A 40-or-so-minute drive will take you to the site where William Faulkner died some 60 years ago in Byhalia, Mississippi. It’s a gas station now, but in its place once stood the Leonard Wright Sanatorium, a reputable place but one stigmatized with its association for treating alcoholism. Perhaps, that is why when Faulkner died in 1962, the Memphis Press-Scimitar, TheCommercial Appeal, and The New York Times reported that the author died in Oxford, his death shrouded in shame and unasked questions even today.
Hickman has been fascinated with Faulkner since taking a single-author course on him as a sophomore in college. “Faulkner’s literature is always relevant because it’s a window into human nature,” she says. She later earned her Ph.D. at Ole Miss with a concentration in Faulkner and Southern literature. “Then, I met and became good friends with novelist Joan Williams, a Memphian who’d been in a relationship with Faulkner. That opened an entirely different window. His literature and personal life converged.”
Meeting Williams also led her to writing The Romance of Two Writers about the two writers’ affair, and through it, Hickman learned of Faulkner’s “rich interior world,” which she was able to delve into deeper in her most recent release. “These extramarital affairs he sought were another form of addiction, and aspects of them were more imagined than realized, yet they kept him going,” Hickman says. “His wife, Estelle, is fascinating. A brilliant, artistic woman who had her own struggles. She actually was a patient at Wright’s before her husband.”
“I’d actually walked around the site a couple of times, once with Joan Williams, so I was familiar with it,” she adds of Wright’s Sanatorium. “There were dilapidated, small scattered cabins. … The grounds were eerie, otherworldly. Two metal lawn chairs remained positioned side by side under a favorite oak tree. You couldn’t help but imagine the patients wandering around in various states of dishevelment. Honestly, it was a bit like a Stephen King novel. I was fortunate to interview some of the last close associates of the sanatorium, and the family who purchased the property were careful guardians, photographing what was left of the original structures and preserving the records, documents they discovered under a stairwell.”
Between Grief and Nothing includes these interviews and more, including previously undisclosed medical details. “Many of my sources are new and original — and hopefully reaching a readership outside of academia,” she says.
Hickman also says that readers don’t need to be familiar with Faulkner’s life or works to read her book. “I wrote this book with a general readership in mind focusing on a propulsive narrative. … There’s this collusion — between his genius and struggles — and while his creative powers aren’t widely shared, his struggles are widely relatable.”
“I often was stuck by the mindset toward alcohol and drug addiction during Faulkner’s time. Treatment was a band-aid until the next episode. While therapy has come a long way since then, we’re still living in a culture ripe with addictions.”
To celebrate the release of her Between Grief and Nothing, Novel will host a Meet the Author event with Hickman on Saturday, February 8th, at 2 p.m. You can order a signed copy here.
The Continental Drifters were a band whose lineup alone would turn heads. Though members came and went over the decade or so of their existence, the personnel settled to include Peter Holsapple of the dB’s, Mark Walton of the Dream Syndicate, Vicki Peterson of the Bangles, Susan Cowsill of The Cowsills, and, most notably for Memphians, Robert Maché, the journeyman guitarist who played with Steve Wynn for years and now lives here, often seen playing with his wife Candace in Dan Montgomery’s band, or touring with Dayna Kurtz. Yet despite their collective pedigrees, they never quite “made it” in terms of sales or record deals, perhaps because all involved found the “supergroup” tag repulsive. That’s one of the few things they all could agree on, as is made clear in Sean Kelly’s new book, White Noise & Lightning: The Continental Drifters Story (Cool Dog Sound), which traces the group from before they coalesced until after they’d broken up. One strength of the book is that all living former members embraced this chance to speak freely and tell their story. And Holsapple is particularly blunt about the “supergroup” tag.
“We were hell-bent on not seeming like this purported busman’s holiday,” he tells Kelly. “We were so irked by that description that it was this sort of ‘sometime supergroup.’ It was like, ‘Fuck. You really are just not getting it, are you? This is a band.’”
That latter point also comes through loud and clear, as Kelly delves into the complex, Fleetwood Mac-level entanglements between the members that, despite making relations fraught at times, also sealed the family-like bond between them. And that bond seems to have been, in retrospect, a key to the group’s sound, a brand of roots-infused alt-rock with a strong focus on harmonies and songwriting that might today be labeled “Americana” but had no such pigeonhole in the ’90s.
