Tag: Everything That’s True

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At Large Opinion

The Year After the Year

The Saugatuck River (Photo: Andrew VanWyngarden)

It was the year after the year of the big change, the year after the year we all stayed home, the year after the year the offices shut, the restaurants closed, the live music died, the planes stopped flying. It was the year after the last year of Trump. It was 2021.

It began with the most egregious assault on American democracy in our history: The January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol — planned and instigated by the former president of the United States with the assistance and support of numerous Republican flunkies and traitors. It was a pseudo-insurrection that drew thousands of deluded Americans to Washington, D.C., to act out Trump’s final fantasy — that he could overthrow the democratic process and remain president, despite losing the election by 7 million votes. The cultish “patriots” who bought into this lunacy included a planeload of wealthy Memphis Country Club types who, as of this writing, have remained officially unidentified — and out of jail. Maybe they just watched from the hotel lobby. Or went shopping. We may never know. Screw ’em.

As February came on, the first Covid vaccines were administered hereabouts. The state urged us to try the “Sign-Up Genius,” which sort of worked and sort of didn’t. There were long lines, short lines, last-minute cancellations, and sudden open cattle calls for shots. My daughter called me on February 2nd and said, “They’re giving the vax to whoever shows up at the Pipkin today. A bunch of people canceled. You should get on over there.”

An hour later, my wife and I pulled into that strange building on the Fairgrounds, lowered our windows, and got the jab. It felt like a whiff of freedom after a year of suppression and worry. It felt even better 28 days later, when we got the second dose. Vaxxed, baby!

March came and the Tigers missed the Big Dance. The Grizzlies made the play-in playoffs but it was soon over. No one seemed to care much. Maybe it was the shortened seasons, the missed games, the empty arenas, the sideline masks. The magic wasn’t there.

In April, Memphis International Airport (MEM) climbed back atop the rankings as the world’s busiest cargo airport for the first time since 2009. And Amazon announced it was increasing its presence in the Mid-South with two new facilities: a delivery station in North Memphis and a fulfillment center in Byhalia, Mississippi. Some good news at last.

In more good news, I retired as editor of the Flyer in May and set off on a road trip to the East to see distant family and some old friends. The talented Mr. Jesse Davis stepped in as Flyer editor and hasn’t missed a beat since. Thanks, pal.

As soon as I got back to town in June, inspectors discovered a crack in the Hernando DeSoto Bridge and shut it down. I don’t think there was a connection.

Freed from having to be the official voice of the Flyer, I began to write about whatever sparked my fancy: Brooks Museum statuary cleaners, the Waverly flood, the 1919 Elaine (Arkansas) Massacre, Midtown geckos, Donald Trump’s email grift, the latest zoo/Greensward spat, kayaking Nonconnah Creek. It’s been very liberating, and I’m grateful to be able to do it in semi-retirement. Or whatever this is.

I spent most of the summer putting together a collection of my past columns, travel articles, and features for a book, which the Flyer’s parent company, Contemporary Media, published in November. It’s called Everything That’s True, and it makes a great gift, I’m told. So go buy it. It’s at Novel, Burkes, and on the Memphis magazine Shopify site. All sales revenue goes to support the Flyer. End of commercial break.

Thankfully, the year ahead looms with some promise that life can return to normal. Yes, there’s a new Covid variant, but 75 percent of us are vaccinated now and there are medicines that will keep most folks out of the hospital, even if they catch it. Those lines at the Pipkin building hopefully will not reoccur — and the “year after the year” will remain behind us. Onward.

Categories
At Large Opinion

Tuesdays With Sid

Illustration: John Ryan

Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from Bruce VanWyngarden’s new book, Everything That’s True, which is now out
and available online and at Novel and Burke’s Books.

I moved to Memphis 20 years ago this spring. It was a new city to me, and I liked to wander around Downtown on my lunch hour. One day, I walked into Rod & Hank’s Vintage Guitars, a magical shop then located just across from the Peabody hotel on Second Street. I loved the smell and the feel of the place, and I loved all the classic old guitars hanging on the walls.

Rod Norwood and Hank Sable were friendly guys and would encourage you to take instruments down and play them until you found one that you had to have — as they knew you would, eventually. After a few visits, I fell in love with an old Gibson J-45 that sounded like thunder when you strummed it and whose high notes rang clear as water. I had to have it, and I dropped some serious jack to take it home.

“A J-45 is the guitar Sid Selvidge plays,” Hank said. “A lot of the old country blues singers wouldn’t play anything else.” I’d heard of Selvidge — mostly from reading Robert Gordon’s essential Memphis music and wrasslin’ book, It Came From Memphis — but hadn’t met him. When Hank told me Sid gave guitar lessons in the shop, I decided to give him a call. I wanted to learn country blues, and I wanted an excuse to keep hanging around Rod & Hank’s.

