An Oldie but Goodie: Halloween 2010

Who knew that losing a camera could turn into such a feelgood moment?

Tommy and I went down to St. Francisville last night for the Faux Blood Music Festival with True Blood soundtrackers Jace Everett, et al, and Chuck Prophet and his band from San Francisco, who played at Magnolia Cafe.



The music was awesome, and I was awestruck at meeting the guy who wrote that song for the opening credits of True Blood.  To meet the person and be able to tell him how much you love it is something special.



(Apologies for the image that video shows up with.)

If you're not familiar with it, Magnolia Cafe was the winner of Country Roads Magazine's Favorite Small Town Dining Destination" and Favorite Venue for a Live Performance.

Knowing we'd be having cocktails, Tommy and I did the responsible thang and took a taxi to the restaurant, asking the driver if he'd be so kind as to return and pick us up later that night.  The driver's name is Mark Armstrong, a 70-something-year-old man with his own taxi and tour service.  He promised he would come back, but said he had to get up this morning to go see his wife, who is in a nursing home with cancer.

After we got out of the cab, I realized I'd left my camera in the back, and called.  Told Mark just to hang onto it and bring it when he came back.  Alas, we were having such a fine time, I didn't hear my cell phone when he called at 11 p.m. to say he just couldn't stay awake any longer and he'd bring it by the hotel in the morning.

The noise was so loud I couldn't quite make out what he was saying, though, and thought he'd said he would bring it by last night and leave it at the desk.  So when we got to the hotel and discovered it wasn't there, and tried to call, I must admit I suspected I'd seen the last of my camera.  Now, you can get these cameras for a lot less today than you could ten years ago, but when I bought it, it was a pretty pricey item.  And I make my living with my camera and my 'puter, both of which I hope to never lose.

I was having murderous thoughts:  "I wanna do bad things to you."

When he showed up at the hotel this morning, he emerged from the taxi with his little dog -- same kind of dog as Toto in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  The two came up to the room to deliver the camera in person, and I felt downright ashamed.  We talked about Muffin, his dog, and he said he was taking her to see his wife, whom he informed me, he still adores 25 years after he married her.  Muffin, he said, really cheers her up.

"I hope she gets better," I sympathized.

"Oh, honey, she's not gonna get any better.  This is it."

"I'm so sorry," I said, quite honestly.

"We've been together 25 years," he said, and it's been really hard being at the house alone.  If it weren't for Muffin here, and my little cat," he continued, "I don't know what I'd do."

He told us about his place in the woods, and the deer he feeds daily -- just like my own father -- corn that he pours out dutifully every evening.

And he started getting choked up.  Before you knew it, the three of us were crying, and Mark and I were hugging each other.

"You know," he said later as he was about to leave, "I gave three sisters a drive up to Natchez a few years back.  They were taking a cruise.  They were staying at the Eola.  That's just about the prettiest hotel I've ever seen.  And Natchez is pretty, too," he said.  "I think of St. Francisville as a little Natchez."

I quickly agreed.  St. Francisville is a jewel.

"Well, next time you want a vacation, drive on up.  We've got a little B&B you can stay in."

"Why, that sounds just fine," he said, and we parted ways.

We drove through Centreville on our way back to Natchez, and had lunch.  On our way out of town, I noticed I had several missed calls on my phone.  It was Mark.

"Can I get your names, please?" he asked.  "I really enjoyed meeting y'all.  You're nice folks."

Guilt about the camera sticking in my craw.

"Next time y'all come down, I want you to call me," he said.  "I give tours, and I'd be proud to take you on a tour.  I told my wife about you, and it was just real nice talking to someone.  I don't have any family.  No children.  Just my wife and my pets.  I haven't talked to anyone like that in a long time."

I felt that old familiar lump in my throat.

Then he told me to Google him.

"I've driven everybody from George Clooney and Bob Hope to The Rolling Stones and AC/DC.  Just a whole bunch of people.  Look it up.  You'll see."

So I did.  And you know, he wasn't kidding.

So for all my readers, please call Mark Armstrong at Tiger Taxi and Tours the next time you're in the St. Francisville/Zachary/Baton Rouge area.  You'll get a ride with a real character -- one who knows all the haunts and stories and the heart to tell them.

