Over the past 30 years, Memphis comic book artist, sculptor, and filmmaker John Michael McCarthy, aka Mike McCarthy, has taken self-mythologizing to a level few others have matched, often weaving elements of his compelling personal history into fantastic scenarios drawn from the B movies, comics, and pop icons of his youth. That’s especially true of what’s arguably McCarthy’s greatest work, the film Teenage Tupelo, released in 1995 by Something Weird Video.
Ostensibly telling the tale of a young, buxom single mother’s odyssey through Tupelo’s underground, circa 1962, as she comes to terms with an unwanted pregnancy, it’s chiefly an homage to the low-budget flicks (think Roger Corman or Russ Meyer) that captivated young McCarthy as he grew up in Elvis Presley’s hometown, echoing those films’ visceral impact via Darin Ipema’s pitch-perfect, mostly black-and-white cinematography and a sizzling soundtrack by surf rock-crime jazz kings Impala.
The film became a cult favorite in the ’90s, championing the burgeoning garage aesthetic of that era. No prior knowledge of McCarthy’s personal history was needed to savor the raw shock of the film’s visuals and sounds. Its staying power was confirmed in 2020 when Portugal’s Chaputa Records revived Impala’s soundtrack on vinyl, then again last May when the film was remastered and released on Blu-ray. But if the latter’s bonus director’s commentary hinted at the many layers of influences behind the film, that was nothing compared to what came next: a coffee table tome which publisher Fantagraphics Books describes as “a mammoth volume dedicated to one of the last underground sexploitation films of the 20th Century.”
With more than 300 generously illustrated pages, this would be a monumental tribute to any film, yet in this case, beyond honoring McCarthy’s vision, it’s a tribute to the entire Memphis scene of the ’90s. The fact that it’s a compendium of “essays, reviews, articles, and interviews” rather than a single narrative is actually a strength, as the book offers many voices, some from the era, some looking back in hindsight. Impala’s Scott Bomar, for instance, writes movingly of recording with the legendary Roland Janes. There are also reminiscences by the star of the film, D’Lana Tunnell of Texas, and the three supporting actors from Memphis, Kristen Hobbs, Sophie Couch (Christine Gladney), and Dawn Ashcraft (who most Memphians know as McCarthy’s wife at the time, Kimberly Ashcraft). These essays — and accompanying photos — are especially “revealing” as the four women describe McCarthy cajoling them into performing topless, and the spirit of gonzo transgression in which they did so. One might thus consider both the film and this book as bold shots across the bow in the “free the nipple” movement.
The introduction by the Commercial Appeal’s John Beifuss sets the context perfectly, and the Memphis Flyer is well-represented with writings by Greg Akers, Chris Davis, Susan Ellis, John Floyd, Andria Lisle, and yours truly. Also on display is a letter by McCarthy’s biological father, Terry Blair Carr, published by the Flyer in 2008, though no one knew of that connection at the time.
And that is where the personal, emotional heart of the book resides. Most of the essays are by McCarthy himself, and while many of them, bursting with wordplay, concern the process of indie filmmaking, the director, an adopted child, also delves deeply into the private family history that obliquely inspired the film. As he ruminates on the parents who raised him as well as his search for his biological parents, the book becomes a profoundly moving detective story. A further essay by Tunnell, in which she reveals that she too was adopted, resonates with this, marking both the book and the film as expressions of very heartfelt histories.
Part of the mystery and allure of these histories is where they overlapped with the mythic realm of Elvis Presley, and his presence throughout the book lends the proceedings an epic glow. The result is a rich tapestry woven from the families, friendships, fetishes, and fandom of the last century in the land that McCarthy calls “Mythissippi,” but also in Memphis itself. And, as a celebration of the latter, the milieu in which McCarthy’s vision took root, this volume is unparalleled. Far from being mere vanity projects, the film and the book are emblematic of an evolving community. As Bomar writes, “if I were to stumble upon a time machine, I would dial in Mike McCarthy’s Memphis, TN, in the ’90s.”
Memphian Avery Cunningham debuts her novel at the end of January. (Photo: Andrea Fenise)
Avery Cunningham was destined to be a storyteller. Even at a young age, she would stand on a stepping stool in her childhood kitchen in Jackson, Tennessee, and just orate what she now calls “stream of consciousness tales.” People would filter in and out, and Cunningham would keep telling her stories. “I would do this for hours,” she says. “And I guess that’s the clearest representation of the type of person I am and how I’ve always been this person who wanted to tell stories even if no one was listening.”
Except people are ready to listen to Cunningham’s stories. At the beginning of 2022, she sold her debut novel to Hyperion Avenue on proposal, a rare feat for a debut author but, as Cunningham assures, more common than one might think. “I honestly wish that more people talked openly about it, so writers don’t feel this incredible pressure to have written the perfect book right out of the gate,” she says.