Indeed, the book deftly conjures up the spirit of that era in Los Angeles, where the group began. The respected session drummer and producer Carlo Nuccio, who appropriated the band’s moniker from a group of the same name he’d played with in his native New Orleans, was a focal point, sparked by his relocation to L.A. and his talent for gathering like-minded souls around him. Eventually, he and friends Mark Walton and Gary Eaton were rooming together in what they called the “Batch Pad” (at a time when native Memphian David Catching was also in their orbit), and, sharing similar tastes, formed a band that also included guitarist Ray Ganucheau and keyboardist Dan McGough. By 1991, the newly formed Continental Drifters had taken up a Tuesday night residence at Raji’s, which soon became a scene unto itself.
That was a bit of a paradox at the time. As Greg Allen, who went on to found Omnivore Recordings with fellow Raji’s patron Cheryl Pawelski, tells Kelly, “There was no real scene in L.A. It’s not like it was the power-pop era or the new wave era or what have you. It was just a lot of whatever. The kind of void that the Drifters filled, especially with the shows happening every week — that was its own scene.”
The Raji’s residency nevertheless became legendary to those who participated, setting the aesthetic tone for all of the Drifters’ subsequent years: keeping things loose, inspired, and very much at the service of the songs more than any identifiable “sound” that could be marketed. The many rock veterans in and out of the band preferred to do as they pleased, rather than bow to the demands of a producer or label. Ultimately, as new members like Holsapple and Cowsill (eventually wed, then divorced), Peterson, or Maché joined the group, the group’s aesthetic, impervious to fickle fashion, carried on. This held true when they migrated piecemeal to New Orleans in the mid-’90s, destined to be as celebrated there as they had been in L.A.
Kelly’s book weaves this web of relationships into a tale driven by his love of the music. Prospective readers should revisit the group’s records before diving into this meandering tale: They are what make the vagaries of friendship, dating, marriage, divorce, and substance abuse among the members so compelling. Moreover, it was by remaining staunchly eclectic that the band defined its place in (or not in) the music industry. Being outsiders who were nonetheless revered by their fans defined the lives of all involved, as they all rejected grandstanding musicianship in favor of playing to the songs. And that approach, whether in L.A. or New Orleans, is why their records (and friendships) have endured.
A new compilation from Omnivore Recordings, White Noise & Lightning: The Best Of Continental Drifters, can be purchased here. And a new tribute album, We Are All Drifters: A Tribute to the Continental Drifters, has been released as a companion to Sean Kelly’s book. Proceeds from the tribute album benefit The Wild Honey Foundation.
Think of a pansy, the flower, pink or yellow, blue or deep purple, marked with sharply defined pigmentation or a soft blending of hues on the petals that fold over each other in layers.
That’s how Jasper Joyner pictures their identity as a nonbinary transmasc writer. It’s masculine and feminine, soft yet hardy, layered. It’s why Joyner titled their memoir, Pansy: A Black American Memoir, which was released on October 22nd.
Of course, pansy has another connotation, used to derogatorily describe gay men. But Joyner says, “I thought of that. I’ve been calling myself a pansy for 15 years. That’s not why I chose it [as a title], but I’m trying to reclaim that word.”
Joyner, now 34, set out to write a memoir some four years ago after reading Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde, who established a new genre called biomythography that combines history, biography, and myth into a narrative.
Joyner describes this style as a “mosaic” of “snapshots” of the author’s life. “I was really inspired to read more memoirs like it because it really made me start asking questions about myself,” they say.
It was almost like an obsession. They went on to read memoirs by Black queer writers, by Black Southern writers. They read Alice Walker and read “how she talked about how important it is for Black Southern writers to tell their stories.”
Joyner has always considered themself a writer, ever since childhood. They’ve written a young adult novel, Juniper Leaves, anda chapbook, AFlamboyance. They’re currently the managing editor for Focus Mid-South magazine.
Yet never did they intend to write a memoir. “After reading [so many though],” they say, “it was like it makes sense for me to add my story to this mosaic of stories because I didn’t see a lot of stories like mine with my similar experiences. … It’s worth it to go ahead and try to tell my story, not because it’s unique, but because it’s a human story that I think makes sense to share.”
“I feel like,” they add, “my particular experience with transness shows you that it’s much muddier than a lot of the ways transness is defined now because, in my belief, I never transitioned. I’ve always been this person, and I think everyone is constantly becoming more of themselves. … We can all see ourselves in that nuance.”
Told in nonlinear episodic snapshots in the biomythographic style of Audrea Lorde, Joyner’s memoir explores their Memphis upbringing in the ’90s, their time at Vanderbilt, finding themself in New York City, and more.
