South Toward Home

by Julia Reed

  Bo’s boat enabled us to tote more people, but also tables and lounge chairs and a slightly more elaborate menu. There was a full bar and a bartender and a ladies’ room in the form of a tepee made from willows cut on the opposite bank. Tunes were provided by the official Sandbar Boombox, a masterpiece of Burdine engineering consisting of an ice chest with holes cut in one side for speakers and a car CD player installed on the inside and rigged with twenty feet of wire attached to a 12-volt battery with alligator clips. There was live music too, provided by the exceptionally talented Brent sisters, Jessica, Eden, and Bronwynne, who all brought their guitars, and Howard, who never goes anywhere without his famous miniature harmonica.

  These days, we don’t bother to wait for the tamale fest to make a trip, but we do have to wait for the river to go down. (After Hank and I scouted a sandbar for a planned trip in the spring, the river rose six feet in a single day, which meant that it disappeared.) Also, we keep adding stuff: Indian quilts, folding love seats, threadbare Oriental rugs. Hank tops a charcoal-filled hole with a grill in order to cook his sublime duck poppers, and I use it to heat up a big enamel casserole of barbecued pork shoulder. Paper plates and Solo cups have given way to enamel plates and stemmed Lucite glasses. We even have a signature drink, a punch called the Evening Storm (an event we’ve so far avoided) invented by Christiaan Rollich, the talented bar manager at Suzanne Goin’s Lucques and A.O.C. in Los Angeles, after I told him about our exploits and sent him an image of the painting of the same name by David Bates. (At A.O.C., the hostess’s mother is from Wilmot, Arkansas, just on the other side of the aforementioned bridge—the world is small, though you could never tell it from our sandbar vantage point.)

  On our most recent visit, the river was so low there was plenty of room for dancing. Eden Brent, the piano virtuoso and three-time Blues Music Award winner, played “Fried Chicken” and “Panther Burn” in her usual performance garb, including a black sequined porkpie hat purchased in the Memphis airport, and lamented the lack of a sandbar keyboard. Our friend Raymond Longoria, who had performed at the tamale fest the day before, had brought his guitar, but not his accordion, at which he excels, so he vowed to return with it next go-round. There were no spoons, so Jessica showed off her prowess with a pair of forks (who knew?). At one point, we hatched a slightly sodden plan to bring out an old upright piano and leave it until the river carried it away the following summer. The next day I got a text from Hank: “Not possible to get an upright on the sandbar. WAY too heavy to transport, but we can do an electric keyboard with a small quiet Honda generator and long cord.”

  If all this sounds insanely over the top, we come by it naturally. The Mississippi Delta, which is actually the diamond-shaped alluvial floodplain of the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, was all but uninhabitable until well into the nineteenth century. Lured by some of the richest soil in the world, planters whose land had already been tapped out in places like South Carolina and Kentucky took a gamble and battled panthers and floods and a tangled mess of a hardwood forest before they could even think about dropping a seed into the ground. Once they did, the results were worth it economically, but there wasn’t a whole lot to do there, so they became extremely adept at making their own fun. Most of which involved a serious intake of whiskey and traveling long distances over rough terrain—in 1850, fewer than 25,000 people inhabited the Delta’s 7,000 or so square miles, and this being the bad old days, the majority of them were slaves. House parties abounded.

  These days the population of the Delta is more than 500,000, and there is all manner of things to do, but old habits die hard and we persist in organizing elaborate diversions. I mean, there may be plenty of people, but the mosquitoes and snakes haven’t gone anywhere, and it remains hot as hell. Still, there are only so many ways to skin a cat, which is why I can’t believe it took us so long to come up with the sandbar as a venue.