She didn’t have years to sit and ponder. She had a deadline, and a full-time job at Southern College of Optometry’s student services. There were late nights with “big dead eyes” stretched open to the glare of the computer screen. There were two-hour-long walks with her Bernese mountain dog, Grizzly, while she devised her story’s structure. And there were visits to Memphis coffee shops and hotel lobbies where she wrote and wrote and wrote, and occasionally looked up to watch those around her, the way they moved, the sound of their voice, could they fit a character’s description?
“They don’t tell you when you’re in a writing program where you have all of this time built in to discover your craft that the challenge is working on this incredible craft and art — these really soul- and time-eating pursuits — while also trying to be a constructive member of society,” Cunningham says. “And that’s a challenge but also that’s part of what it means to be a working novelist right now. … I love that part. I didn’t love it at the time when I was up at one o’clock in the morning, but I love that part of the writing experience and it helps it feel a bit more real.”
This was, after all, what Cunningham had been working towards, what she’d gone to undergraduate and graduate school for at DePaul University in Chicago, and on January 30th, she will celebrate the launch of her novel The Mayor of Maxwell Street, a historical drama about the Black elite in 1920s Chicago.
Cunningham frequented coffee shops and hotel lobbies to write and observe passersby in the making of her novel. (Photo: Andrea Fenise)
ON MAXWELL STREET
Avery Cunningham’s book doesn’t open with the glitz and glamor you’d expect from a 1920s drama — that comes later. Instead, a prologue settles the reader in a dilapidated plantation in Alabama, a sign of the Old South, where a white woman falsely and maliciously accuses a Black man of rape, a tragedy that history is all too familiar with. Yet, this is not the story at the center of Cunningham’s novel, though it’ll reveal its relevance as the plot unravels. The prologue, ultimately, serves as context, a contrast for the unfamiliar yet vibrant aspect of American history that has seldom been honored or explored in media.
Within The Mayor of Maxwell Street, the daughter of the “wealthiest Negro in America,” Nelly Sawyer, finds herself the premier debutante of Black society after the sudden death of her only brother, and immediately, she is whisked off to a number of social engagements as part of her coming-out, much to her chagrin. She has her secrets, though — for the past year, she’s written as an undercover investigative journalist, reporting “the achievements and tribulations of everyday Black people living in the shadow of Jim Crow.” Nelly’s latest assignment: to identify the head of an underground crime syndicate, the so-called Mayor of Maxwell Street. Soon, she enlists the help of the mysterious low-level speakeasy manager, Jay Shorey.
So, yes, there’s glitz and glamor, guns and gangsters, speakeasies and soirees in this novel that seeks out life’s contradictions and doesn’t shy away from its harsh realities. At once Cunningham’s Chicago is alluring, dazzling even, yet its underbelly is foreboding, her characters under the pressure of “the monolith of Jim Crow, the inflexible world of the Black upper class, and the violence of Prohibition-era Chicago.”
“I wanted to honor that era,” Cunningham says. “And I tried to be as historically accurate or representative of the place and the time and the people as I could. But of course, I also didn’t want to attempt to match Fitzgerald’s style or [Nella] Larsen’s style or any writers that were really prevalent during the ’20s. Because it was a different time, a different place, and different readers. So I just hope that my own voice kind of came through but also still managed to honor as much of the historical accuracy as possible.”
THE MAKING OF THE BOOK
“I’ve called myself a writer for pretty much as long as I’ve been aware of written language,” Cunningham says. “And historical fiction has always been what I’ve enjoyed. … One of my first novels ever, or technically a novel — it’s buried somewhere in a box from when I was 13 years old — but even that first experience of novel writing was set in medieval France. And so I love the research aspect of historical fiction. I love how history is so often stranger than fiction or stranger than what we think reality might be. And there are already so many amazing stories nestled in the past. And through historical fiction writers can really bring all of that to light and expose new readers and new people to the stories and kind of really honor the lives of the past.”
In 2020 and 2021, mainstream media began to incorporate people of color in historical settings that traditionally excluded them, Cunningham says. The Netflix series Bridgerton, for instance, cast Black men and women in roles of British aristocracy during a period when slavery was central to Britain’s economy. “I think that there was a hunger with stories like Bridgerton — that yes, thank you for the representation, but also let’s not pretend that this didn’t already exist in its own community,” Cunningham says. “Instead of trying to rewrite a history that never tried to include us in the first place, maybe acknowledge the history that really did exist at the time and all of its seriousness and all of its wealth and joy and happiness. … I was really hungry for a story that made Black Americans the primary narrative.”