There are moments of intense vulnerability. “There’s a chapter in there where I talk about suicidal ideation that I almost wasn’t going to include, but transmasc folks in LGBTQ communities have the highest rate of suicidal ideation. You never really hear about it.”
But there are moments where Joyner holds back or leans into poetic truths and mythmaking. “I didn’t want this to be a story about a trans person who’s struggling. I wanted it to be a human story that people can relate to,” they say. “I didn’t want to accidentally exploit myself by focusing too much on any one of my identities.”
After all, this book was and is about more than themself. Joyner says that at only 34, many in the LGBTQ community would consider them a trans elder. “It’s a devastating fact, but at the same time, there are so many young trans folks who look at me and see, like, oh, you still exist. You’re still surviving, you’re thriving, and for a lot of young trans people, they don’t want to wait to see what that could look like.”
Joyner sees this firsthand in mentoring 20-something-year-olds in creative spaces and through the Sam & Devorah Foundation for Trans Youth.
That’s why Joyner didn’t wait until they were older to write their memoir, but it’s also why they took so much care with it. The book went though eight or so drafts with several readers’ feedback — an approach they hadn’t taken before with their published work. “I write work like Pansy for them and also my younger self,” Joyner says.
Jasper Joyner’s Pansy can be purchased at DeMoir Books & Things and other independent bookstores as well as online. Pansy was named one of BookLife’s Best of 2024 by Publishers Weekly.
Our nation has a distinct literary tradition, which some dub the American bildungsroman, that delves into the provincial life of a protagonist in his or her youth, then reveals, layer by layer, the stages of learning and mind-opening encounters by which the narrator learns of the wider world, thereby transcending provincialism and achieving a kind of worldly wisdom. And such books, often loosely autobiographical, can, by way of setting the scene for the protagonist’s eventual escape, offer rich and nuanced portraits of the small-town milieu in which they were raised. Writings as disparate as Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory paint indelible portraits of daily existence in small towns.
Now, local author, filmmaker, musician, and photographer Willy Bearden has produced such a work about his hometown of Rolling Fork in his semi-fictionalized memoir, Mississippi Hippie: A Life in 49 Pieces. And, in its segmented, episodic telling, it reads like another great fragmented bildungsroman, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio — but with a laconic Southern drawl.
Like Anderson’s masterpiece, Bearden’s memoir is, as he notes in the first sentence, “a work of literature.” And yet he’s committed to telling the story of his life. “Memory has its own story to tell,” he writes. “But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.”
Bearden has an artist’s commitment to truth-telling, and, as becomes clear over the course of his youthful epiphanies, that unflinching honesty served him well in his quest for a life of some significance. As the Tennessee Williams quote beginning the book states, “No one is ever free until they tell the truth about themselves and the life into which they’ve been cast.”
For Bearden, that starts with a long, hard look at his father. This being a somewhat conversational read, though, it takes him a while to settle on the opening scene. First, he tells the reader of his curious habit, at the age of 11, of listing everyone he’d known who had died. It marks a vivid through-line to the book itself, written in his 70s, filling that same need.
Then, skipping ahead in time, Bearden confronts the idea of “woke” culture, a descendant of the “hippie” culture that Bearden threw himself into as a teen in the ’60s. And, as he writes, “I am proud of my hippie roots,” yet the book makes clear that such pride comes after long years of confronting the very un-hippie culture of Rolling Fork.
The book really gets started when, after such preambles, Bearden unearths a short story he wrote in 1984. His father has been returned to the home where Bearden, then 10, was being raised by his mother. “What until now had been the complacent, resigned look of an alcoholic had turned wild and frantic as if some demon inhabited his skinny 130-pound frame.” As the father is unceremoniously dumped into a bed, the stage is set for Bearden’s early years and the chaotic family life he endured.
But, as reflected upon by the author decades later, it’s a thoughtful portrait of such chaos. That’s true of any of the local characters young Bearden interacts with, as the stories skip back and forth in time, often hinting at Bearden’s development as a thinker and a questioner later in life. For, while he wasn’t a great student and didn’t really learn to read until after he was 10, he was doggedly curious and reflective. The folk songs his brother played him jolted him into imagining other values and life ways, and the growing counterculture of the ’60s only confirmed those humanistic values, even if he met some sketchy characters along the way. That in turn served him well as he ventured out into the world (hitchhiking widely from 1969-1976) and greeted all he met with a mixture of Sherwood Anderson’s keen observational eye and Woody Guthrie’s everyman approachability.
