Just Do It

Okay, I've never done this before...just posted a random something from another site, but this is so awesome I just had to do it.  Enjoy.

Muddy Water and Blues

Soul Survivors

By Elodie Pritchartt

The Spring of 2011 was hot, and the Mississippi River was straining against the levees as a massive surge of water — snowmelt from the North — made its way toward the Gulf of Mexico, a flood the size of which hadn’t been seen since the 1920s. The river pushed more than just water.  Deer, possums, alligators and pit vipers fled the rising waters and I thought of Randy Newman’s song, “Louisiana 1927.”

Rained real hard and it rained for a real long time

Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

The only difference this time was the lack of rain, and while the prison crews in their black-and-white striped jail suits worked ‘round the clock to fortify and raise the levees, sprinklers irrigated the corn and soybean fields on the other side. Who ever heard of a drought and a flood at the same time?  It’s always some damned thing.

They almost called the whole thing off, but the levees held.  And when Ferriday, Louisiana, hosted its second Soul Survivors Festival, it was a triumph.  We were all survivors. 

Gathered under the cool shade of Rockabilly Plaza, locals and visitors from New York, St. Louis and beyond were there to enjoy the music of Ferriday’s oldest Soul Survivors who all had one thing in common: Haney’s Big House.

Li'l Poochie

YZ Ealey, Hezekiah Early, Li’l Poochie, Gray Montgomery, Elmore “Elmo” Williams and Jimmy Anderson had either played there or been there back in the 1950s and 1960s when it was one of the hottest clubs on the Chitlin’ Circuit —  B.B. King, Solomon Burke, Ray Charles, Fats Domino, Irma Thomas, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Johnnie Taylor, even comedians Redd Foxx and Moms Mabley and others all performed at Haney’s.

It was at Haney’s where trombonist Pee Wee Whittaker would sneak a little boy named Jerry Lee Lewis into the back door so he could hear and see the performers whose sounds would influence his own boogie-woogie and rockabilly styles on the piano.

Hezekiah Early

The Soul Survivors are well known in their own rights for their contributions to music in the Delta with each having a place on one of the many Blues Markers that make up The Mississippi Blues Trail, a project of the Mississippi Blues Commission that marks historical sites related to the birth and growth of the Blues in Mississippi.  www.msbluestrail.org.

We had gathered to hear and honor these men on that muggy, fecund Louisiana day.  Festival organizer Tommy Polk had arranged to give them each an award, after which we all settled in for a treat and a bit of history in the making as it marked the first time they had all played on stage together.  The only one missing was Jimmy Anderson who, due to health concerns, was unable to attend.  

Elmo Williams

Hezekiah Early, 77, is a vocalist who plays guitar, drums and harmonica. The son of a sharecropper he still owns his first guitar. He built it, himself, from a wooden cheese box his father brought home.  He played society parties in Natchez, Mississippi, and in the house band at Haney’s.  His recording of a blues album led to a gig at the 1984 World’s Fair followed by fourteen overseas tours — virtually all of Western Europe and Japan.  He’s toured the United States, extensively, the largest performance on July 4, 1986, at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, before 1.5 million people.

“It was so many people, it was frightening,” he recalled.  “It was unpredictable.”

A far cry from the simple days as a sharecropper’s son playing at picnics under the oaks.

YZ Ealey

YZ Ealey — his real name — learned to play on a guitar his brother brought home in 1946 when YZ was nine years old. After his brother left for Korea, YZ started playing at home with another brother, Melwin, a church deacon, singing and performing religious songs, then later at parties in the country playing rhythm and blues.

YZ Ealy

In 1959 after a four-year stint in the navy, YZ returned home and formed his first band with his brothers Melwin and Theodis, and three other musicians — YZ Ealey and the Merrymakers.

They played clubs, high schools, and dignitary functions all around the Miss-Lou (Misssissippi/Louisiana) area.  During the same time, they were the house band for three years at Haney’s Big House.

Guitar player in the YZ Ealey band.

YZ has worked as a longshoreman in New Orleans, and on the factory lines at Diamond International and Armstrong Tire & Rubber in Natchez.  But his fondest memories are of Haney’s.

“People would come from far and near,” he said.  “People who lived far away would always look forward to going to Haney’s Big House.  It was fun.  You could look up while you’re playing and see one of your old friends that lives in Chicago, New York, Memphis, California.  You could always see an old face.  It added a joy to your playing, you know?”

YZ’s favorite music is Country and Blues, his favorite artists Little Milton and Albert King.  He loves the Blues, calling it “born music.”