Through books like The Original Black Elite by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, and Our Kind of People by Lawrence Otis Graham, Cunningham says she was awakened to the truth of Black wealth and all the facets of Black history in this country. Some of the historical figures she read about during her research even make appearances in her novel. “I wanted to make sure that people could read this book and know that these people could exist,” Cunningham says. “This is not is not a fantasy. This is not someone trying to create some kind of alternate history. These individuals, even though they may have not gone through the specific trials or the experiences, existed in this world. And my hope is that people might [look up] Robert Pelham [a journalist] or The Chicago Defender [the African-American paper Nelly writes for] … and learn about this whole different side of life they may not have realized existed in the first place.”
At the time of her research, Cunningham also happened to be reading The Great Gatsby. “It really is such a fascinating tale of wealth and intrigue and kind of the corruption and the artifice of the American dream. And I thought that was a narrative that was really prime to the Black experience, one never really seen through any kind of diverse perspective.”
Cunningham’s novel was almost a Gatsby retelling, she admits, but as her story took shape, it became less and less like it. “Over the course of the writing process, it became … [about], more than anything, the kind of the sacrifices that people were forced to make when challenging the status quo in this country, especially during times when that status quo is changing,” she says. “And we’re living in a very similar time where the status quo not only in this country but truly across the world is shifting dramatically, and still to this day people who seek to challenge that status quo … are facing terrible backlash. So I felt like it was truly reflective of the times that we’re living in now and that we might be living in future years.”
“Everything informs everything else,” Cunningham adds. “That’s one of the fascinating things about historical fiction, that you may be researching a certain time or certain place, but everything that you’ve learned or absorbed from every time period or past experience is informing that time or that place because people change, people move around, people who represent different communities relocate and change that community.”
In fact, prior to working on The Mayor of Maxwell Street, Cunningham had been working on a novel centered around Memphis hoodoo. “So this city was very much still in the back of my mind because of all that research and work I’ve done on Memphis during the 1920s,” she says. “And it did feel like, as I did more research, there were so many similarities between the two cities and the experiences of the two cities that just rounded it out in a way that I really hadn’t anticipated. … So, I think living here and writing this story really informed the entire process and gave the entire soul of the book something more rich and meaningful.”
Cunningham called Grizzly a “great writing partner.” (Photo: Avery Cunningham via Instagram)
TO DEBUT
Today, Cunningham revels in “all of the emotions, every emotion that one could ever possibly feel” as the launch of her debut approaches. “It’s strange,” she says. “And I talked to a lot of writers who go through a similar feeling that even though you’ve put so much work and time into a story or a book — it’s something that you really love and believe in and are passionate about — there’s still this sense of almost like an impostor syndrome. Like, how am I worthy of being the one to tell this story? Am I the appropriate person to tell this? Should someone else who’s more educated, who’s more experienced, who has more talent — should they be the ones to honor these characters?
“It is super exciting, and I’m so honored that this story gets to be kind of my start in this career professionally. And I think it was a professor of mine who I was talking to and they said that every person’s individual experience is important and that every story that is told is important. Even if someone else tells a similar story to The Mayor of Maxwell Street, it’s still incredibly valid because it would be derived from their experience. So it does kind of uplift you to think that because of who I am, who my parents are, who my family is going back 300 years, that makes this book particular and specific and unique. So it’s not a question of am I worthy to tell this story? It’s bigger than just me.”
Cunningham continues, “The wonderful thing also about art is that you will find your audience that really sees themselves in your stories and you eventually learn and accept and really revel in the fact that you’re writing for them. You’re not writing for the world. You’re writing for the people who maybe need this more than even you do.”
But two readers’ opinions have mattered more than others’: those of her parents. “They both were very supportive and they said they really liked it. That’s it. As long as they think it’s good, then it doesn’t matter.”
The Mayor of Maxwell Street is available in hardcover and paperback for preorder wherever you buy your books. Avery Cunningham will celebrate the launch of her novel with a “Meet the Author” event at Novel in conversation with Tara Stringfellow, author of Memphis, on Tuesday, January 30th, 6 p.m.
Magic portals, sexy aliens, and sci-fi romance — these are just some of the things you’ll find in the graphic novel Mariko Between Worlds, written by Matthew Erman and illustrated by Liana Kangas. Set in the year 2099, Mariko and Rem are breaking up, their interdimensional relationship proving to be far too complicated, but they agree to make the most of their last night together in the Mall of Portals, “an interdimensional consumerist heaven full of unending vice.” What ensues, as Kangas says, is an exploration of communication, boundaries, and lots of aliens.
The inspiration for the story came from writer Erman’s pandemic-induced binge of 90 Day Fiancé with his wife and comic book artist Lisa Sterle. “They really wanted to tell a story about this girl who doesn’t get a visa to essentially go be with her boyfriend,” Kangas says. “They brought, I think, the first three chapters to me and the editor, and Matt finished writing the rest of the book.”