That hopeful, clear-eyed, and even bawdy approach to the world rings out from every page of this book, and it’s still heard in Bearden’s current work as a historian, filmmaker, and raconteur. Knowing that Bearden became a key player in Memphis’ progressive community helps make sense of what he passed through to get there, from the unsavory drunks to the homespun wisdom of Rolling Fork’s working people. Seeing the poverty and racism of his hometown didn’t give him a permanent scowl. Rather, it only made him more determined to keep searching, just over the flat Delta horizon, for some kind of redemption.
Burke’s Book Store will host a reading and book signing by Willy Bearden on Thursday, September 5, at 6 p.m.
She realized this at the age of 3 when her father read her Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” one night instead of a bedtime story. “I was instantly in love,” she says. “I thought it was the best thing I’d ever heard. It felt like almost like hip-hop, because it was a rap. It rhymed. … I asked him to read it again. I was so in love with it, and he did. I stopped him, and I said, ‘This is what I’m meant to do.’ I said, ‘I’m going to be a great American poet, like whoever this guy is’. And he said, ‘Okay, well then you’ll have to be three times as good because you’re Black, you’re a woman, and you were born into a country built to enslave you.’
“So I always knew that it would be a harder road for me as a Black American woman to get anything published, for anyone to even listen to me, let alone the biggest publishing house in the world. This country does not treat even Black little girls as if they’re worth much. I knew the road ahead of me would be a long and arduous one, and I might not make it.”
Yet she, arguably, has made it. Her debut novel Memphis, released in April of 2022, was a national bestseller and a Read With Jenna Book Club Pick. All the bookstores in Memphis carried her book. “Local businesses have made me who I am, put me on the map,” the writer says. “Women in Memphis found my book, especially Black women in Memphis. They have put me on a map.
“To break out into this industry has been a godsend,” Stringfellow adds. “I don’t think it’s just talent and hard work. This world does not give that many opportunities to unpublished people of color, so I’ve been very lucky. It’s nothing short of a miracle. I just wish there were more opportunities for writers and authors of color to be more widely read in this nation.”
This isn’t anything new, of course. Only 250 years ago Phillis Wheatley could not get her poetry published in the U.S., a fact upon which Stringfellow reflects after the June release her collection of poetry Magic Enuff (The Dial Press). “It’s a huge historical achievement, I think, for the literary canon,” she says. “I’m very humbled.”
Poetry, after all, is some of the oldest literature we have — think of Homer, Sappho, Vergil. These are the works we’ve labeled as “classics.” “[Poetry] is, to me, the highest form of literary work,” Stringfellow says. “I think poetry is revolutionary. I think it has the ability to reshape nations. … In a novel, you have a whole chapter to get your point across — I’m not knocking novelists, and novels, I love them. I’m in the middle of a novel — but in a poem, you have not even a page to get your point across. You might only have a line or not even a whole word, a syllable.”
The verses might be fleeting, but their impacts are all the more striking, the smallest detail becoming a powerful source of imagery. In Magic Enuff, Stringfellow’s poems are deeply personal. “These were written from my experiences over the years. The narrative voice and the poetry is often just my voice. Some of these poems have taken a long, long time to come to light. This collection is my life’s work. My art speaks for herself, and she speaks loud and clear and proudly.”
There are vulnerable moments within the pages, moments where she talks about her dad leaving her mom and her own divorce from her ex-husband; there are haikus about love, poems about the bonds between women and living in the South. At its core, Stringfellow observes, the book is intrinsically and unashamedly political, even in the personal. “The simple act of a Black woman sitting down to write a sonnet is a political act,” Stringfellow says. “It’s a revolutionary act.”
Many poems, though, are explicitly political, like those dedicated to Breonna Taylor, Tyre Nichols, Trayvon Martin’s mother, and Gianna Floyd, all who were killed by or whose loved ones were killed by racially motivated police violence.
“Until Black children aren’t being gunned down in America for simply ringing somebody’s doorbell; until Black children aren’t having the police being called on them by white women for just being outside, being loud, because all children are all loud; until we have basic civil rights in this country, my writing will always be political,” Stringfellow says. “It has to be. Nina Simone once said it’s the duty of the artists to reflect the times in which they find themselves. And unfortunately, I find myself in America in 2024 in some rather turbulent times.”
