Toby Sells reports that managers of the Mid-South Fair have told the city council that they would like to return the fair to Memphis/Shelby County.
Month: November 2013
Leaders of the Mid-South Fair said Tuesday that they want the fair to come back home to Memphis or Shelby County and believed that the public was misled on what prompted their move to Southaven.
Fair president Michael Doyle told members of the Memphis City Council Tuesday that attendance numbers for the Fair have been up over the past few years at its new home at the Landers Center in Southaven, but “we would love to come home to Memphis, our home for 157 years.”
Doyle said the Fair board is now actively looking for 100 acres in Memphis or Shelby County and that the site should have plenty of asphalt and grass and access to electricity and water. The board would need to build an office complex and exhibit halls on the site. The board will soon start a capital campaign to move the fair but a final fund-raising goal is not yet known.
Doyle said he didn’t go the council Tuesday to ask for anything. But he wanted it made clear the fair wanted to come back to Shelby County and to let people know that the fair was forced out. Many council members said Tuesday they didn’t know why the fair left and did not know it was forced out of its location at the fairgrounds.
“So, if (the city council) doesn’t know, then imagine what the public thinks,” Doyle said. “They think we got mad and packed up our ferris wheel and left. But we fought and scraped and lost.”
Doyle said “no one truly knows why” the fair was asked to leave but that “we were told to leave our home during the previous administration.”
Council member Jim Strickland said the move “didn’t make any sense to me” but said hosting an event that would bring hundreds of thousands would have any city “chomping at the bit.”
Doyle said the fair’s peak attendance in Memphis was about 550,000 and that attendance had dwindled to about 350,000 in its last year here. Attendance was up nearly 19 percent last year over the previous year at the fair in Southaven, with a total attendance of nearly 85,000.
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Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc. Sold
Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc. has been sold. Anna Cox has more.
Elvis Presley Enterprises Inc. has been sold to New York-based Authentic Brands Group LLC for an undisclosed amount. Previously, Elvis Presley Enterprises had been majority owned by CORE Media Group since 2004 and the remaining interest owned by Elvis’ daughter, Lisa Marie Presley.
Lisa Marie Presley
Authentic Brands Group will own and manage Presley’s name and likeness, video and TV segments, artwork including album covers, movie posters, and photos as well as music and major events such as Elvis Week every August.
But fans need not worry about the state of the house and property of Graceland, according to Presley’s daughter. “While I will continue to own Graceland and the original artifacts, we are looking forward to working with our new partners to continue the growth and expansion we have been working toward,” Lisa Marie said in a statement. “The licensing and merchandising aspect of this business is not to be confused with the fact that the property will always remain with me and my family. However, this is a great partnership for our family and Elvis fans worldwide.”
Toby Sells reports that the Memphis City Council has tabled action on schools litigation until January.
Yesterday I was ready to unilaterally bestow the above title on Sonny Craver’s weirdo soul single “Outside of Memphis,” a song that claims Memphis is so great we should “build a wall” around ourselves to keep from being pillaged. But now I’m not so sure. In an approving response to the original post, a friend who shares my love of lost vinyl (and the absurd), reminded me of another oddity that earns bonus points for having been recorded in Memphis, at Style Wooten’s Park Ave. studio, and released on Wooten’s wonderfully-named Camaro label.
Although the song is ostensibly about a girl, “I Found My Love in Memphis,” seems to be less of a love song than Chamber of Commerce propaganda cataloging the city’s many amenities. Breakout couplet:
“We have more churches than filling stations/One of the best cities in the nation.”
Now would be as good a time as any to give this 1969 gem a listen and judge for yourself.
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I haven’t been able to track down much information about Wooten, Camaro, or the singer/songwriter George Clappes, but here’s what I’ve got so far. Between 1968-78 Wooten cut a number of records in Memphis including a version of the song “Rub it In,” which was recorded two years before Billy Craddock made it a hit. His business was, in part, a vanity studio attracting customers “song poem-style” with print ads suggesting that a big hit record was only $425 away. Wooten released country, rock, and blues records but is probably best remembered by record collectors for the (sometimes psychedelic) gospel releases on his Designer label. Available sources suggest he passed away after moving from Memphis to Jackson, MS but none of that has been confirmed.