Memphis-based Kangas’ playful and psychedelic illustrations flesh out the many worlds in the novel, adding to its “fun and bizarre” atmosphere and plot. “I watched movies like Paprika and really weird old anime to get inspiration for integrating the sci-fi elements but make it fun,” Kangas says, adding that they also read “corny romance novels to get in the right headspace.”
“Matt and I had poured a lot of our personal selves into the book as well, you know,” Kangas says. “We’ve all been in that angsty teen/early 20s break-up phases and stuff like that. So it’s been fun to do. I mean, it’s the first romance book, I think, I’ve really ever worked on.”
Previously, Kangas has worked with IPs, like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Stranger Things, and in addition to most recently releasing Mariko Between Worlds, she’s had two other books come out this past month: Know Your Station, a space horror book, and Trve Kvlt, a supernatural horror book.
“All three [of those books] across the board are totally different,” Kangas says. “But I think being in a space and a city like this has allowed me to pursue that, by being connected with my peers. Like, I go to a lot of conventions and stuff, so I get to see them and feel refueled because there’s a small community of comics in Memphis. … The city is very vibrant in terms of diversity and how much they care about the arts and stuff. And so I really think having that sort of supportive community allowed me even during the pandemic to continue my freelancing and continue telling stories.”
And Memphis, Kangas says, has slipped its way into her illustrations. “The book that I just did — Trve Kvlt — it’s a fast food heist, it’s a very bizarre, very fun, dark comedy,” they say. “I would say a lot of my inspiration came from Memphis. It feels a lot like the energy and the vibe of the city, which is very hardworking, very work hard, play hard. … But it’s hard not to see some of that in some of my work, but I definitely think that is the book that shows it the most. But otherwise, I would say, mostly because I’ve been complimented a lot on my diverse characters that I make, I do attribute that to living here.”
This Friday, November 3rd, at 6 p.m., Kangas will celebrate the launch of Mariko Between Worlds at Novel. They will also sign Trve Kvlt and Know Your Station. All three books are available at Novel or on Novel’s website.
Earlier this month, Michael Kiggins released his debut novel, And the Train Kept Moving (Running Wild Press). Set in Memphis, the book uncovers the story of Bryan Meigs, described as “a gay alcoholic with OCD who struggles with the aftermath of getting date-raped and potentially infected with HIV.” It’s a story about mental illness, addiction, and compulsion, and it’s a story about a doomed quest for revenge.
A former student of the University of Memphis, Kiggins now lives in Nashville but will return to Memphis for a reading and book signing at Burke’s Book Store this Friday at 5:30 p.m. In anticipation of the event, we spoke with the author about his debut novel and his writing journey. Here’s what he had to say. — Abigail Morici
Memphis Flyer: What drove you to write this book?
Michael Kiggins: It started off almost 20 years ago as part of my MFA thesis, but it was a completely different book. It’s gone through several drafts. The narrator and protagonist of the final published draft was originally a secondary character. Just full disclosure, I have OCD, kind of bad, and I just sort of locked into Bryan as the narrator and his mental illness and how that shapes the way that he looks at the world and reacts to the things that happened to him and the things that he does became the spine of the novel. I kind of wanted to explore [OCD] — sort of like, what if a person dealt with what I have sort of have dealt with and mostly gotten over, but that person didn’t [get over it] and what if they went into a really dark place because of it? And I wanted to study that in a time that advances in HIV treatment were there, had been there for about seven years, but it was nine years before the FDA would approve PrEP and 12 years before marriage equality. So much better times than the early ’80s and early ’90s, But his mental illness and just fixations and obsessions can’t really let him see past his own fears of infection. …
There have been times in previous versions where [the novel] was third person and I just felt like it wasn’t clicking, that it was too removed. And I think one of the strengths of the narration in this final version is that you are so locked into Bryan’s sort of headspace, and — I don’t know if I succeeded at this — but I wanted readers to sort of feel trapped as he is in his own thoughts.
Why was it important for your character to have OCD?
OCD in popular culture and then media often gets reduced to very simplistic things often about tidiness and anal retentiveness, and I really would like for people to inhabit a character who is constantly on guard, trying to protect himself, not really fully understanding exactly how that is ruining his life. I wanted [readers] to feel the obsessive nature that often just gets reduced to a punchline. Also, by using the first person narrator, I wanted them to sort of sympathize with Bryan, but at the same time, by the end of the novel and over the course of the novel, to really begin questioning their allegiances, and why maybe they originally identified with him. I mean, he does some horrible stuff. The novel opens and we know he’s murdered somebody. To me the novel is a tragedy, but the narrator of this novel believes this is sort of a comedy in the classic sense. He is deluding himself. He thinks he’s claimed a victory, but we can hopefully recognize just the pure tragedy of it.