Yet Stringfellow also embraces the role of the writer as a bearer of hope. She notes how the other week, she saw a woman sitting at the Memphis Chess Club reading Memphis before Magic Enuff’s release. “It was so surreal to see my book out there [even two years later],” she says. “I hope the same happens with this poetry collection — that I see her, I see the cover, and a Black woman is reading her somewhere in Memphis. That is the ideal dream for me. That is the goal, to just bring a little bit of joy to Black women here in the South. Every book I write will be for the glory of Black Southern women.”
Indeed in her poem, “Hot Combs Catfish Crumbs and Bad Men,” she writes, “God can stay asleep/ these women in my life are magic enuff.”
Corey Mesler seems to have literary works in every stage of production. A list of his published works has 33 volumes of poetry and 21 prose books. He’s got other works accepted for publication but not yet printed. And he’s working on a novel now, which probably actually means he’s got several going on at various stages in the creative process.
But let’s just focus on this week when he’s having a reading and book signing for two that are fresh off the presses. Vitamins for Ygdrasil and Other Poems is in the verse category and The World is Neither Stacked For You nor Against You: Selected Stories is the prose offering. (The event is at Burke’s Book Store July 25th from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m.).
So, no novel? We just have to be a bit patient — one is coming next year, but it’ll happen since Mesler says he now only writes poems or novels. “I’d rather be writing a novel than anything else in the world,” he says. “And poems I write in between on days that I don’t work on the novel. They just sort of come.”
He’s not even that much into short stories these days, despite his new selected stories book. “I got a little tired of the form, and it takes such precision,” he allows. That’s why there are only a couple of new stories in the book; mostly it’s previously published but hard-to-find tales. But if you haven’t read ’em, they’re now in this neat package for your delectation.
Despite Mesler’s current view of the short story form, he was encouraged to assemble the works by Steve Stern, the acclaimed author from Memphis. “He said, ‘You ought to take the strongest stories and put ’em together.’ And I said, ‘Okay, that’s a great idea. Will you do an introduction for them?’” That’s some literary horse-trading there.
There’s much to appreciate in the titles alone. Try these: “The Slim Harpo Blues,” “Any Day is a Good Day that Doesn’t Start with Killing a Rat with a Hammer,” “God and the Devil: The Exit Interview.” Irresistible. As Mesler says, “I love titling things. I love titling poems. In stories and in novels, I often will have a musician character so I can make up song titles.”
He’s also got the title mojo working in Vitamins for Ygdrasil: “Franny and Zooey Deschanel,” “World Full of Spooky,” “Learn to Love Your Narcotics.” The poems are not tied together thematically, which Mesler regrets a little bit. “My poetry collections always come when all of a sudden, I realized that I published a bunch of poems that I probably should gather. I wish I was one of those poets that worked thematically.”
The volume is not entirely random, though. There are several poems that refer to Ygdrasil, a giant oak in Mesler’s yard that provides acorns of inspiration. And there is inspiration there as well in the form of Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory. “I fell in love with his idea of the forest as a creature itself. Everything’s connected in a forest and it’s fascinating — the symbiosis that goes on in a forest. Trees talk to each other; they save each other. It’s all a design.”
So expect two volumes at Thursday’s event, thematically unconnected but both with content that is funny, profound, thoughtful, and very likely to make you stop and think. It’s also worth noting that the two books of literary art also have fascinating fine art on the covers. Vitamins for Ygdrasil has a splendid work of a tree (as you might imagine) by local artist Martha Kelly. And for The World is Neither Stacked, Mesler is using a work by noted illustrator Edward Carey that — like a good short story — will make you think.
We, the writers of the Flyer, report the news, and sometimes we make the news. Case in point: Our reporter Toby Sells wrote a book. (Yay, Toby!) It’s called Haint Blues: Strange Tales From the American South (available on Amazon), and it’s about, well, strange tales from the South — UFO abductions, ghosts, Bigfoot, psychic horses, you get the gist. It’s the stuff that Sells just doesn’t stop talking about and now he’s written 20 chapters of it for anyone to read.
“I’ve been into unexplained and folklore stuff since I was in third grade,” he says in an official interview (not during an off-the-record office gossip session, for the record). “I won’t go into the whole story, but a friend of mine showed me the movie The Legend of Boggy Creek when I was at his house for a sleepover in third grade. I think I told you this before [Yes, Toby, you have]. That was my paranormal gateway drug. And I just started consuming every bit of media that I could find after that.”