Maybe I should lose my camera more often.

Tiger Taxi and Tours

"Always on the Prowl"

Mark Armstrong, owner
Cell Phone:  225-921-9199                 Home Phone:  225-635-4641

Howard's Revenge

Pictured from left, back row:   Howard Pritchartt, Jr.; Devereux Marshall; Elizabeth Patterson; Bubba Patterson; Sophie Junkin; Mimi Brown; Neville Marshall
Seated, from left, front row: Alma Kellogg, Andree Benoist, Sally Junkin 
The identity of the woman in the photo is unknown.  I do wish I knew who she was.  She's got the sweetest expression on her face, and should be recognized for playing the role so well.  She's a good sport, to boot.

Utter the name "Katherine Miller" in Natchez, and the reactions you get vary wildly. She's either the patron saint of Natchez or evil incarnate. Sometimes both. But you have to give the old girl credit, for it was Katherine Miller who spearheaded the formation of the Natchez Pilgrimage, which saved this town from certain doom.

During the 1930s, Katherine traveled the country with a projector slideshow of antebellum homes, inviting prospective visitors to see how the Old South used to live. Because of the success of her campaign and the cooperation and efforts of the other ladies in town, people who were barely eking by during the Great Depression were able to hang onto their homes in Natchez.

For over sixty years, she ruled Natchez society engendering fear, admiration, adoration and loathing in equal measures. Under her direction, grown men were persuaded to dress up like Southern planters and dance the Soiree for strangers. They even allowed their wives to smear rouge and lipstick on their sons, and dress them in lace and knickers and ballet shoes to dance around a Maypole with little girls in hoopskirts.

Sure, for the rest of the year they wore camouflage, slapped each other on the back, broke wind, hunted wild game, played football and talked about the price of oil. But March belonged to the women. No disgrace was too demeaning to keep them from following the orders of the matriarchs of Natchez.


When General Douglas MacArthur visited Natchez after World War II, a photographer captured a photo of him being told to look at the camera by The Mighty Katherine Miller. She was a'scared of nobody, and her legacy lives on even now as every year March comes in like the lion....or lioness, and goes out like the lamb.

It was under the shadow of this matriarchal monopoly that my father, Howard Pritchartt, spent his childhood. His mother, Bessie Rose, was Katherine's sister, and boy, was she disappointed when her only child wasn’t the girl she’d always wanted. She'd had visions of playing dress-up with a beautiful little girl. Not to worry. Bessie Rose decided she'd dress him any way she darned well pleased, and that's exactly what she did.


Every morning she'd send young Master Howard off to school in a sailor suit or Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit, where he'd get beaten up for wearing sissy clothes. When he got home, she would rage at him because he'd ruined his outfit. He remembers one incident, in particular, when she ripped off his jacket and started jumping up and down on it in a fit of fury as he backed away, awed and terror stricken.

Like my great aunt Katherine, Bessie Rose worshiped at the altar of high society, and for her, every night was a party. Nearly every evening, they’d leave Howard at home with his elderly grandmother. He and the old lady took care of each other. He would bring her milk toast and they would keep each other company in the silent house. It was a lonely time.

One night, he begged, "Please don't go, Mubba. Stay home, please?"

"You ought to be ashamed,” his mother replied. “You ought to be happy so many people want us to join them.”

So he grew to hate social events and all that they entailed. As he grew older, my grandmother and her sister tried teaching my father the importance of the social graces. The harder they tried, the more he rebelled. He wanted nothing more than to be a man’s man, happiest when he was out on the river with his friends, hunting and exploring the muddy banks and back bayous of the Mississippi.

Handsome though he was, he always felt at odds when dressed for a party. And though he did his part by participating in the springtime madness that is the Natchez pilgrimage, he never tired of thumbing his  nose at it all.

He still laughs when he remembers that when he was still in the army, his aunt Katherine sent a letter to his commander asking him in all earnestness if they could let him come home for the month of March so that he could be king in the pageant.  I mean, sure, World War II was important and all, but this was Pilgrimage!

“They’d never heard of Natchez,” Daddy laughs. “Those women thought Natchez was the center of the universe and that, of course, I should be excused to be king. God, I was embarrassed.”