  Especially since I am apparently no stranger to sandbars, something I was reminded of in a post on my Facebook page a year or so ago by a former bartender at the late and very much lamented One Block East. During what we shall call my formative years, the Block (so called because it was located one block east of the levee) was the primary source of almost every diversion a girl could find. I myself had not planned on sharing any of them—ever—but one day a former assistant checked my page and began reading aloud: “Hey Julia, it’s Sam here. Remember that time we stole the DDT’s boat and you and Robbie left Finn and me on a sandbar until like five in the morning?” Well, sort of. Sam was a bartender at the Block whom I hadn’t heard from in more than thirty years, and the DDT is the Delta Democrat-Times, whose then owner, Hodding Carter III, kept a very handsome speedboat docked within walking distance of the bar. Finn is Hodding’s daughter, and she knew where the keys were hidden, and Robbie was another bartender with whom I was ridiculously in love. Suffice to say that this is why Facebook scares the hell out of me. Also, my memories are not nearly as clear as Sam’s. For example, I have no idea where Robbie and I went while leaving our companions stranded, but I can only hope we found another sandbar and smooched.

  It is a miracle that I lived to see another sandbar in the daylight, but I’m extremely grateful that I did. On that last outing, we’d just started unloading the boats and setting up the food tables when a thirteen-foot canoe, outfitted with a tattered American flag and containing two very sun-brown young folks, came within our line of sight. We are used to seeing the occasional towboat, and in the old days we’d get a lot of hippies on handmade rafts, most of whom ended up composing the kitchen staff at the Block. But I’m not sure I’d ever seen such a comparatively tiny vessel, especially one that started off in Indiana.

  The intrepid canoers, Susan and George, were on their way to Baton Rouge, where they planned to sell the boat and head back north. When we met them, they’d been on the river for more than two months, camping out on sandbars and making infrequent trips into towns for supplies. When they came upon our own elaborate “campsite”—not to mention Hank waving his arms, hollering “Cold beer! Cold beer!”—they must have thought it was a mirage.

  They stopped anyway and turned out to be the loveliest of guests. Among Susan’s possessions was a beautiful six-string guitar stored in a black plastic garbage bag, and she played a song she’d been composing on the trip. We fed them catfish pâté and barbecue, and then Bo Weevil insisted that he put them up for a few days, promising to drive them and the canoe down to Vicksburg so they could make up for lost time. We showed them around the Delta and invited them to a dove-hunt breakfast and shared all the other diversions we had mastered. They later wrote really nice things about us on their own Facebook page (one on which I came out a lot better), but they did more for us than we did for them. Our encounter reminded us again of the river’s mythical but no less real place in American life. It allows for reinvention and renewal, and enables—encourages, really—our citizenry to light out for parts unknown. In our case, new territory is just a twenty-minute boat ride away, but it feels like another world entirely and it makes for a damn fine day.

  Songs of the South

  A few years ago, I attended a sixtieth birthday bash at the House of Blues in New Orleans, and since the birthday boy happened to be a billionaire, the entertainment was especially stellar. My buddy Harry Shearer, a very funny man (and the voice of about half the cast of The Simpsons), emceed the proceedings, which kicked off with a version of “Happy Birthday” by his wife, the Welsh chanteuse Judith Owen, that made Marilyn Monroe’s seem wholesome. Dr. John cut loose with “Right Place Wrong Time,” and Chrissie Hynde, looking and sounding at least as hot as she did when she first broke through with the Pretenders, did a set that included “Don’t Get Me Wrong” and “Back on the Chain Gang.” The late Gregg Allman was up next with “Statesboro Blues,” “One Way Out,” and “Melissa,” and the great Joe Walsh (who sang an especially ironic “Life’s Been Good”) closed the show with a rousing set that rocked the house. Or at least it should have.
/>
  Before I go any further, I should confess that I have never actually met my host. I was a guest of a guest, and a very lucky one at that, so I am trying to be very careful not to cast aspersions. But it was … weird. No one seemed to take much joy in the proceedings, or if they did it was seriously internalized. Though the party was held in what is essentially a big bar, the audience seemed airlifted in from Carnegie Hall. I mean, I learned to make out with the Allman Brothers on the stereo; there’s no way to listen to “Melissa” without the hair on the back of your neck standing up. I first heard Joe Walsh when I was ten and he was in the James Gang. Until he joined the Eagles, no one in that band could have pulled off that central guitar riff in “Life in the Fast Lane,” which he also played that night. There was some serious history—and not just my own—on that stage.