Yes, that meant watching Unsolved Mysteries but that also meant digging into the archives and doing good old-fashioned research that eventually led him to creating the scripted podcast Haint Blues. “The show got, literally, dozens of listeners,” Sells says (brags?), adding that he recorded his last episode in 2020. “Those scripts kind of sat on the shelf for a little while, and then I was reading one day about average word length of books, and I was doing the math and thinking about how many scripts I had. Those were about 3,000 words each. And I thought, well, it’s getting pretty close. … I thought maybe that’s a way I could share these stories with people. And so I went back to the scripts and rewrote everything in a more nonfiction, prose style, but it still sounds really conversational and still sounds folksy. It’s really laid-back and Southern and comfortable.
“You know,” Sells continues, “all these stories, somewhere down the line, if they’re not just completely fabricated, involved real people at one point, and you want to treat that as respectfully as you can, and that’s what I tried to do. But I think what I really wanted to do is put these stories out as a collection of Southern culture. We all know about Southern food and Southern music, and what I hope I’ve done in the book is let everybody know that we have our own folklore traditions, too. … I think that stuff is as important to Southern culture as any other thing.”
This Friday, you can meet Sells at An Evening of Ghost Stories with Stephen Guenther, paranormal investigator and owner of Historical Haunts. They’ll both share paranormal stories and do a Q&A, and Sells will sign books after. “If you’re ready for an evening of spooky stuff, even before Halloween, come on out and join us, grab a beer,” Sells says.
Ron Hall with his 1977 ticket stub. Elvis died before he could use it.(Photo: Shangri-La Projects)
There are record collectors, and then there are record collectors. Holding strong against the tides of time, which have rendered recorded music as weightless as a cloud, streaming past us like raindrops and just as ungraspable, Memphis is yet home to many mini-librarians. We curate our own collections of vinyl, tapes, and CDs, still attached to those miniature works of art and the ritual of listening that they require. Yet, among this haven of gatherers — raging, raging against the dying of the vinyl — there once walked among us the ur-collector, and the ultimate documentarian of the history behind his stacks of wax.
His name was Ron Hall. There was no one more committed to the history and lore of local music than he, and no bigger fan of Memphis wrestling.
When Hall passed away in March at the age of 73, after suffering a major stroke two months earlier, the city lost not only a gifted private archivist but a gifted author. Shangri-La Projects, who published his entire oeuvre, posted this on social media as a response to his death:
“Ron was a savant in shining a light on what it meant to grow up in the middle of the post-war pop culture explosion in one of the most influential pop culture, music, and professional wrestling cities in the world. Ron’s three books, two CD compilations, documentary film, and Memphis music calendar solidified him into being one of the craziest chroniclers/fellow fanatic travelers of all that is wacky in Memphis’ creative cauldron of the ’50s/’60s/’70s/’80s.”
Here, then, is a recap of Hall’s important body of work.
Playing for a Piece of the Door: A History of Garage and Frat Bands in Memphis, 1960-1975
This was the book that started it all, and it remains a constant reference source for this writer and many others in Memphis. Tellingly, the introduction begins with Hall’s memories of actually performing with a band, when “the 13th Muse took the stage at a home for unwed mothers in the Oakhaven area of Memphis, Tennessee,” in late 1969. Though they only played the one show, Hall recounts, “I was doing what hundreds of other kids in Memphis wished they could do.”
That everyman spirit informs this look into the stories of over 500 local bands that cropped up in the title’s 15 year span. Some went on to stardom, others were only locally celebrated, and some weren’t even that. Yet all are cataloged with an inclusive, democratic zeal by Hall, who not only collected the sometimes obscure 45s that made these bands immortal but saw many of them performing in their prime. This lends crucial historical context to the groups. Take The Embers, for instance, “one of the top bands in the Jackson/Humboldt, Tennessee, area in the mid-to-late ’60s.”
Starting in 1964, many (most?) of these groups were inspired by The Beatles. This is, after all, an undeniably partial collection of groups, centered on the largely white ensembles that sprung up in The Beatles’ wake. But Hall reaches back before the Fab Four’s heyday as well, as with his entry on The Monarchs, who, starting in 1959, were “one of the few surf bands in the area.” Hall fills out his archival research with interviews with some of the players, making this book a kind of oral history as well. “The Beatles killed us,” recalls Charles McAllister of the Monarchs.
And, as the book takes us into the ’70s, we see the post-Beatles groups flourish as well, with power pop and California rock-tinged groups like Big Star, Target, and Cargoe hitting their stride. In all, it’s one of the most important chronicles of how sounds morphed through a decade and a half of the city’s golden years at the top of the music industry.
