October 6th to 8th - Memphis redux and Arkansas

Arriving back in Memphis, Martha picked me up at the airport and Allison met us for lunch at La Baguette, magical French bakery I remember from childhood.  Armed with a box of almond croissants and two coffee mugs, I drove around Memphis and visited Stax Records for the first time.

Stax is magnificent.  It's history, and what it is as a museum.  An uncanny number of musicians recorded there, including Isaac Hayes, Sam and Dave, and Jean Knight.  It is also the last place Otis Redding recorded before he died in a plane crash.

The most interesting trivia I learned: Sam and Dave's song "Hold On, I'm Coming" originated thus: one of them was working on chords and the other was in the bathroom.  The one doing chords found a great melody and yelled for the other to join.  He replied, "hold on, I'm coming!" hoisting pants back on, running down the hallway.  The comedy was not lost on them and made its way into the lyrics.

The wackiest thing I saw: Isaac Hayes' Cadillac.  It is peacock blue, with white fur trim under the gas and brake pedals, and most everywhere else.  It has a television and mini fridge, and gold trim (by which I do not mean gold-colored trim).  It lives on what is essentially a car-size turntable and rotates with the doors open, mesmerizingly.

The biggest reminder of the creative process: The song Green Onions is not one you'd know by name but definitely by tune.  It started out as a b-side of a different record, then took on a life of its own.  It is featured in a shocking number of advertisements and films.  Why Green Onions?  Because the blues was sometimes called onions -- because it was so stinky.  They went fresh and stinky. . .


Stax is surprisingly near where I grew up.  I did a tour of the neighborhood.  This may be the most personal part of the blog yet, but here is our house, minus some trees that were cut down on the front yard.  Our block was in the film Walk the Line, when Johnny Cash is being a traveling salesman.  He stands on the front porch. . . 

From here I drove over the Mississippi River and into the flood plains, to visit family in northwestern Arkansas.  This is one of my favorite drives on earth.  My dad could drive it blindfolded (and in fog felt like he did).  If there is a comfort food of landscapes, this is mine -- utterly flat ground, big sky, butter yellow crops and gray clouds, improbable, Impressionist color palette.  You drive across the impossibly wide, force of nature Mississippi, away from the Memphis skyline, and immediately hit verdant, flat-flat green, and swamplands that then give way to fields.

I've painted this landscape before, had one in my attic room in London in art school, in lieu of an additional window.

I drove straight over to Jonesboro to visit with my cousins Dewey and Teresa.  I had come all the way from New York very early and was a bit comatose by the end of the day.  Dewey and Teresa couldn't have been nicer about my incoherence and took me out for catfish dinner.

The next day, we stopped by to visit the vibrant Laura Collier in the retirement home -- she alternated Sundays with my grandmother as a church organist. 

I drove over to Harrisburg, Arkansas, the town of about 2,000 where my dad and aunt grew up, and stopped in to see the new performing arts center at the high school.

The facility was really quite amazing:

I got into a conversation with a woman who was doing some housekeeping.  I mentioned my dad had grown up there.  She knew him, and my grandmother, who had taught music to a couple of generations of students at the grade school.  (We used to joke that my grandmother would never get a speeding ticket because she had played in everyone's wedding.)  The woman who was cleaning was like, "Oh, Berniece!  Of course."  And then proceeded to offer me directions to my grandmothers house.  (My grandmother died in 1993.)  For the record, I did know how to get there, though it's three blocks away.

Harrisburg is the county seat of Poinsett County:

Also of institutional longevity is The Modern News, an independent newspaper founded in 1888.

It's a wonderful paper.  My aunt has a New Yorker friend who subscribes.

Some other parts of the downtown square are colorful but shut down, other parts, still, full of offices.

I went to check on the farm, and started to uncover my artistic "style" of diagonal "taken while driving" photos.  

I did stop to take this one, which is exactly the same shot I have in black and white from 15 years ago.

The farm is where all of us learned to drive (er, yes, Amy, you are in a ditch, but that's why it's a four-wheel-drive car. . . ).  My grandfather was a farmer and, as my aunt says, loved what he did so much she's pretty sure he would have paid someone to let him do it.

I don't mean to seem like a tourist in a place where I am from, but here is some local color.  A study in font size at the Food Giant:

 And these are inside the grocery store:

(Those are huge industrial bags of something like deer feed in front of the pharmacy.)

I started the drive westward toward Dallas, over rural roads that drop phone calls in an instant, resurfacing on the interstate.  

That setting sun.  Listening to music from Stax (which would hit its real renaissance accompanying Sunday morning in New Mexico). . . .

A side note: