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Well butter my buns and call me a biscuit because the folks at the Oxford American have done it again! Each year this literary quarterly, proudly published by the University of Central Arkansas, releases a Southern music issue. This year the editors have introduced a new theme—The Southern State Series—because, according to founding editor Marc Smirnoff (no relation to the vodka distillery so far as I know), “We now expect, if not demand, surprises.” Fittingly for a publication out of Conway, Arkansas, the first of these pleasant surprises pays homage to Arkansas natives.
The issue offers not only the printed prose of several talented writers but also a double-disc demo of foot-tappin’-fanny-shakin’-honky-tonkin’ soul and sound. Bursting with improbable yet impeccable rhythms, refreshingly low-brow lyrics, twang, strings, and ol’-timey things, the CDs feature artists like Sonny Burgess, Billy Lee Riley, Larry Donn, Little Beaver, Maxine Brown, Sleepy LaBeef, and other notables among not-so-notables. One CD spotlights local artists (Arkansas Masters); the other, an eclectic, hand-picked mix of musicians from various Southern regions (Southern Masters).
Some of the selections will make you unbutton your shirt, loosen your belt, and flail your body from side to side. Some, though, will tug at your heartstrings. (I cried twice while listening to Southern Masters, but I’m a bit of a sap.) No one genre dominates this mélange of gospel, rock, bluegrass, and blues. Whether wailing about home-sweet-home, prison melancholy, lonesome highways, lost love or love made, these artists are sure to connect. (more…)

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A Southern Town Echoes Cradle to Grave

And, mirrors civilization from cradle to grave as well. These stories from the South seep storied tales from the past. Vultures and buzzards abound, their leavings foreshadow early that nasty stuff is to come, as nasty as some of the hidden behaviors of the founding fathers. Snakes weave about and follow, mocking religious hypocrisy. The constellations and the muses reflect and scare by telling truth instead of some whitewashed legend.

History reflects off Deadman Mountain, shaped by flowing, constantly moving waters, yet unmoved by man until the government gets involved. All is tied to the historical founders, the Falklands. (How transparent is that?

KKK, slavery, religion, the Jeffersons and Hemmings, it’s all here. There is the journal, and the daughter who speaks of it and notes the entries are sparse when evil was afoot. Yet, Carson Falkland sings, beautifully sings on. The Gypsy finds love with the Jew. The blackest of blacks (named Tom in case the sophomores miss it again) appears when salvation is required. The danged ghosts persist. The most evil ones are silent in the silent grave of a bat and moss covered cave, leaving no visible memories.

Upstanding “leaders” hatch a plan to improve the area by destroying Concord. Poisoning the early planners doesn’t work. Like the hallowed founding fathers, the pesky critters keep coming back.

Should you ever wonder if a short story writer can create a successful novel using individual stories, here it is – a woven novel. The commonality of location runs from and through the stories. You know you are in the same place. The plot is the ground where the story lies. That plot, soon, like the black walnut that spans the decades, is sentenced to be sunken under a dam, or is it damnation?

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Yazoo Blues continues the adventures of Junior Ray Loveblood, the racist, trash-talking yarn spinning character from John Pritchard’s first book Junior Ray. Junior Ray is now a semi-retired self-described lawman, now part-time casino guard that boasts “I come from the roughest they is.” As story tellers go, he is part historian, part author of literature as well as a born philosopher as only a small town in the back woods can produce. In many respects he is Jerry Clower meets George Carlin. Junior Ray has all the flavor of the yarn spinner of Jerry Clower with the potty mouth, irreverence and politically incorrectness of George Carlin.

Yazoo Blues continues Junior Ray’s fasciation with history, as he sees himself as becoming part of history in the making. Leaving WWII behind, Junior Ray delves into the Civil War and especially the failed attempt on the part of the Union Soldiers to invade Vicksburg by ship coming through the Yazoo Pass. As the tale was described, “of course the expedition failed as the Delta is too tangled for canoes much less 200 foot ironclads and troop ships”. (more…)

Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel about people. A fact that can get lost when categorized as African-American fiction, or women’s fiction, and hailed as a great book by a black woman before the Civil Rights Movement took hold. Unlike Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, Hurston didn’t write about black people as they compared to whites—she simply wrote about folks from Eaton Florida and they were black. The kind of people Hurston knew in a land she must have known as well as she she knew her own skin. How else might a writer write about a hurricane and all that led up to it and all that came to bear after it without knowing the land so well. The dialect is written as though it’s poetry.  (more…)

It was with great interest—and, perhaps, skepticism, for I myself taught English in Japan—that I read Faulkner Studies in Japan, an assemblage of critical essays written and translated by Japanese academics and edited by American Thomas L. McHaney, professor of literature at Georgia State University.  Whisking eagerly through the pages of this significant, insightful book, I learned, to my surprise, that Faulkner’s reputation in Japan has been, for six decades, mostly favorable, despite that his “works are difficult to read, even in his own country” (xiii).

Though my brief stint as sensei didn’t lend itself to instruction in unconventional, stream-of-consciousness fiction—just getting my pre-teen students to pronounce “Yoknapatawpha” would’ve been inconceivable—other sensei have taught Faulkner with relative, if not outright, success.  (more…)

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Reading John Pritchard’s Junior Ray is like sitting in a rocking chair, on the front porch, a beer in your hand, listening to some trash-talking, sheep-screwing redneck—Mr. Junior Ray Loveblood—ramble on about, well, whatever comes to mind.  Junior Ray is the racist, rascally protagonist of this explosive little novel, which, with its roots in oral tradition, recalls Joel Chandler Harris’s The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or, more recently, Gayle Jones’s Eva’s Man.  But caveat emptor:  it’s far more profane than any of these books. (more…)

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Through the Pale Door is a coming of age story set in Columbia, South Carolina. Sarah West, the female protagonist is a recent high school graduate from Marietta, Georgia who packs up and leaves her psychotic mom to live with her dad. He gives her a summer job at the steel mill he manages so she can earn some money before going to Emory in the fall. It doesn’t take long for her to meet and fall in love with Edgewood, a fellow mill worker and artist who secretly paints murals around town and lives in an abandoned jail. (more…)

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Joshilyn Jackson’s “Between, Georgia” reminds us that we are not lonely people. No matter where our lives take us, our families will follow.  When we meet our narrator, Nonny Jane, she is recounting the story of her birth and simultaneously introducing us to a small town family feud that will grow up with her. Born a distinctly red-headed Crabtree, Nonny comes to belong to the Frett family whose members include three dark-haired, thick-skinned sisters: Bernese, the town matriarch, and her twin siblings Genny and Stacia. It is Stacia, born def and destined to lose her eye sight by middle age, who decides that the Frett family will raise Nonny. (more…)