  In contrast to the rest of the group, my friend and I spent the evening juking around like maniacs—or, indeed, like normal people listening to a kick-ass lineup of some of the greatest and most storied musicians in the world. And we weren’t just the only ones moving, we were the only ones on our feet—except, of course, the musicians, most of whom were the oldest people in the room. At the time, Gregg Allman was sixty-five and was the recipient of a new liver; Dr. John and Joe Walsh have put enough bad stuff in their bodies over the years to kill a herd of water buffalo. But all three of them exhibited far more energy than the people they were playing for. But then, almost nobody in the audience, which included Bill Gates, was from the South. Apparently, folks in other regions do not spend the bulk of their youths in cars and bars learning about life and love and lust to the beat of a constant sound track.

  Which leads me to the definition of Southern music. You could make the case that most music is Southern since the South gave the world jazz, blues, rock and roll, country, and the songs of Johnny Mercer. But I think you can also define music as Southern by the way you listen to it. In the car, of course, with the AC blasting and the windows rolled down, while banging out the beat on the steering wheel. Or in a club, while dancing the shag or the funky chicken or the gator or trying to do James Brown’s splits. It was the Godfather who said, “The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing.” My friend Humphreys McGee does an indescribable dance during the instrumental break in Rufus Thomas’s “Walking the Dog” that is such an intense expression of the good stuff in Humphreys’s soul he only does it every five years or so, lest he have a heart attack. When André Leon Talley saw Humphreys “walk the dog” at my parents’ house once, he pronounced it a “piece of Appalachian folk art” and said he ought to be in the Smithsonian. Humphreys himself says simply that the song allows “an opportunity to abandon all inhibitions and release my body to my id.”

  The world would definitely be a better (or at least a more exciting) place if we all tried that every once in a while, but for starters you’d have to get up out of your seat. When I was eleven, I came home from school to find my mother dancing through the house while “American Pie” blared from our brand-new quadraphonic speakers. She was so into it and so oblivious of my presence that I was in awe and maybe even a tiny bit afraid, and I didn’t tell her I’d seen her until years afterward. My mother is a great, great dancer. I am not, but that has not kept me from dancing on bars and tables and in my kitchen by myself late at night. Mostly, though, I listen to a lot of music, and below I’ve created an entirely arbitrary Southern Playlist. If it were remotely comprehensive it would include additional acts ranging from Irma Thomas to the Avett Brothers, but I’ll get to them. Fortunately, I have a little bit of time before I start planning my own sixtieth birthday concert (which will likely be broadcast via iPod).

  “I’ll Take You There”

  THE STAPLE SINGERS

  Former Stax Records executive Al Bell wrote this song in his daddy’s backyard after attending the funeral of his little brother. Much of its power comes from the Memphis Horns and the famed Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (pay special attention to that bass line), but Mavis Staples’s vivid contralto provides plenty of competition. The song may have been written as a classic call-and-response gospel chorus, but she sings it like she is well on her way to a very different kind of heaven.

  “Baby, Please Don’t Go”/“Gloria”

  VAN MORRISON

  Morrison is from Northern Ireland, but then so are a whole lot of people in the South. A cover of the Big Joe Williams classic “Baby, Please Don’t Go” was the A side of a single recorded by Morrison’s band Them in 1964, while “Gloria,” written by Van himself, was the B side. In his book Rock and Roll: The 100 Best Singles, Paul Williams writes that “here is something so good, so pure, that if no other hint of it but this record existed, there would still be such a thing as rock and roll.” The night I met my ex-husband, who was in his former life the lead singer of a band called the Mersey Shores, he played “Gloria” on the piano, and it may well be the reason I married him. The song remains a perfect, raunchy, three-chord rock anthem and such a garage band staple that Dave Barry once joked that “you can throw a guitar off a cliff, and as it bounces off rocks on the way down, it will, all by itself, play ‘Gloria.’”