“It’s so real,” he says.  “Because, you see, it started from slavery when all a person could do was work. You had no privileges.  You had no other way to find contentment or satisfaction but just hum it out or sing it out.  And all that was natural.  And anything that’s natural is real.  You see?

“That’s a time of depression.  But when you’re joyful it’s expressed the same way. So that’s reality again.  When your heart aches, you express it the same way.  Reality again.  Depression. Women. Good times.  That’s what the Blues is all about.  A sack full of reality.”

Gray Montgomery

Gray Montgomery, a guitarist, drummer and harmonica player is the only white man in the group, and at 84, also the oldest. And about to become a newlywed.  Life hasn’t slowed him down.

He started playing when he was fourteen.  A boy from Texas moved into town with a guitar and a repertoire of songs and stole his girlfriend away.

“So I says, ‘Well, look at this,” he says in a gentle Southern dialect. “ And I got me a gi-tah [sic].”

It was his brother’s guitar.  And it wasn’t long before he was the better player. He studied the older men, in particular a black man who worked for his mother named George Jackson.  They lived in a little house on the outskirts of town next to five other houses occupied by blacks and a small juke joint — the Airport Inn Grocery with a jukebox in the back playing Lightnin’ Hopkins and Muddy Waters.

He says he can still hear George playing in the kitchen:

Dey’s a rabbit in a hollow log

Ain’t got no rabbit dog

Gone shoot him with my .44

‘fo day.

“He would pick it out and bend those strings and make that Blues sound,” Montgomery says, demonstrating the twang of the strings with his tongue.

As an adult, Montgomery played clubs in Natchez in a band called Billy Tabbs & Western Swing Band for $5 a night.  He also had a radio show. 

Jimmy Anderson

“We needed a piano player at the radio show,” he says.  “So one day Jerry Lee Lewis came over.  But all he played was church music.” 

So Montgomery hired him on as a drummer and hired a blind black man named Paul Whitehead on piano.  He remembers one night, in particular.  An intoxicated man came up to the bandstand and asked Jerry Lee if they’d play “Down Yonder.” 

According to Montgomery, Jerry Lee told him they didn’t play it. 

“Don’t tell him we can’t play that,” Montgomery said. 

“He’s just a drunk,” said Jerry Lee.  “He’s crazy.”

Photo Credit:  August Thompson for The Concordia Sentinel

“I said, ‘Jerry, without drunk, crazy people we wouldn’t have a job.’  He didn’t like me much after that.”

Although he never played at Haney’s, Montgomery played in black juke joints all over Mississippi with Papa George Lightfoot.

“If you’re a musician, your race, color, origin, don’t matter. I learned something real good about my life, being white and associating with the black people.  It don’t take money, wealth, background….it don’t take any of that to make you happy.  I’ve seen so many black people that didn’t have nothing, and they were happy.  They’d sing and laugh and slap their knees.  Laughter is good medicine.  You’ll live a long time if you laugh a lot.”

ferridaymusic.com

It works for him.

This year's Soul Survivor Festival takes place on May 26 in Ferriday.  For more information, see the Soul Survivor's Facebook page as well as the website at www.ferridaymusic.com.

* This post dates from 2011.  Soul Survival Festival is no longer being observed.

More Visions of Home

For more visions of home, go to  http://shantybellum.blogspot.com/2011/10/visions-of-home.html

Temple B'nai Israel, Natchez, Mississippi

Photo by Cappy Stahlman

 Built in 1872, B'nai Israel serves only a handful of congregants.  To read the history of this beautiful building, go to:  http://www.isjl.org/history/archive/ms/HistoryofBnaiIsraelNatchez.htm

SSssssssspringtime.

The dogs were barking madly one day last week.  I went out to see what it was.  It was this fellow on the porch, buzzing frantically and having a particularly bad day.

I don't like killing anything.  Not even snakes.  They're just trying to get by like everybody else.  If he'd been further down the drive I would've left him alone. But all the dogs were surrounding him and sooner or later, one would've gotten bitten.  So I grabbed my dad and my camera and took a picture before said father dispatched him with a pistol filled with bird shot.

He was big.  About four and a half feet.  Ten rattles and a button, which we placed in the calling-card tray by the door with half a dozen others.  We think it's welcoming.  Don't you?  Ha!

Unable to find a yardstick to measure him with, I settled on a cane.  In fact, I'm pretty sure he's a cane rattler.  Be careful out there in this warm weather.

By the way, those of you who follow this blog will notice it's changed in appearance.  I was playing with templates today and lost my old template.  I can't figure out how to get it back.  I'll be working on trying to create something attractive and easy on the eyes.  If you see something you particularly like, take a screenshot and let me know.