One of his fondest memories is of his best friend, Johnny Ogden, sneaking into the City Auditorium the afternoon before the pageant with a dead fox he'd found beside the road. Dragging the fox by the tail, Johnny made his way up and down the aisles, over and under the seats of the room, laying down a scent and then slipping back outside.

They roared with laughter that evening when during the tableau for The Hunt, the beagles and hounds used for the scene broke their leads and climbed across horrified tourists' laps, baying loudly, drooling, trembling and peeing with excitement, as they tracked the scent of the long-departed fox.

And now at eighty-five years old he, like Katherine, is one of Natchez’s most colorful characters. And although he lives in the country in a house with ancestral portraits on the wall, more often than not you’ll find him wearing a wife-beater t-shirt with a do-rag on his head, driving his tractor all over the property, happily pushing things around, stopping to eat a can of sardines, an onion, and a slice of bread. He spends his days feeding the deer, dogs, cats, birds, squirrels and other assorted animals that call his place home.

From left:  Howard Pritchartt and Joe Remondet, circa 1979

And like his aunt Katherine, he's loved (and loathed) in fairly equal measure, but no one laughs louder or longer at Howard Pritchartt than Howard, himself.

And so, at last, with all that being said, I now offer you his original poem about Natchez, making no excuses for the portions of it that are politically and socially incorrect.


Natchez
If you doubts your social fame, 

git an old house and give it a name. 

If you still lacks social position,
git it put in the Pink Edition. 


If your position is still not clear,
git it decorated by a Natchez queer.

But, really, the mostest important of all
Is finagle your brat into the Pilgrimage Ball.
But really the mostest, most ultimate thing
Is finagle the brat into Queen or King.

We're all aware of the social mystique
that sticks to the gal with the finest antique.
So, ladies, ladies, let’s hold a quorum,
to see who’ll rule the Antiques Forum. 

To us this is now our holiest cause, 

since we’s all well into menopause.

So you give a luncheon and I’ll give a tea. 

And I’ll snub you and you snub me.
And when it’s all over, we’ll make our amends,
pretending to be the closest of friends.

What makes it all so goddamned funny
Is all it takes is a little money.
And when it’s all over, we’ll have to admit
The whole damned thing is a big pile of…
old furniture.

~~ Howard Pritchartt, Jr.
circa 1985

Story by Elodie Pritchartt

The Lost Clifton

Windsor Ruins near Port Gibson, MS  Photo by Elodie Pritchart

The following is an excerpt from the book In Old Natchez by Catherine Van Court, published in 1937 by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.

One hundred years ago, a distinguished New Englander made the entire trip to Natchez by boat, and the beauty of the country seemed to strike him with particular force.  He wrote a fascinating record of his impressions and among other things said:

The town, Natchez, is mantled with a rich, green foliage, like a garment.  A noble esplanade runs parallel with the river; at the northern extremity of this esplanade, upon an eminence, gradually yet roundly swelling away, stands Clifton.  Its lofty colonnades glance in the sun, and a magnificent garden spreads out around it.  This garden is diversified with avenues and terraces, and adorned with grottoes and summer-houses.

Clifton was old when the the Civil War began.  It was built for Samuel Postlethwaite, about 1820.  Later, Mr. Frank Surget owned it.  His wife was Mrs. Charlotte Linton, who was wealthy in her own right.  Clifton was her ancestral home, built by her parents.

The grounds were landscaped by European artists, and exotic plants rioted in a cloud of fragrant bloom.  A commanding view of the Mississippi River and the fertile plains of Louisiana lent peculiar picturesqueness to the entire setting.

Such was the fairylike Clifton when, at the close of that historic siege, Vicksburg fell.  Natchez was then placed under military rule with six hundred Union soldiers garrisoned there.  Mr. Surget invited a number of these officers to dine at Clifton but, by some oversight, failed to ask the chief engineer.  In speaking of the matter later, Mr. Surget said:

"It was not an intentional slight on my part."

The next day, a peremptory order came to the Surgets to vacate their house.  The order said that it was necessary to erect fortifications where Clifton stood.

It seemed strange to Mr. Surget that no other site could be found.  "Natchez is a fallen city!" he expostulated.  "There is no reason to fortify the place!"  But the chief engineer was obdurate.