  “Turn on Your Love Light”

  BOBBY “BLUE” BLAND

  This is the kind of song that can—and will—change your life. Much of the intensity comes from the drums of John “Jabo” Starks, who went on to play for James Brown, but, man, it’s all there. “The chord changes, the solid horn section, the drum break—none of it has ever been equaled and certainly not surpassed,” says my good friend the artist Bill Dunlap, who was himself a drummer. “And then there’s Bobby’s plaintive call to ‘turn on the love light’ and ‘let it shine on me,’ which pretty much sums up the American dream—and which, in the South, always tended to be wetter than in other parts of the world.” Enough said.

  “The Weight”

  THE BAND

  Robbie Robertson wrote this masterpiece—chock-full of biblical allusions and characters from bandmate Levon Helm’s Arkansas upbringing—after his first trips south to Memphis from his native Canada. “It was like, ‘Whoa, this is where this music grows in the ground, and [flows from] the Mississippi River’,” Robertson told a reporter after Helm’s death last year. The gospel arrangement of “The Weight,” performed with the Staple Singers and featured in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, is guaranteed to make you cry.

  “Ode to Billie Joe”

  BOBBIE GENTRY

  Forget all the mystery surrounding the events on the Tallahatchie Bridge; what “Ode to Billie Joe” really captures better than any novel is what happens around a Southern dinner table. And then of course, there’s Gentry’s deep/smoky/sultry/haunting voice.

  “What’d I Say”

  RAY CHARLES

  I’m pretty sure Ray Charles never wrote a bad song, but if I had to pick just one to listen to for the rest of my life, this would be it. “What’d I Say” was born in 1959 at a dance in Pittsburgh where Charles and the band ran out of songs just before the end of a set that was contracted for four hours. “So I began noodling—just a little riff that floated into my head,” Charles explained years later. “One thing led to another and I found myself singing and wanting the girls to repeat after me.… Then I could feel the whole room bouncing and shaking and carrying on something fierce.” It remained his closing number for the rest of his career.

  “I’ve Got News for You”

  EDGAR WINTER

  Ray Charles wrote this song too, but I have to say I prefer this version. Edgar and his brother, Johnny, both albino guitar players with roots in Leland, Mississippi, are literally the whitest blues singers alive.

  “Polk Salad Annie”

  TONY JOE WHITE

  In addition to the Swamp Fox’s sexy, gravelly voice, this song features the immortal phrase “’Cause her mama was working on a chain gang,” as well as White’s “chomp, chomp” after the line about the gators getting Granny. Another classic recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.r />
  “Here Comes My Girl”

  TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS

  Petty, organist Benmont Tench, and guitarist Mike Campbell created a stone classic of a song. Heartbreaking in the best kind of way, it sounds like summer and sex and the first time you’ve ever heard that title line. Worth it alone for Petty’s “Watch her walk.”

  “Sweet Home Alabama”

  LYNYRD SKYNYRD

  Three words: “Turn it up.”

  Also by Julia Reed

  But Mama Always Put Vodka in Her Sangria!

  Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Southern Specialties

  About the Author

  JULIA REED is a contributing editor at Garden & Gun, where she writes the magazine’s “The High & the Low” column. Her books include But Mama Always Put Vodka in Her Sangria!; Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Southern Specialties; and Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena. Reed divides her time between New Orleans, Louisiana, and Greenville, Mississippi. You can sign up for email updates here.

  Thank you for buying this

  St. Martin’s Press ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Part One. Personal Notes

  Grace Under Pressure

  New Year, Old Habits

  Songs of Summer