southeast of Oxford on the south side of the Yocona River. The location of one of his best stories, “The Hound”, is northeast of Oxford in the Tallahatchie River bottom, in a locality known as Riverside. On one long drive we made together in my jeep, he said, “This is where ‘The Bear’ took place.” We were passing through the old Stone place, between the Sunflower and Tallahatchie Rivers, some seventeen miles southwest of the old river town known as Panola, situated a few miles north of Batesville in Panola County. It was in the late fall, I believe, and we had been hunting at Mr. Bob Carrier’s plantation, where Pappy took Clark Gable to hunt once in the late 1930s.
On our return trip to Rowan Oak that evening, we travelled along an old, dusty road. Cotton stood on either side of the road, but much shorter and scrawnier than that we had passed earlier, around Batesville and Clarksdale in the Delta country. Pappy had noted there that some of the cotton had been picked by hand, some by machine—this was one of the earliest occasions, if not the earliest, that we had seen machine-picked cotton fields. Now from the road we could glimpse the tops of the trees in the river bottom beyond the fields—just a faint outline against the fast fading evening. From Pappy’s silence I realized, as we had rolled along this country road, that he was headed towards his typewriter again, and that soon I would be hearing once more the tap-tap sounds that so often penetrated the quiet darkness of Rowan Oak at odd hours during the night.
We speak of cult musicians or novelists, and while it might seem odd to speak of a food writer that has such a following, Laurie Colwin does, primarily I think because Colwin has what other food writers in this age of kitchen glamour don’t: candor and a total lack of pretension.
Colwin, who died in 1992, the year before the Food Network was founded, wrote in an era when food and cooking were still relatively pedestrian topics. Sure, Stewart had spread her pristine wings, Prudhomme was burning up the scene and of course Claiborne, Child, and Beard had blazed the way, but Colwin wasn’t a media personality. Far from it; she was a working writer and mother. In addition to her two collections of culinary essays, Home Cooking (1988) and More Home Cooking (1993), which were inducted into the James Beard Hall of Fame in 2012, Colwin published eight novels, and her work appeared in The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Allure and Playboy.
As a food writer, Colwin doesn’t have a style so much as she does a voice, which some might say is much the same thing, but no: she writes as if she were talking to you across a picnic table or at a bus stop, intimate but breezy, alternately tongue-in-cheek, insistent and certainly droll at times, always warm; somehow when reading her my mind hears her as what the Brits would call “fruity”, though not strained or shrill.
“Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant” is usually cited as a signature piece, but “Kitchen Horrors” is essential, as is “How to Avoid Grilling” and my favorite, “How to Cook Like an American”. Colwin writes a great deal about how to (and not to) cook for children and how to feed a multitude with grace under pressure, but speaks most about how much of our lives revolve around the things we see, touch, hear, and eat every day.
Colwin’s fans constitute a cult in that they are devoted to her writing as a source of discovery as well as comfort, and acknowledge self-effacement as a virtue in those who know their craft and practice it with modest aplomb.
Some know Karel Čapek as a seven-time Nobel nominee, but most remember him as the man who gave us the word “robot”. Among Čapek’s more endearing works is The Gardener’s Year (1929), a learnéd, light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek depiction of the enduring, eccentric gardener, including a “Gardener’s Prayer” that’s more of a demand for Eden than a supplication. This illustration from the accompanying pages was drawn by his brother, painter and writer Josef Čapek.
O Lord, grant that in some way it may rain every day, say from about midnight until three o’clock in the morning, but, you see, it must be gentle and warm so that it can soak in; grant that at the same time it would not rain on campion, alyssum, helianthus, lavender, and others which You in Your infinite wisdom know are drought-loving plants-I will write their names on a bit of paper if you like-and grant that the sun may shine the whole day long, but not everywhere (not, for instance, on the gentian, plantain lily, and rhododendron) and not too much; that there may be plenty of dew and little wind, enough worms, no lice or snails, or mildew, and that once a week thin liquid manure and guano may fall from heaven.
Amen