In their astonishment and excitement, the Surgets only found time to gather up the family silver and a few personal belongings before Clifton was blown to atoms.  The detonation of the explosion was heard for miles; not one brick was left upon another.  Even the gardens were demolished; the greenhouses, grottoes and pavilions were leveled to a mass of debris.

The loss of their beloved house, treasures and keepsakes weighed heavily upon the hearts of these gentlefolk, and as soon as peace was declared they prepared to depart for France to make their home.  But Mr. Surget did not live long; he died in America before they could sail, though his wife continued living in Bordeaux to a ripe old age.

War is always hideous, and Natchez fared better than most Southern Cities.  The memory of Clifton has faded, though a section of Natchez perpetuates the name of the beautiful house that was wantonly sacrificed to one man's petty animosity.

The inhabitants of Natchez today, these descendants of that gallant band who enjoyed the spacious life of the feudal days of Southern civilization, have little inclination to indulge in unhappy retrospection.  They love beauty, and it is around them in abundance.  The pink, white and cerise azalea, the japonica, the sweet olive and the cape jasmine are ever before them, tiny monuments to the beauty of a civilization that has died.


Needless to say, times have changed and the "feudal days of Southern civilization" are no longer referred to in such glowing terms.  One cannot dismiss, however, the beauty of the architecture that those "feudal days" made possible.  I love my little town unabashedly and am proud to call it home as it struggles (at times more successfully and at times less so) to acknowledge the realities of the past and embrace a future where one and all live in harmony.  

An interesting footnote:  

In 1900, my great grandfather built a house on the bluff where Clifton had once stood.  Back around 1982, I was at the house visiting my great aunt, Annet Pritchartt.  We were standing in the driveway when my husband looked down at the ground and suddenly exclaimed, "Wow.  Is that a Civil War bullet?"  He leaned down and plucked it up.  It was, indeed, a Civil War bullet.  Perhaps a relic of that fateful day at Clifton.

Cherry Grove

All around the old place,
the dead visit. The
day he opened up the trunk
of that sweetgum tree,
and before we saw the
horseshoe hanging inside,
something brushed against
my face. I heard a nickering

far away 

and the smell 
oiled leather and candlewax.

A few days later Lloyd
found an anvil half
buried in an oak tree, back
by the old barn. It was 

ten feet up  

and the color of storm clouds
when the air smells like metal
and electricity breaks it 

right in two. 

They say
a shipwright lived
there once. I know.
I've heard him hammering.

That was before the rumor 
of the slave revolt 

across the road. 

Nineteen men killed, 
tortured, all for the sake 
of a child's tale. 
A child named 

Obey. No excuses.

The crape myrtle we cleared
 from the back forty 
bled claret-colored sap, 
and stuck inside
one old, stubborn knot
was a skeleton key. The silver lying 

all around,

tarnished forks and bone-
china plates. Daddy said
she burnt that house a’purpose,
took  the train and 

left town. 

Nobody
Ever saw her again.
But to be frank, I don't
believe it. I saw her walking 

in the fog

one morning, early. Picking 
bones, rearranging bricks,
breaking twigs over and over.

She saw me too.

We've been talking
back and forth, she and I,
between the branches.

*photos and post by Elodie Pritchartt

Don't Try This at Home

Don't Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes by the World's Greatest Chefs edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Andrew Friedman - Haven't you always wanted to start your own catering business? Open your own quaint little restaurant? I know, I know. You have visions of sitting around at the bar, sipping tea and creating delicacies that everyone will oooh and ahhh over. Everyone will love you. You will become beautiful and life will be perfect. Not! Trust me. I know this from experience. I had a restaurant once. It was nothing but a nonstop nightmare.

So when I ran across "Don't Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs," I thought maybe it would help me lick the wounds I'm still licking 30 years after I lost my little fantasy. And it did! This is the stuff of nightmares that everyone -- even those who don't cook for a living -- can enjoy. Grab a cup of tea with a nice side order of schadenfreude, and eat your heart out.

Chefs aren't always brilliant. Now, don't you feel better just knowing that? The book opens with a truly horrific tale of a chef who let the lobster spoil the night before catering a lobster dinner for 3,000 people. I almost had a panic attack, myself, just reading about how he had to scramble to try to salvage that disaster.