I’ve attempted to contact Clappes who moved to VA and, according to one source, is still performing oldies and gospel songs for nursing home patients. He hasn’t responded yet, but I’ve got my fingers crossed that I’ll soon know the story behind this vintage oddity that was frequently covered by one of Memphis’ oddest bands, The Grundies, who were active in the early 1990’s and who also did a mean cover of Eddie Bond‘s Buford Pusser epic, “What a Lawman.”
It has been more recently performed by Memphis music expats James Enck and Linda Heck.
Just to keep things straight, Fly on the Wall isn’t a music blog. All the good stuff happens over at Sing All Kinds. But considering FOTW’s commitment to the stranger side of Memphis and the sheer volume of songs written about our musical home, exploring the novelties may need to become a regular feature here at FOTW. So if you know of an unusual song mentioning Memphis, share it. I’ll do my best to tell its story.
A deal that would have ended the city of Memphis’ involvement in the ongoing litigation concerning Shelby County and suburban municipal schools was tabled by a Memphis City Council committee Tuesday until January.
Council members wanted to wait until after the December deadline for the suburban cities and the county to reach a final agreement ordered by U.S. Judge Samuel Mays.
Council member Lee Harris brought the committee the resolution that would have immediately ended the city’s involvement in the ongoing litigation. He said legal fees in associated with the case have been mounting. He cited media reports on the matter noting he was not privy to the day-to-day bills involved in the case.
“Months ago we were close on an agreement and now we’re close but not much has changed,” Harris said. “These things seem to never wind down and won’t unless action is taken on the council.”
Allan Wade is the city council’s attorney has been handling the case for the city. He said the city’s spending on the case compared to the county’s was like a “gnat to an elephant.”
“Contrary to what Mr. Harris believes, we’re not here to drag (cases) out,” Wade said. “We win them or we lose them and then we go on. I’m not here to run up a bill.”
Council members Shea Flinn and Harold Collins agreed that the city needs to remain involved in the process as negotiations continue on the ownership of three schools between Shelby County Schools and the city of Germantown.
“I think our interest in those buildings are critical and if we don’t have an agreement with Germantown, we need to wait until that part of the deal hashes out,” Collins said.
Flinn explained that the schools were built primarily with the financial support of Memphis taxpayers and giving them up may have tax liabilities for the city’s taxpayers in the future.
Germantown officials have said they want the schools even if many of the students that would go there would live outside the municipal boundaries of the city. But Flinn worried that Germantown taxpayers would want to limit the schools to only Germantown students in the future if they had to pay higher taxes to educate those students who lived outside the city.
If that were the case, SCS could have to build new schools for those displaced students, a project that could cost taxpayers in Memphians and Shelby County millions, Flinn said.
“That’s the sticky wicket at the heart of this,” Flinn said. The present need and the future need are very different and there are huge associated with it.”
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Grizz Kick Clippers, 106-102
Kevin Lipe reports on the Grizzlies’ (pleasantly) surprising 106-102 win over the Clippers on the second night of a back-to-back.
The Mid-South Peace & Justice Center’s Community-Police Relations Forum series highlights certain segments of Memphis’ population and helps to bridge the gap between the people and the police. Tonight, the focus is on the LGBTQ community.
The LGBTQ Community-Police Relations Forum will be held at Holy Trinity United Church of Christ (685 S. Highland) tonight (November 19th) from 5:30 to 8 p.m.
At the meeting, members of the LGBTQ community and their allies will be asked to share stories of interactions with local law enforcement. A handful of Memphis Police officers and Shelby County Sheriff’s deputies will be on-hand. The forum is intended to break down the walls of communication between the community and the police.
For more information, check out the event’s Facebook page.