Why did you choose to set your novel in Memphis over any other place?
I have been in Nashville since 2002, but I was in Memphis from the fall of 1993 until May 2002. I went to undergrad when it was still Memphis State University at the time. And I worked in the mental health field for a few years.Then I realized I didn’t want to do that with my life. So I Hail-Mary-ed an application for [University of Memphis’] MFA program and got in. I started writing [the story] in Memphis like little scraps of scenes here and there, and I didn’t change it because, I don’t know, I love Memphis to death. To me, Memphis was just such a character in the novel itself. And there’s just something about the city that when I lived there, I knew so many people that had been there forever and would rag on the city but they’d never moved. In certain ways, I wanted Bryan to be sort of emblematic of the kind of person who has stayed in Memphis maybe too long, but doesn’t really know how to move on with his life.
What made you shift from working in the mental health field to pursuing creative writing?
I wasn’t an English major in undergrad. And in fact, I didn’t have enough English credits from undergrad when I got into the MFA program so I had to take some extra classes, but I wrote my first novel in high school. But when I graduated with my B.S. in psych, I worked in the mental health field, and by the end of that, I was so stressed that I had worn deep gouges into my steering wheel, just from the stress. Eventually, I went to work for Friends for Life, and it was one of the most rewarding and fulfilling jobs in my life. But I lost many clients to HIV. I had recently lost one of my favorite clients, and my partner was like, ‘Michael, do you want to do social work for the rest of your professional career?’ And it was such an obvious question, but I hadn’t really ever considered it. At that point, I had been writing a lot, but before the MFA program, I’d never been in a writing workshop. So that sort of opened my eyes to how much I needed to learn. But the program probably saved my life. If I had stayed in the mental health field without any sort of options, I don’t know who I would be today.
Do you feel that you were able to benefit by having another career before pursuing writing professionally and by working on this book for almost two decades?
I’m so grateful for the time I had to really just put this aside to grow as a person, to reconsider what I was attempting to do, and to maybe shed some of my youthful or late 20s, early 30 pretensions. I’m dealing with a lot of heavy topics, and with the very different book that it was way back then [when I first started], I don’t think I had enough insights to accomplish what I was trying to even then. So, yeah, the many extra years really let me sort of interrogate things on a deeper level and just simply refine my writing at the sentence level. But I’m also very grateful and glad that I’m being published before I’m 50.
And the Train Kept Moving is available for purchase on Amazon and Burke’s Book Store. An audiobook is in production.
On her TikTok account, Chloe Sexton, owner of BluffCakes, revealed that she’s in a bit of a dilemma. Google her name, and you get her TikTok, her cookies, clips of her on The Kelly Clarkson Show, a host of articles, from Today.com to yours truly, the Memphis Flyer. But Google “Chloe Sexton book,” and you end up with some results leading to an array of adult novels by another “Chloe Sexton.” “Turns out I’m not the only Chloe Sexton on the planet. Go figure,” she says in her video. “Only 7 billion people on the planet, but all the 7 billion people whittled down to make this happen to me.”
Fortunately, we’re not here to talk about that Chloe Sexton’s literary achievement. Rather, we’re here to talk about Memphis’ own Chloe Sexton’s new cookbook, Big Yum: Supersized Cookies for Over-the-Top Cravings, released yesterday by Page Street Publishing, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers. The cookbook, Sexton says, might just be the biggest book deal to come out of Memphis.
Sexton first caught the attention of Page Street two years ago through her TikTok account (@chloebluffcakes), where she shares her personal life and her love of baking — specifically baking large cookies for her online business. Since then, the account has grown to 2.1 million followers and 75.5 million likes, and Sexton has even opened her brick-and-mortar storefront in Germantown. Through it all, over those two years, Sexton had also been developing Big Yum.
The cookbook has 52 giant cookie recipes, most of which were created just for this cookbook. “We’ve got at least two or three recipes in this book that we not only ship internationally, but yes, we offer at our storefront here in Germantown,” she says. “But the rest of them — other than those like two or three — are completely new. We’ve never shipped them. We’ve never sold them in a store. They are completely organic to the book, so you’re gonna make them yourself and be surprised.”
Though the baker admits she hasn’t “done a ton of teaching people,” her start as a home-baker has served as an advantage while creating the cookbook. “I did not at all come from a background of a pastry degree or go to the Culinary Institute of America,” says Sexton, who worked as a news producer before turning to baking full time. “I had to start from my own kitchen, and have been baking from 14 years old on. So I really know what does and doesn’t work in a home kitchen.”
