Barry Hannah

Damn if Barry Hannah didn't go and die last Monday. It would not be easy for me to tell you how much I enjoyed his writing, and for more than 30 years. Once while visiting Oxford, Mississippi I told my hosts I wanted to meet him. They said I could, at a bar, but advised against it, as he might bridle. He came to Atlanta once to give a reading at a university, and that time I did go, and sat and listened but decided not to go up to talk with him afterward. So I never said hello or got into a fight with him. There are eight books by him on my shelves, more than any other author by far.

The New York Times and Vanity Fair both noted his passing with articles.

Here's a part of what Claire Howorth, daughter of the owners of Square Books in Oxford, wrote: "Women, God, lust, race, nature, gay Confederates, good old boys, bad old boys, guns, animals, fishing, fighting, cars, pestilence, surrealism, gritty realism, the future, and the past are tossed together in glorious juxtapositions in Hannah’s writing. Weird, funny, conversational, soulful—it was entirely his own thing, the numerous comparisons to William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Mark Twain aside."

His stuff wasn't like anybody else's, and what I mean to say is that, as a Southerner and a lover of words, I was proud of him. Try Airships or Ray if you're inclined.

the photo above was taken by Miriam Berkley

Otha Turner and His Cane Fife

I've meant for a while to post about a favorite artifact, one especially treasured because it comes from a tradition now nearly extinct. It's a cane fife, made by the late Othar Turner of Gravel Springs, Mississippi. Mr. Turner was perhaps the last master of American fife and drum. You may have heard his music without knowing it, as part of the soundtrack of Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York. Turner was also featured in Scorsese's Feel Like Going Home, a delta blues documentary for PBS. In the film, when Turner and his musicians march across the fields playing fife and drums, it was as electrifying to me as Jimi Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock. His best known composition, Shimmy She Wobble, is named for the dancing it inspires (and is one of the great song titles of all time).

What finally motivated me to write about this fife is an article in The New York Times here, about the recent discovery in Germany of a five-hole flute made from bird bone which dates to nearly 40,000 years ago.

So here's an object that proves a human musical tradition going back that far. I don't mind telling you, it makes me say wow.

You can read more about Mr. Turner here, and check out a film about him here .

And here's some music.






In his own words:

I make my own fifes. The cane grows right down there in the ditch banks down in the bottom. First you go out there and cut you a piece of cane. You judge the length you want your cane-you going to make your fife a foot, or a foot and so many inches long. A two-foot cane is really too long to blow. It's best a foot or so, I reckon. And your cane should be a medium size around. Too large a cane and you can't tune it. That cane grows from the earth so high, see, and it's jointed. You pick you out so many joints and cut it off. Then you take your knife and dress it down.

You get you a rod of iron and put it in the fire and get it red hot, and bore you a hole in your cane. See, sometime if you don't get your hole large enough, that fife won't blow good, so you got to twist it around and blow that hole out. You got to hold that rod in there so it starts smoking and steaming. You hold it and then, whoop, slides it on through there. You put all them holes in there that way.

Thanks to Jim for letting me buy this object.

Otha Turner and Granddaughter Image Credit Bill Steber, more here.
Bone Flute Image credit Daniel Maurer, Associated Press.

Bottle Trees

One of the most arresting sights in a garden or landscape is the bottle tree. All are alike, but no two are the same. Some consist solely of blue bottles; some have great variety in the size, shape and color. It's rare for me to see one, since I don't get out into the countryside too much. But there's no telling where they'll show up - in fact, the one shown here was located in a dense urban neighborhood. The strand of Christmas lights is an unusual embellishment.

The story is that bad spirits are irresistibly drawn into them, become trapped and can't enter the house to do harm. Most people, including some scholars, believe them to be an African survival, first employed by slaves. The great American writer Eudora Welty, while working for the W.P.A. in the 1930s, took the black and white photo in Simpson County, Mississippi. She also wrote about bottle trees in her short story "Livvie."

The boldly painted Clorox bottle in the last picture was done by Mary T. Smith, a well-known African American folk artist from Mississippi. She made several of these spirit traps. It was given to me by a friend during a rough time in my life. I never put it outside.