Cheers.

Childhood memory resurfaces...in a cast-iron coffin

A guest blog today by a new friend, Ann Dupont from Shreveport, Louisiana.

        The story I am about to share is true, historical and — some might say — rather dark. The fact that it led me up the front steps to Shantybellum.com to ring the doorbell and ask about pictures of magnolia trees seems a bit funny now but I'’ll always consider meeting Elodie Pritchartt to be my personal legacy from a mysterious young woman who died almost 200 years ago.

        I was 9 years old, living in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1955. No one had ever heard of cell phones back then; no one carried a camera. Something happened one day that those who knew about firsthand probably never forgot, but nobody else ever knew anything about it unless they happened to read one account in the local newspaper. It happened one day and was pretty much over and done with the next, but the memory has haunted my thoughts for over 55 years.

—

        My father was working on the campus of what was then called Northeast Louisiana State College. Nearby a construction crew laying a water line to a home being constructed along Bayou DeSiard, off Lakeshore Drive, accidently hit a brick tomb or crypt and the entire enclosure collapsed, revealing a cast-iron casket which had a glass viewing window, protected by a removable cast-iron plate, over part of the top. The body inside the coffin was in perfect condition, so well preserved that even a wreath of magnolia blooms and leaves encircling her upper body was still intact.

        The coffin was taken to a Monroe funeral home the day it was unearthed where my parents, along with hundreds of others, went to view it that night.

        The petite young woman was buried in a black silk dress that was clearly visible as was a lace handkerchief and reportedly a diamond ring on one hand. Unfortunately the glass window was cracked when the bricks collapsed and the body began to show signs of decomposition, so it was hastily reburied in a Monroe cemetery the following morning.

        The ornate Fisk coffin still bore traces of orange and black paint. There was a sterling silver nameplate engraved, "St. Clair Wade" that listed the woman’'s age as either 30 or 39 and the date September 7, 1814. The nameplate was also damaged but there was a capital "H" and other small, indistinguishable letters before the St. Clair but no other information.

        A local historian named John Humble said he thought there was a good chance the woman could have been one of Benjamin Tenneile'’s four daughters. The Tenneiles had once lived on the property where the coffin was found.   It was part of the Magenta Plantation, which had been previously owned by Col. Frank P. Stubbs's’ family before the Civil War.

        In searching genealogy websites for information regarding the Tenneile family, it didn’t take long before I found a biography on genealogy.com for Benjamin Tenneile, born around 1750 in Prince William County, Virginia, who died June 30, 1811, in "Bayou de Siard, Monroe, Ouachita Parish, LA."

        Naturally I would find this tiny text around 11 p.m. but there was no mistaking what my tired old eyes were seeing in the last paragraph:

"In 1955, while workers were laying a water line for a home being constructed on Lakeshore Drive in Monroe, a brick tomb was accidently unearthed. On the casket was the name 'St. Clair Wade,' age 30 or 39, and the date September 7, 1814.

"The property had at one time belonged to the McEnery family and was called Magenta Plantation. It was thought at the time that the young woman may have been Mary St. Clair Morrison, wife of Joseph Wade. The connection with the Tenneile or McEnery families is not known."

        There is an early entry in the record books of Ouachita Parish in 1809 that reads, "The first marriage license to be recorded in Ouachita Parish was in 1809 when John Hughes, a farmer of Bayou de Siard, was authorized by law to celebrate the privilege of marriage with Mary St. Clair Tenneile."

        So, with that, I finally felt like I had found closure for the bits and pieces of a strange, mysterious story a 9-year-old child’'s impressionable mind would hold onto indefinitely, but the realization that this was but one such story of men, women and children buried in Fisk cast-iron coffins whose remains were later found to be perfectly preserved has led to a desire to learn more.

        So how did this story lead me to Elodie'’s front door? In researching the partial name "St. Clair Wade", one historian somewhere along the way referred to "St. Clara Wade". Elodie had posted beautiful old pictures of a young woman in Natchez named Clara Wade. Guess what Clara had in her front yard? Two huge magnolia trees. 

Two heads are better than one but that’'s not saying much when two women who have probably watched too much Law & Order try to figure out what "St." could be an abbreviation for or why Clara Wade would have been in Monroe.

        It’s been interesting and fun putting the puzzle pieces together and I am so happy to have gotten to know Elodie.

As I was searching for photos to go with this story, I came across a few stories about similar mysterious cast-iron coffins.  You can read one here.    Also, if anyone has any information on what the "H" or the "St." in St. Clair Wade is, we'd love to hear it.  ~ Elodie