But the cookbook isn’t just recipes, she says. “I’m sharing my life in the book. The people who are going to buy this book — they know me. They followed me for a long time. A lot of my content has been about the business and it’s been about the cookies and promoting this thing that I’ve built, but more than that, there is an audience that’s gonna buy this cookbook because they watched me lose my mom and watch me actively take on a role at becoming my sister’s sole guardian, and I had an opportunity to really dive deeper into more things maybe they don’t know about me.
“I want them to see that it matters to me that I’m having a conversation with the reader,” Sexton continues. “I’m not gonna put out a cookbook and pretend like, oh, none of that really, really difficult stuff ever happened. No, it’s present. We are gonna talk about it. And I want them to know that there’s not going to be a chapter where I just stop talking about what made me me, what put me on the map on social media.”
In fact, when conceiving these recipes, Sexton looked for inspiration in what brought up her best and favorite memories. One cookie is named after her late mom Jenny Wren; another, the Dreamsicle cookie, takes her back to her childhood in Florida, chasing after the ice cream truck in hopes she could score one of those orange frozen treats. “When I normally bake for shipping or for our bakery, it’s all about what the consumer wants,” she says. “Whereas the book is more about what I want to share.”
Among the things she wants to share is her pride for the place she calls home: Memphis. “[The book deal] is definitely something that makes me really conscious about representing the city that I’m proud of,” she says.
In honor of the book’s release, Novel is hosting a launch party Friday, September 22nd, at Restaurant Iris. The chefs at Iris will offer an intimate two-course dinner, and Sexton will do a live cooking demonstration, preparing a vanilla cheesecake with a berry compote. Tickets ($75) are required for this event and include a copy of Big Yum and the opportunity to meet the author and have your book signed. A virtual option is available for $23.99 and includes a signed copy of Big Yum and a link to watch the live cooking demonstration. Find more information about the event and purchase tickets here.
Big Yum: Supersized Cookies for Over-the-Top Cravings is available at all major bookstores and at Novel.
BluffCakes is at 7850 Poplar Ave., Ste. 24, Germantown; bluffcakes.com.
Memphis has been a crucible for sounds and songs that have come to define America, yet many of the volumes covering the topic keep a narrow focus on particular artists, labels, studios, or genres. The sprawling history of Memphis music as a whole is simply too huge for most authors to cover in one fell swoop. Most authors, that is, except James L. Dickerson.
His Memphis Going Down: A Century of Blues, Soul and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Sartoris Literary Group) is a welcome exception to the narrow focus of most books on the subject. And, in a sense, we’ve known this for almost 30 years: The book was originally released in 1996 under the title Goin’ Back to Memphis. But that edition and the reprint that came out 10 years ago are both out of circulation. Now, a new edition has been released with a title that leans into the dire thread running through Dickerson’s story. No one is going back to Memphis, it seems to say. Memphis has only gone downhill, and that’s where it will stay.
Yet Dickerson does not arrive at this gloomy prognosis without some serious research, backed up with considerable first-hand experience in the Bluff City. The Greenwood, Mississippi, native was a reporter and columnist for years at several newspapers, including the Jackson Free Press and The Commercial Appeal. He has written over 30 books and over 2,000 articles in magazines and newspapers. Indeed, Warner Brothers bought the rights to his 2001 biography of Colonel Tom Parker as the basis of last year’s hit film, Elvis.
Thus, while he offers no footnotes or citations here, the book’s extensive bibliography will likely bear out his claims. It hardly beggars belief when he claims in the book’s opening line that “In 1905 Memphis, Tennessee, had a national reputation, but not for music. It was the murder capital of the United States.” He repeats that claim as the decades roll by, chapter by chapter. What’s new is to contextualize the city’s music thus. “America’s Distribution Capital,” it turns out, has been a veritable Sin City for much of its existence, chronically plagued with prostitution, addiction, and homicide.
While he draws no precise lines between such facts and the city’s remarkable music, it does help set the socio-political stage for the ascension of one W.C. Handy, whose first attempts to notate the blues were sparked by E.H. Crump’s need for a campaign song. From there, the author astutely notes that “at the turn of the century, Beale Street was the only entertainment district in the nation openly hospitable to women entertainers.” What follows are brief biographies of three Memphis legends: Memphis Minnie, Alberta Hunter, and Lil Hardin. While many know of the former, the Memphis roots of the latter two are not as often celebrated, but Dickerson corrects that tendency.
And that’s only in the first 30 pages. Chapter Two touches on Furry Lewis, Sleepy John Estes, and “Fiddling Abe” Fortas, who’s really only notable for having made the journey from Beale Street entertainer to U.S. Supreme Court justice. Moving along briskly by decade, the book’s a decent introduction to the deep jazz and blues roots that Memphis boasts. And as the author writes of the ’30s and ’40s, he begins to incorporate his own interviews with players from those times who were still alive when Dickerson was a journalist.