A story by Anthony Bourdain about a New Year's Eve dinner that flopped spectacularly had nearly the same effect on me. Then there was the one by former Good Morning America food correspondent Sara Moulton about cooking and flubbing her first Thanksgiving dinner after attending culinary school that was downright heartwarming. And the one by Gabrielle Hamilton, who, worried about being politically incorrect, hired a blind line cook...with disastrous results.

There are plenty more tales of woe, tender and tough, and I recommend this highly to anyone who's ever had to pass off store-bought pecan pie as homemade to a busload of tourists who just have to have real Southern cooking because someone forgot to write it down. Who me? Never.

Slick Rick's Cafe: A Daily Special

Story and Photos by Elodie Pritchartt

When the workers started renovating the newly closed restaurant on North Pearl Street in Natchez three years ago, I wanted to tell them not to spend too much money.  I’d seen restaurants come and go — good restaurants with good food.  And I’d about decided the location was jinxed.   I’d tried the restaurant business, myself, once.  I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.  It’s a tough business.  

The proprietor, Rick Simons, was young and eager and going all out to make it something good.  With a shaved head and a few well-placed piercings, he looked as though he’d be more at home in a heavy metal band than a kitchen.  I love being proved wrong. 

Since Slick Rick’s Café opened three years ago, there’s been a steady stream of hungry diners.  With just a handful of tables inside and one big table outside, its all-day hours make it an easy fit for anybody’s off-hour appetite.   

So what’s different this time?  The food.  And what’s so different about the food?  Its originality — Rick has a knack for taking an everyday dish like chicken salad or BLT and turning it into something special, using unusual ingredients like Portobello mushrooms, sundried and heirloom tomatoes, black bean salsas and special sauces and dressings he prepares himself with spices he creates, himself.  

He offers wraps and sandwiches using whole wheat or spinach tortillas, wrapped around tequila-lime marinated shrimp, blackened chicken and pork loin, toasted French bread topped with a spicy crawfish sauce.  There’s always a tempting assortment of pastries and cupcakes on hand, as well.

Rick has created his own line of organic spice mixes, which he sells in the café and calls red, black, salty and spicy, chili, garlic and herb, steak, and red-hot.

“You know how an artist likes to use certain colors in his paintings,” says Rick.  “These spices are like my palette.  Every chef likes to put his own signature on the way the food tastes and looks, and that is what you might call my thing.

Turns out I was right about one thing.  Food wasn’t Rick’s first choice.

“When I went to school I got my degree in recording arts for sound and music in Orlando, which is kind of the exact opposite of what I’m doing now,” he says.  “But they’re both creative ways to make a living,” he adds.  “It’s one of the few things that involves all the senses — seeing, tasting, touching, smelling.”

Simons learned how to cook at the foot of an African-American woman who worked for his family in Sandersville, Mississippi.  Rick knew her as Mama Johnnie. 

“I would hang out in the kitchen with her while she cooked,” he remembers.  “I’d pull out the bottom drawer in the oven and pull out all the pots and pans and get in the oven and watch her cook.  I learned how to make gravies and roux.”

Rick first got serious about food after a stint in college working for a catering company.  Not long after he started work full time at a restaurant, starting out as a dishwasher and eventually working his way up to second cook, then kitchen manager for daytime lunch.  He moved on to Chappy’s La Font Inn in Pascagoula where he remained for two-and-a-half years.   Then Katrina hit, and the restaurant was destroyed.

He moved to Natchez and tried a short stint in real estate, which just didn’t satisfy his creative urges.  He got a job at Monmouth Plantation, starting out helping in the kitchen and working alongside another noted Natchez chef, Regina Charbonneau.  He was eventually hired on an as the executive chef, helping open the fine-dining restaurant 1818.

“I wrote their first menu,” he recalls.

After about a year he started creating his spice line and went to work on Slick Rick’s café. 

He’s twice won first place in the Clash in the Kitchen fundraiser competition for the Mississippi Firefighters Memorial Burn Association in Jackson, MS.

The restaurant is now doing some remodeling of the kitchen as well as the menu.  Alongside its tried-and-true dishes like crawfish bread, the ultimate BLT, Mexican shrimp wrap and Rick’s famous chicken salad, he’ll introduce some new dishes, although he’s keeping most of it under wraps.  While you wait for your food, you can browse the spice collection, the pre-seasoned, cast-iron cookware and the beautiful, pink Himalayan salt blocks for seasoning or presentation.  He’ll also be doing more catering.

“I want to change the way Natchez sees the food industry,” he says.  “I’ve always heard that if you’re going to do something, pick one thing and do it well.” 

I think he’s done that.  Very well, indeed.

Slick Rick’s Café 107 North Pearl Street, Natchez, MS 39120  Phone 601.445.9900.

Hours Monday – Friday 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. and Saturday 10 a.m – 9 p.m.

Living Interracial: Lloyd and Nancy Johnson

Lloyd "Teddy" and Nancy Johnson have been married for nearly 35 years, and run well-known blues bar 'Teddy's Juke Joint'  in Zachary, Louisiana.  Teddy's is one of the last authentic juke joints on the old Blues Highway 61.

"The couple said they have experienced a great deal of harassment over the years, especially in the beginning of their relationship. Despite those hardships, the two remain committed to each other and their business."~ Kevin McQuarn, Online Entertainment Editor/Chief Videographer
Producer/Host of 2theMovies
The Advocate
www.theadvocate.com

Used with permission

I've been to Teddy's several times. (see Ann Vidal's Wild Ride, April, 2010) Teddy and Nancy have created a fun, funky atmosphere where people play the blues but seldom feel it.  It's a good vibe.

The Tractor

Photos by Randy Laird.  Used with permission.

It stood motionless,
the Deere at the edge
of the woods, as though waiting
for something, for someone
to bring the come-along
and finish
what we started.

The bushes moved
in like guerilla soldiers. Stealthy.
The bush hog lay
wounded in the weeds.

And standing in that patch
of angled sunlight,
the heat ticking off
the hours
and minutes
and days
and moments
of reflection and rejection,
it seemed as though I heard a sigh.

The trees, their reply,
a sudden shudder,
showered leaves like trouble
you'd just as soon forget.
Birds burst forth with screams.
Why?  Why?

Had the tractor been brought to clear the brush
or had the brush moved in to claim the tractor?
Who was the warrior here? Who the vanquished?

Insect battalions chant their nightly ululations
and the creepers crawl.

Like a Confederate soldier
fighting someone else's war,
the Deere stands, a silent sentinel
slowly bleeding
precious oil into the ground
and asks us to remember, or
at least not to forget.

Will man ever make order out of chaos
instead of the other way 'round?

Listen to the land.  She will tell you.
Beyond the darkening woods,
behind the hill, you can feel it
a distant rumble
thunder, hoofbeats
the coming roar.

August 14, 2006

A report on Natchez 1932

Natchez, Mississippi, 1932 -- Two years ago we were in Natchez on a business trip.  My husband, looking out of the hotel window, called my attention to an amusing sight.  


Rumbling down the middle of Main Street was a wagon pulled by an old horse.  The reins hung loose along his back and he threaded his way through the traffic at a lazy gait, an ancient straw hat set rakishly on his head.  


The negro driver was fast asleep, slumped down in his seat with his mouth wide open.  The wagon was loaded with large boxes of nationally advertised food products.  What matter if they reached their destination after an hour or so delay?  Even time moves slowly in Natchez.


"How would you like to live in Natchez?" Bill asked, laughing, and I said I'd love it.


That was in jest, of course, but after two years here we are.


~ Sue Brown Hays




I ran across this delightful description of Natchez a few days ago when I was handed a letter written by a Mr. Bill Hays of Baton Rouge, who was trying to find a descendant of my uncle Balfour Miller.  Sometime in the 1930s, Mr. Hay's father owned and operated a tire store in Natchez for about a year.

 "When we lived in Natchez I was about a year old," said Bill, Jr.  "My parents rented a house in town. They both noticed the house had unusual noises from time to time.

"Being from old houses, and as they were in Natchez; they told one another it was merely a ghost. They even named her 'Anna Belle.'

"There was a trap door in the hall which went to the cellar. When my father had to work late, Mother would put the rocker over the hole and rock me until he returned."

After a year or so Bill's father returned to a job with Goodrich Tire Co.  

"As we were leaving Daddy opened a small door to the cellar to find it had been recently occupied by a couple of bums.  He said he told the landlord who did not seem to be concerned.  

"I remember them saying that old house must have been a duplex.  They just never knew it."

Mrs. Hays was a writer, and wrote a mystery novel set in Natchez in the 1940s called Go Down, Death.   I found a copy of the book online and am so looking forward to reading it.

Also included with the letter was a cute poem Mrs. Hays had penned around 1932.    It was written on Eola Hotel letterhead, where she was staying while her husband traveled out of town with a tire company.

I have a feeling I would've liked Mrs. Hays, and hope she had fond memories of the Eola and Natchez.

Building Dreams for a Song

When the band Chicago released Color My World in 1971, I was in 9^th grade.  The languid cadence of the piano introduction was captivating and beautiful.  It’s been called the most famous major seventh chord in the history of music, and it was — bar none — the best slow-dance song of my generation.

 One day in study hall I heard that chord being played on the baby grand piano down in Coach Parker’s classroom.  I went to see who was playing.

It was a new kid – a shy young boy with jet-black locks that hung down in his eyes as he played, totally lost in the music.  His name was Tommy Polk, and he’d picked the song out by ear.  Feeling out of place, not knowing anyone and not having an athletic bent, Tommy found refuge and release and friends through music. Who doesn’t want to hang with the kid in the band? 

“I was never good at sports,” he says. “I was always on the sidelines and never got any recognition. When I was about nine I took a guitar to class and played. Everyone noticed. I was not on the sidelines; I was not overlooked or ignored. I was hooked.”

When he was old enough to drive, he took his guitar to a secluded spot on the bluff where he would sit in the shade, the river a wide, shimmering ribbon down below with the flat, Louisiana delta beyond.  He started writing songs — the first of hundreds.

Tommy would make music his life. In that little classroom in this quiet little town his journey had only just begun.  He moved to Nashville in 1979.  In 1981 he began working at a boutique music-publishing company co-owned by one of Britain’s most successful songwriters, Roger Cook, and Canadian-born Ralph Murphy.  Between them they had written huge hits, such as, I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing; Long, Cool Woman in a Black Dress; Here Comes that Rainy Day Feelin’ Again; and Half the Way.

Under Cook and Murphy, Tommy learned about music publishing, foreign publishing, performing rights, copyrights, song plugging, signing writers, catalog acquisition, demo recordings and record production.

“When I left for Nashville in ‘79, I had written a hundred or so songs at that point. I thought I was going to be the biggest thing since sliced bread,” he says shaking his head. “Wrong!  It would be another 200 songs before I got my first substantial cut.”

In 1989 Tommy signed with Warner-Chappel Music Publishing where he stayed for four years, after which he remained as a signed songwriter, as well as with various publishing houses in Nasvhille, including EMI, Hamstein, The Farm, OMG/Acuff Rose. He also has extensive catalogs at other publishing companies including Sony Tree.

Some of Tommy’s hit songs include Look What Followed Me Home by David Ball; He Feels Guilty to Me by Bobbie Cryner; I Don’t Want You to Go by Carolyn Dawn Johnson; the recently released Beyond My Broken Dreams by Eden Brent; and Willing to Crawl by Johnny Neel, which was featured on HBO’s True Blood in 2009.   He’s even written songs for Irma Thomas and Bobbly Blue Bland.

“I loved what I was doing,” he says.  “I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning.  It wasn’t work; it was play.”

Then somehow things changed. 

“I don’t know,” he says.  “It seemed like the music business had become more cutthroat. People were downloading music off the Internet, which really hurt financially, both for me and for everyone else.  Even the music changed. Performers were writing their own songs rather than using songwriters.  A lot of people were out of work.  Perhaps I changed, too.  It just wasn’t as much fun anymore.”

So Polk switched gears, opening a one-of-a-kind B&B in Clarksdale, Mississippi, called Shack-Up Inn with a couple of business partners. 

“We moved some sharecropper shacks onto my cousin’s cotton plantation and just fixed them up enough to be livable.”

They were simple, rough shacks, the kind where the original old blues players wrote and performed their music — people like Son Thomas, John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, Lead Belly and others.  It was a huge success. 

