Gleaning Memories Uncovers Culture - 1980

By Connie Holman, The Jackson (TN) Sun, June 10, 1980. 

MEMPHIS — For years, the Center for Southern Folklore has been making films, records and books about the people and culture of Mississippi and its rich Delta. 

Now, the center staff is working in its own backyard with a Mid-South Folklife Survey of Shelby, Fayette, Lauderdale and Tipton counties in West Tennessee as well as DeSoto County, Mississippi, and Crittenden County, Arkansas. 

"We see our survey as a year-long search for people," project director Debbie Gibson says. "We're trying to find them and document the culture of an area through its people.

"We're going out in all directions with this survey. We're interested in urban and rural relationships, how they affected the past and now. We're looking for things passed from one person to another." 

The staff hopes to work in Golden Circle counties eventually, but for now, local residents are urged to help supply the center with names of people to interview in the four target counties. 

Skills and knowledge passed from generation to generation need to be preserved and shared with the public, Ms. Gibson says. For example, she's interested in finding people who have been taught by another person to sing or perform the blues, make baskets, gather herbs, tell stories or prepare food. 

"If things are documented, there's an incredible chance for their survival," she explains. "It increases the chances that a younger person can take up what you're documenting."

The survey project is two-faceted — educating the public and documenting traditional culture through interviews and photographs. 

Ms. Gibson and her staff introduce themselves to numerous communities through presentations about the Center for Southern Folklore. Slideshows and films help explain how the center preserves traditional culture. 

"Our outreach is tangible," Ms. Gibson says. "We give them something concrete that doesn't cost them. In return, they name people for us to interview, which we follow up on in our survey." 

"For years, folklorists have been digging up bones in one place and burying them in another," Ray Allen, a music specialist for the project, says. "And the public hasn't been getting to it. With our grant, its emphasis is getting it back to the public." 

Explaining that folklore exists in the city as well as the country is another emphasis of the survey. "Everyone thinks of folklore as old, rural, antiquarian," Allen says. "But, now people are realizing there's lore in the city. Anything that's passed on orally or visually from one generation to another generation is folklore." 

"All of the different cultures do contribute to what we call Southern, rural culture," Miss Gibson says. "The South has not been thought of as having a large, ethnic population, but it does." 

And folklife isn't just basket-making or blues, Ms. Gibson says. "It's all aspects of life passed on. It's barn construction, agricultural techniques and foodways. 

"And, during our interviews, we look at the total culture of a person," she continues. "Our questions are geared to complete biographical information on a person as well as his craft, art, whatever he's proficient at. We tie together his religion, sense of place (what he calls home) and his family. 

"We're dealing with the artist, not just his art, but a picture of his whole life," Allen says. "We don't just record songs or take pictures of a quilter, but how they learn, the social context of the songs in their life. We get inside of their lives." 

One final result of the survey will be a four-day July Fourth weekend festival at Shelby County Penal Farm in 1981. Craftsmen will demonstrate their craft and musicians will perform. 

Photo courtesy of the Center for Southern Folklore 

Lucy Long, an ethnic specialist at the Center for Southern Folklore, interviews Duoang Keo, right, a 1 7-year-old refugee from Cambodia. This was one of many interviews conducted among the ethnic groups in urban Memphis as part of the Mid-South Folklife Survey. This summer, the staff will focus on rural communities in West Tennessee. 

The Grave of Asie Reed Payton

Holly Ridge, Mississippi

We believe the grave marker for Asie Payton was provided by Fat Possum Records.

Asie Payton died of a heart attack on May 19, 1997, in Holly Ridge, Mississippi. It occurred in the early afternoon, while he was driving a tractor in the same fields he’d worked most of his sixty years. For all of 1995 and most 1996, Fat Possum tried unsuccessfully to convince Asie that the world outside Mississippi needed to hear him. But despite living below the poverty level and desperately needing the easy money of a gig, he could not be lured away from Washington County for more than a couple of hours.

"Good Morning Blues" (1978) - Deconstructing the Dockery Myth

"B. B. King hosts blues special," Clarksdale Press Register, February 19. 1978.

A 60-minute Mississippi ETV film program about Mississippi blues music from its earliest origins at the turn of the century until World War II debuted on MS Educational Television at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, February 21, 1978. Narrated by well-known Mississippi-born musician B.B. King, the program featured the music of 18 Mississippi blues musicians. 

The filmmakers shot King's narration near Cleveland on the plantation of Will Dockery, because it was the alleged "home of many of the singers in the film." New research into the history of the blues and blues tourism in Mississippi reveals, however, that the identification of Dockery farm as "the birthplace of the blues" was a socially-constructed concept devised by early blues scholars and more contemporary brokers of blues tourism. For more information about the myth of southern redemption through a love of Black music, see Deconstructing the Dockery Myth by ethnomusicologist David Evans.

Good Morning Blues, nevertheless, is one of the most comprehensive collections of Mississippi blues singers ever to appear in one film, according to producer Rob Cooper. Some of the musicians featured in the film were Son House of Lyon, Bukka White of Houston, Nathan Beauregard of Ashland, Houston Stackhouse of Crystal Springs, Big Joe Williams of Crawford, Gus Cannon of Red Banks, Furry Lewis of Greenwood, Johnny Shines, Honey Boy Edwards, Walter Horton, Sam Chatmon of Hollandale, Zula Van Hunt of Memphis, Memphis Ma Rainey of Memphis, Hayes B. McMullen of Tutwiler, and Hacksaw Harney of Jackson. Also featured were the recordings of Willie Brown of Robinsonville, Charley Patton of Bolton, and Robert Johnson of Hazlehurst. The film explores the roots of country blues music, which provided the basis for rhythm and blues, rock and roll, soul and much of modern music today. 

Producer Rob Cooper hoped the film would demonstrate the connection between the lived experience of African Americans and the art form of the blues. "The blues is as starkly beautiful as the land its singers lived in," declared Cooper. "It is the purest kind of musical and lyrical expression, the perfect vehicle for communicating the pain and deprivation of the harsh and desolate existence of [African Americans] in the early 1900s. It is purely American art, and the majority of the artists came from right here in Mississippi and went on to influence popular music all over the world." 

An art form born out of a need for expression of the problems unique to African Americans, the poor, and the subjugated, blues compositions were put together with traditional verses handed down through the generations, with personal experiences added, perhaps even the singer's own name in the lyrics. Inspiration for blues music came from love, longing, and pain. The language is poetic, strong and vivid, but, at the same time, simple and unpretentious. 

According to the film's writer Edward Cohen, "Blues music is not an art in the classical, conventional, or sophisticated sense of the word, but is art in its simplest and purest state...The blues is not only a musical form, it is a feeling, a feeling that arose out of the years of slavery, of sharecropping, of the life Black men and women led in the early decades of this century. Blues songs are extremely personal; their subjects are hard times, lost love, the desire to move on to a better place." 

According to executive producer and director Walt Lowe, "I think one of the most significant things that can be said about the blues is what B.B. King states in the script: 'There will always be blues as long as people have problems.'"

Obituary: Brewer Phillips

Obituary: Brewer Phillips - Chicago Tribune, September 14, 1999.

Brewer Phillips, 65, a blues guitarist who was a steady force in Chicago blues from his arrival in 1954 to an appearance at the Chicago Blues Festival in 1990, died Sept. 3 1999 after a heart attack in his South Side apartment. Mr. Phillips is perhaps best remembered for his work as a sideman to slide guitarist Hound Dog Taylor, in whose band the Houserockers he played for nearly two decades.

''His sound had so much edge and so much attack and a controlled distortion that it made a kind of snarl that people for years have tried to get from effects pedals and fancy amplifiers," said Bruce Iglauer, founder of Chicago-based Alligator Records. "He got it all from his hands." Mr. Phillips was born in Mississippi and taught himself to play guitar at an early age, even though he never learned to read music. His first gigs were staged in juke joints, where relatives and friends would gather to drink moonshine. "We would just play guitars, and dance, and party," said his older brother, Vance Phillips. Mr. Phillips left Mississippi in the late 1940s for Memphis, where he played behind Roosevelt Sykes, Joe Hill Louis and Memphis Slim, Iglauer said.

In 1954, Mr. Phillips packed up again, this time fallowing Vance to Chicago. He arrived in Chicago at a time when the city's most legendary blues artists were defining the art, said Chicago-based Delmark Records founder and owner Bob Koester. It was a time when Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Junior Wells could be heard regularly at clubs on the South and West Sides.

In 1957, Mr. Phillips joined Hound Dog Taylor, an alliance that would last through several albums until Taylor died in 1975. Two of those albums were nominated for Grammy Award. Phillips cut his only solo album, "Home Brew," on Delmark. Survivors include two brothers, Robert and Eddie, and two sisters, Lauren Harrington and Lorina Durens. A funeral service was held Saturday at Trinity Memorial Chapel, 7605 S. Halsted St.