The Memphis Garage Yearbook, 1960-1975
When Playing for a Piece of the Door came out in 2001, it sparked a new surge of demand for all that was obscure and garagey in Memphis music, and soon after Shangri-La Projects released two CDs compiling the best tracks from Hall’s and others’ vinyl collections. Concerts were held on the Shangri-La Records porch, featuring onetime ’60s artists like Jim Dickinson, B.B. Cunningham, and the Castels. Ultimately, a second book was released which covered much the same ground, but through a different lens. Put together like a high school yearbook, and relying more heavily on rare photographs and show bills collected by Hall, it’s a stunning visual accomplishment. The book being organized chronologically (rather than alphabetically, as the first book is) sheds a different light on the evolution of the groups and the various players who shuttled between them. And the live performance photos underscore that this book, as well as its predecessor, doubles as a chronicle of the era’s key venues as well as its bands.
Sputnik, Masked Men, and Midgets: The Early Days of Memphis Wrestling
Hall was not only fascinated with local music, as this 2009 volume made clear. If many, like me, first became aware of the connection between early pro wrestling in the city and rock-and-roll by reading Robert Gordon’s It Came from Memphis, Hall seems to have gotten it organically, from being a dedicated fan of the sport since his youth. Rare 45s by more sonically ambitious wrestlers like Jackie Fargo, Sputnik Monroe, and (of course) Jerry Lawler are featured in photographs and on the book’s accompanying CD. Moreover, Hall called on some key fellow collectors for the visuals here, namely Robert W. Dye Sr., a local amateur photographer; Jim Blake, owner of the record label that released Lawler’s musical ventures; and many others. The result is a galvanizing compendium of eye-gouging action shots, tough guy poses, screaming show bills, and detailed write-ups from Wrestling, King of Sports, a local wrestling rag from the era. Not long after this book appeared, Shangri-La Projects released the film Memphis Heat: The True Story of Memphis Wrasslin’, which relied heavily on this book by Hall, who also served as the film’s executive producer.
Memphis Rocks: A Concert History, 1955-1985
While retaining much of Hall’s fascination with all things Memphis, this book expands the scope of his research, documenting more than local bands. In a photo-heavy format closer to Hall’s wrestling book than Playing for a Piece of the Door, it collects concert photos, ticket stubs, show bills, and print media ads for practically any major concert in the city over a 30-year span. This includes both national and local groups, with a focus on the former: the big concerts that music fans flocked to, now cherished in the memories of those who attended. Yet smaller shows make the cut as well, and this, like Hall’s other works of music history, serves as an important chronicle of now-forgotten venues. Contrary to the subtitle, for example, the book actually begins in 1954, devoting a page to every local live performance by a certain Elvis Presley that year. Many of them were at Eagle’s Nest. Who knew?
It’s also a de facto celebration of the Mid-South Coliseum, charting the many stellar shows there over three decades, from James Brown in 1965 to The Beatles the next year to Iron Maiden in 1985. Resonating with any fan savoring the experience of such shows are the “Concert Memories” compiled by Hall, where local musicians and others recall the power of seeing pivotal performances in their lives. As such, this, like all of Hall’s painstaking works, is a compendium of not only Memphis music and Memphis memories, but key moments in the history of American culture as a whole.
Books are and always will be the best part of summer. Assigned summer reading? No, never. But when you get to choose, ah, there’s the sweet spot … until you realize there are just too many books to read and not enough time. That’s why we put the question to Memphis’ booksellers to see what they’re recommending to help make those choices a little easier.
Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop by Alice Faye Duncan (Children)
A historical picture book for students by local award-winning author Alice Faye Duncan, Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop focuses on the 1968 sanitation strike that took place here in Memphis. — Jeremee DeMoir, DeMoir Books & Things
Blood at the Root by LaDarrion Williams (YA)
Blood at the Root is a new release that’s taking over TikTok and seems to be an instant book of interest. Its author says it is his version of “If Harry Potter was Black and went to an HBCU.” The book explores the supernatural and the roots and secrets that connect us in an unforgettable contemporary setting. This heart-pounding fantasy series opener is a rich tapestry of atmosphere, intrigue, and emotion. — Jeremee DeMoir
Black Shield Maidenby Willow Smith
The singer of “Whip My Hair” is back with new music and a book for fans of mythology, high fantasy, and historical fiction. The newly released title follows Yafeu, a defiant yet fiercely compassionate young warrior who is stolen from her home in the flourishing Ghanaian Empire and taken as a slave to a distant kingdom in the North. — Jeremee DeMoir
Shit Cassandra Saw by Gwen E. Kirby
A wild ride of 21 short stories from the unbridled imagination of writer Gwen E. Kirby. Anchored by bold female bad-assery, each story instantly demands the reader’s attention.
The whole journey of reading this collection is like a food processor. You are chopped, stirred, pulsed, and crushed. You are shaken up and down and all around and then at book’s end, you are left howling and wanting more.
Funny, tragic, unreal yet real simultaneously, crazy, and savory, every bit of this book is delicious. — Sheri Bancroft, Novel
Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter
dread (n,v): from the Old English drædan, to shrink from in apprehension or expectation; to fear very much.
One of the definitions used in the book. You don’t have to read horror to get dread. If you don’t have enough home made on your own, here it is store-bought. Etter captures that feeling when you have existential burnout in your work, but it turns your senses off enough to not be able to quit.
This chronicling of the Believers (a perfectly apt name) in the tech world is all too accurate. Having worked in corporate America (though not tech, science, or engineering, but tech-adjacent), this is exactly how it feels to be surrounded by the brand attire-wearing masses who are more company cult than culture. — Dianna Dalton, Novel
Two Minds: Poemsby Callie Siskel
Callie Siskel doesn’t miss a beat. Her debut volume, Two Minds, masterfully weaves a thought-provoking exploration of the human psyche, while discreetly grieving her father’s early death. This pulchritudinous elegy delves into the intricate dance between creativity and criticism, and the delicate balance between self-expression and self-doubt. Siskel crafts a narrative that is both deeply personal and universally relatable. Two Minds is a triumph of storytelling, a testament to authenticity, and a shining example of the transformative potential of contemporary poetry. — Blake Helis, Burke’s Book Store
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn / James / The Audacity
My summer reading assignment is to reread Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (not read since 7th grade) and then Percival Everett’s James, a retelling of Twain’s novel from Jim’s point of view. Currently I am reading The Audacity by Ryan Chapman, a comic novel about the implosion of an Elizabeth Holmes Theranos-type company. — Cheryl Mesler, Burke’s Book Store
One of the most intriguing aspects of Lora Chilton’s historical novel 1666 may be the task of keeping the phonetically spelled names of people and places straight.
The story, based on a combination of what author Chilton refers to as “historical records and oral tradition,” is an inspired imagining of the struggle for survival of two members of the Indigenous Patawomeck (PaTow’O’Mek) tribe of Virginia (TseNaCoMoCo) following the attempted annihilation of the tribe by white colonial authorities in the year indicated by the novel’s title.
The primary characters, based on two women who may actually have existed, do indeed survive (though just barely), as, in the long run of history, has the tribe itself via surviving descendants, one of whom is Chilton herself. Her fellow Memphians may recall her as a prominent school board member and political activist (as Lora Jobe) of a few seasons back.
The aforementioned matter of phonetic spellings is really no obstacle to an immersion in the tale, functioning rather to ground one in a gripping sense of Being There in a present-tense reality. (And there are welcome recognitions, as when one of the story’s ultimate locations turns out to be a teeming place called MaNaHahTaAn (Manhattan).)
The main characters themselves have a variety of names. Ah’SaWei (Golden Fawn) is also Twenty-nine (her number as a freshly enslaved prisoner) and Rebecca (while serving in a Barnados household). And, similarly, NePaWeXo (Shining Moon) is Eighty-five and Leah.
To repeat, none of this gets in the way. For each of the characters, the identities are both discrete and overlapping. Each stands for a different phase of the characters’ destinies — Alternately horrific, heroic, and (relatively) mundane.
Those destinies occur within a meticulously outlined span of historical time in which the terrors and atrocities of the colonial era, described unblinkingly, are a basic part of the background and essentially define the course of events. But so, too, are the natural circumstances of life — love and sex prominently among them.
What did people of that milieu eat and how did they cultivate it? In what ways were their domestic tensions, coupling rituals, and emotional realities like or unlike our own? Chilton has researched it all and knows it in depth and can tell you.
And she does so with a dramatic, thriller-like sense of urgency that has us turning pages compulsively.
Some advance readers of the novel, whose blurbs are included with the text, focus on the story as “tragedy.” That’s a way of saying that terrible things happen and are accounted for graphically.
But what the story really is about is humanity’s unquenchable spirit and, as such, is the furthest thing imaginable from being a downer.