The next week, Sid and I — and our J-45s — met in the guitar shop’s upstairs room for my lesson.

“What do you want to learn?” he asked.

“Whatever you want to teach me,” I said.

Every Tuesday, for the next couple years, Sid taught me lots of nice licks and cool songs, but mostly he taught me about Memphis music. He had a million stories — about Furry Lewis, Mudboy and the Neutrons, Sam Phillips, the Memphis coffeehouse scene, you name it — and I loved to hear them. Sometimes, we’d talk more than we’d play.

After the “lesson,” we got in the habit of going downstairs and playing in the shop for a while. Soon, Hank started joining in on banjo and fiddle. Then, former Commercial Appeal music writer Larry Nager began dropping by with his mandolin. Then Sid’s marvelously talented son Steve began showing up and playing Dobro.

The impromptu “Second Street String Band” even played a few gigs, and it was a thrill for all of us to play behind Sid’s amazing voice. But all things come to an end. Rod and Hank closed the shop and took their business online. Sid got a full-time gig running the international radio show Beale Street Caravan. Nager moved to Cincinnati. I became the Flyer editor, and Tuesdays were never the same.

But Sid remained a friend, and he remains in my memory as one of the kindest, most generous people I ever met. His passing last week leaves an irreplaceable void in Memphis music. I still miss those Tuesdays, and, like a lot of folks around here, I’ll miss Sid Selvidge.

Categories
News News Blog

CMI to Release Book by Bruce VanWyngarden

Everything That’s True by Bruce VanWyngarden, with illustrations by John Ryan

Contemporary Media, Inc., the parent company of the Memphis Flyer and Memphis magazine, announced today that it is publishing a collection of the writings of Bruce VanWyngarden, who was Flyer editor from 2001-2021. The book is titled Everything That’s True.

CMI CEO Anna Traverse Fogle: “Flyer readers may remember the time we announced that Bruce VanWyngarden planned to retire. We ended up keeping him in the editor’s chair for 14 months after that announcement. When you are lucky enough to publish a writer like Bruce, you don’t let him get away if you can help it. Bruce writes about Memphis and about humanity with a deftly calibrated wisdom; no one can blend grace, generosity, and acerbic wit better. When Bruce did (sort of) retire, earlier this year, he immediately went to work compiling Everything That’s True. I’m grateful that Contemporary Media had the chance to publish this remarkable collection, and more so that my fellow Memphians will be able to linger on Bruce’s words and wisdom.”

The book consists of selected columns and features from the Flyer and Memphis magazine, and is illustrated by noted Memphis artist John Ryan. The publishing date is officially October 22nd, but advance orders for signed and personalized copies are being taken now at Memphis magazine’s Shopify site.

Bruce VanWyngarden
Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Everything That’s True

CREDIT: Photo by Fontaine Pearson

Photo by Fontaine Pearson

Darling, we are the light reflected 

Darling, we are the love we made 

Darling, nothing precious is protected 

We’re all trembling like a blossom 

With winter on the way. — Rob Jungklas 

Maybe it’s last week’s passing of Wanda Wilson, the singular and much-loved proprietess of the P&H Cafe, a woman who created and curated a beer joint that once made Midtown feel like a village of like-minded souls. It was a harbor, a place of sanity (and insanity), conversation, friendship, and laughter for those of us of a certain age.

Maybe it’s the rain and the long cold spell and the winter hanging on, but there’s an inevitable sadness that comes when you ponder the passing of people and things. Sometimes you just have to let it in.

Or maybe it was my discovery of Rob Jungklas’ “Everything That’s True,” a perfect and gorgeous song celebrating the temporal, inevitable human condition. Memphis singer Susan Marshall posted Jungklas’ song on her Facebook page and dedicated it to all the “beloved Memphians who have recently passed: Jimi Jamison, Jack Holder, John Hampton, John Fry, Sid Selvidge, Jim Dickinson, Di Anne Price, Mabon ‘Teenie’ Hodges, James Govan, and Wanda Wilson.”

Seeing that list in black and white was stunning. So many Memphis music and cultural icons gone in such a short time, so much light no longer reflected.

I found myself wanting to disconnect from the hive-mind of email and chatrooms and Twitter and Facebook for a while. I dug out some old books and hunkered down by the fireplace on Sunday, reading from Be Here Now, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and a battered Alan Watts tome — books that offer words and thoughts that lead one back to the center, to this moment.

Here. Now. All that we have.

And after thinking for a while, it came to me that the hive itself, the incessant connections we make with each other these days, is itself a gift — a way of learning more about the joys and pains of the human condition. The village is larger now; the beer joints are still there, but there are other paths to empathy, to sharing sorrows, celebrations, and memories, to being connected to those we don’t see often enough.

The deepest valley of the human heart knows winter is always on the way, even as spring approaches. It’s as certain as the throw of stars overhead on a February night. There’s a sadness there, but it’s a good sadness. And that too is a gift.