The book covers more familiar territory as the 20th century wears on, limning the stories of Sun, Stax, Hi, and more. But curiously, after the ’70s, when Stax closed shop and Elvis Presley died, the book becomes overly fixated on the city’s lost glory days. The ’80s are chiefly notable in the author’s eyes as the decade when Ringo Starr and The Fabulous Thunderbirds came here to record. Discussions of activity in the ’90s, like Stax co-founder Jim Stewart’s latter day work, are enlightening, but one can’t escape the author’s predetermined conclusion that Memphis music was dying. The rise of the Memphis underground, from the Panther Burns to the Oblivians to the burgeoning hip-hop scene, practically don’t exist, in part because Dickerson is focused mostly on the Billboard charts. By the time the 2000s arrive, Dickerson can write about little more than Justin Timberlake. Memphis Going Down? After the book’s more informative earlier chapters, better to turn elsewhere to find signs of Memphis rising.
Make room on your bookshelves for what could be a major tell-all account of recent Memphis political history or — alternately and additionally — an instructive first-person account of the life and times of Willie Herenton, the first elected Black mayor in the city’s history.
The book, entitled The Bottom, is to be self-published and will make its debut in April, according to Herenton..
The former mayor, who served 17 years as Memphis’ chief executive, sent over a copy of the book’s proposed cover, along with the following synopsis of its contents:
“Making the quantum leaps from poverty in South Memphis to becoming the first Black superintendent of the Memphis City Schools — and later becoming the first elected Black mayor of the city of Memphis is a story told by Willie Herenton.
“Breaking racial barriers in spite of the odds is truly inspirational. Coming up from the impoverished dust of South Memphis to City Hall. (Is a story of what good can come out of South Memphis.)”
Imagine, if you will, looking up to see famed filmmaker Joel Coen and his wife, actress Frances McDormand, walk into your place of business in Memphis on a random December day. That’s what happened to Corey Mesler, who, along with his wife, Cheryl, and daughter, Chloe runs Burke’s Books in Cooper-Young.
“We were all a little gob-smacked,” says Mesler. “They said they were on their way to California and they were stopping in Memphis for ‘barbecue, antiques, and Burke’s Books.’”
The pair was down-to-earth and friendly, Mesler says. “They couldn’t have been nicer. Once they met all of us and discovered we were a family-run business, Frances said, ‘Isn’t it nice that we’re all doing just we want?’ We loved them. It was almost like we already knew them.”
“Anthropologists are thrice-born,” my old instructor in the discipline, T.O. Beidelman, once asserted in a lecture. He had us all captivated with his tales of fieldwork among the Dinka in the Sudan. “First, we are born into our own culture. Secondly, we enter the cultures we study as children, and gradually are born as social beings in that community. And thirdly, we are reborn when we return to our own culture, seeing it with fresh eyes.”
Those words have echoed in my mind while reading a stunning new collection of field notes from the ’60s by two graduate students — one of anthropology, the other of folklore/ethnomusicology — in the blues communities of Mississippi and Louisiana. Going Up the Country: Adventures in Blues Fieldwork in the 1960s (Univ. Press of Mississippi) evokes all the excitement of discovery, of being reborn into another culture, that only a person putting their life and time on the line can feel as they aim for complete immersion. And it’s especially gripping for Memphis-based music lovers, as one of the authors is David Evans, onetime director (and founder) of the ethnomusicology program at what is now called the University of Memphis.
His time at the university is highly regarded among blues aficionados, for he not only studied the form but also performed it (often with the legendary Jessie Mae Hemphill) and produced it, running the small High Water Records label with Richard Ranta, which released many singles and a few albums by lesser-known artists in the ’70s and ’80s. Now retired, he’s still a performer and an appreciator of the blues. Yet all he accomplished at the University of Memphis is but an afterthought in this work, which focuses on earlier chapters of Evans’ life. But he wasn’t alone then.
“It was co-authored with my friend at the time, Marina Bokelman,” Evans explains, noting that Bokelman passed away in May of last year at the age of 80. This book is a fitting tribute to the magnificent work the two did over a half century ago. “We focus on the fieldwork that we did in 1966-67,” Evans adds. “It’s based on the field notes that we took as we did the work. Each day we’d write the notes, describing what we did, our encounters with artists and others. And then there are some other chapters providing background on that, discussing fieldwork, and a little bit about our lives before and after that period.”
The core of the book is an evocative tour through the lives of blues and gospel singers, with a level of detail and attention to both the music and their lives rivaling any blues study before or since. The co-authors’ notes and photographs take the reader into the midst of memorable encounters with many obscure but no less important musicians, as well as blues legends, including Robert Pete Williams, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Babe Stovall, Reverend Ruben Lacy, and Jack Owens.
It was all part of the authors’ studies in the fledgling folklore and mythology program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where they began dating. There was clearly an intellectual as well as a romantic bond there, and the scholarly standards of the field notes are high. But this is also an adventure story of sorts, as the young couple describes searches for musicians, recording situations, social and family dynamics of musicians, and race relations, not to mention the practical, ethical, and logistical problems of doing fieldwork. The book features over one hundred documentary photographs that depict the field recording sessions and the activities, lives, and living conditions of the artists and their families. As you read along, you’ll want to listen to any recordings of the artists that you can get your hands on.
While the field adventures are gripping, so too is the milieu of the young scholars in Los Angeles at the time, living in Topanga Canyon, and playing host to a young Al Wilson, with whom Evans performed previously in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Evans describes introducing Wilson to Tommy Johnson’s “Canned Heat Blues,” and we read of Wilson founding the famous group named after that 1928 record. With this section, occupying nearly the first hundred pages of the book, and the “after the field” biographical essays detailing the authors’ lives after splitting up and pursuing their respective passions, this book is a glowing portrait of two insatiably curious souls, a fitting memoir of two lives well-lived.
“We had some real adventures,” reflects Evans. “They’re all in the book.”
“The Memphis Quarantine Project started on March 13, 2020,” writes photographer Jamie Harmon in the opening lines of his new book, Memphis Quarantine (Amurica), and noting the date only heightens the new volume’s sense of time travel. By that Friday the 13th, the World Health Organization had declared Covid-19 a pandemic and area schools were transitioning to remote learning or extra time off. With the city’s official lockdown more than a week away, most of us were already radically rethinking our routines — and at that point, many feared contagion from just touching groceries. There was but one suggestion of increased safety: the great outdoors.
And so Harmon hit the streets. “I asked a friend if I could photograph them from outside their home,” he writes. “This led to posting an open invitation on social media and the project quickly grew to over 1,200 dwellings.” Luckily for Memphis and the world, Harmon is a photographer with a keen eye for flashes of character in the moment; his bio says he’s a visual anthropologist, and that’s closer to what he does with a camera. With it, he casts a wide net to capture the culture of Memphis in all its diversity: a multitude of porches, windows, apartments, garages, pets, and various states of parenthood reveal themselves from more or less the same zone — between the inside and the outside.
From only a few yards away or through double-paned glass, the distance is always there, looming in every image. A family crouching on a screened-in porch; young housemates gathered with their instruments just inside the door; a couple represented by two heads framed in separate windows; someone playing a guitar solo in green graduation robes; a porch-sitter obscured by the Memphis Flyer she’s reading, her dog alert. Yet all of them also feature another silent subject: the distance itself.
In each shot, Harmon puts himself into what anthropologists call liminal space, a realm betwixt and between different states of being. The photographer keeps his pandemically correct distance, yet simultaneously peers across it, illuminating those interior safe spaces to which we all retreated. Harmon occasionally keeps his spot flash in the frame, throwing light from just outside the window into the spaces where humans live. These pictures capture both how people defined a safe distance in those dark days, and how they defined the interior space of their bubble.
As Harmon was taking images and posting them on social media, just glimpsing them in a scroll was somehow hopeful, albeit ephemeral. Others first saw these portraits in Memphis magazine, or when exhibited by Crosstown Arts in February. But it takes the more contemplative space of a book in your lap to bring it home: Here was someone seeing all of us, bearing witness, even as we bore witness to the friends and neighbors we saw through Harmon’s work. In pairing strangers with more familiar faces, this book forges an all-embracing, democratic vision of who we were.
Writ large, the expressions lean toward the grim, the anxiety-ridden. They’re not unlike dignified 19th-century portraits where subjects presented themselves before the lens in stillness, with the gravitas of the ages. Yet others defy such seriousness of purpose, determined to keep some fun or beauty to their lives, through funny ears, pets, or mugging for the camera. Or, as with that person wearing a tyrannosaurus rex suit in their living room, through all of the above.
It’s a credit to the inventiveness of both Harmon and his subjects that the book presents hundreds of variations in setting, color, lighting, and mood. Some, like Ben Siler, Andria Brown, or Flyer alum Chris Davis, offer writings from or inspired by the time. But most of these portraits are resolutely anonymous, all of us reduced to that stalwart everyman or everywoman bent on survival. In a nod to the many who agreed to have their portrait published (some didn’t), Harmon lists the 814 folders of images in the order he shot them over two and a half months. They’re not meant to identify the subjects; they’re just another artifact of this anthropologist’s journey, from the outside to the inside in the click of a shutter.