“People wanted the blues experience,” he said.  “And they came from everywhere — England, Germany, Japan and the United States.”

It dawned on him that Clarksdale had become a music-tourist destination. He discovered he liked the hospitality business and opened three more.  He decided to move to Clarksdale permanently and bought a house for his mother there. 

When he came back to Natchez to sell his mother’s house in Vidalia, he looked around and realized he didn’t want to cut all ties to his hometown.

Shantybellum

“Natchez is really one of the most beautiful towns in the world,” he says.  “So I bought another shack to use as a B&B and called it ‘Shantybellum.’  I figured I could hire someone to run it here and have a place to stay when I came to visit.”

Shantybellum reflected in the bottle tree

While restoring the house, though, he decided he really wanted to come home for good.  So he stayed, eventually selling the B&B’s in Clarksdale and going to work as a consultant for the town of Ferriday under Mayor Glenn McGlothin, a musician, himself.

“I took Glenn to Clarksdale to show him what we’d done.  He loved it.  And told him that with Ferriday’s musical heritage, I bet we could do the same thing here.”

Jerry Lee Lewis museum

Photo courtesy of The Concordia Sentinel (used with permission)

Will Haney

Ferriday is home to some remarkable music history.  Double-first cousins Jerry Lee Lewis, Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart are native sons.  For years Haney’s Big House, which burned in 1966, had been a feature attraction on the Chitlin’ Circuit, hosting such notable African American entertainers as B.B. King, Moms Mabley, Redd Foxx, Ray Charles and Bobby Bland.

After witnessing smokestack industry pass up Ferriday as a place to do business for years, McGlothin agreed on a new economic development plan focusing on tourism and music tourism combined with a healthy dose of cultural-heritage tourism.

Frogmore Plantation

Building on tourism assets already in the area like Frogmore Plantation, the Lewis Family Museum, the Delta Music Museum and the Arcade Theater, they got grants.  The plan called for:

·      The renovation of a burned-out shell of a building into an open-air venue called Rockabilly Plaza, which would also function as a farmer's market/music venue and arts center for youth, and with original artwork/murals on exterior walls.

·      The renovation of a deteriorating railroad property into the Haney’s Big House Music Hall to include a large, fully covered outdoor stage for festivals and events. 

·      The partial restoration of an underutilized railroad building to be leased as a private club.

In addition, Ferriday began hosting an annual songwriters workshop at the Arcade for local songwriting hopefuls, bringing many of Tommy’s Nashville co-writers to teach about the business and craft of music.  Ferriday also created and hosted the annual Soul Survivors Festival, honoring Will Haney and Haney’s Big House and the musicians associated with Haney’s from the 1940s until its destruction in 1966.

Playing air guitar on a cane at the Soul Survivors Festival

It was an uphill job.  McGlothin had to deal with water issues and his own health issues as well.  But they persevered. On May 22 at the third-annual Soul Survivors Festival, McGlothin presided over a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the new Will Haney’s Big House Music Hall and Jerry Lee Lewis Rockabilly Park and Plaza, the renaming of First Street to Pee Wee Whittaker Avenue, the naming of Will Haney Circle and the placement of seven historic markers downtown honoring Ferriday’s past and people.

As McGlothin’s mayoral term comes to a close, Tommy is looking ahead.  He hopes to continue working as a consultant in the area.  He’s even going back to songwriting.

“I’m playing with a local band in Natchez called Back Roads,” he says.  “I’m also beginning to write again with two of my Nashville cowriters on Skype and putting lyrics on prerecorded tracks sent as mp3 to me. High-tech Tommy songs.”

He looks back on his time with McGlothin in Ferriday fondly.

Mayor Glen McGlothin, left; Tommy Polk, right

“I am so glad Glenn asked me to come aboard. For four years now I've been able to focus on music, even bringing Nashville friends and cowriters down to Ferriday, and working on downtown development projects that I am so proud to have been a part of. 

“In researching Haney's for Ferriday I learned that three of the headliners during its heyday would record some of my songs. I loved learning that.  Who would’ve guessed it?

“We will leave our babies behind for the next administration to nurture and grow Ferriday into a music destination. The ball is in their court. I wish them well.  They have a tremendous tourism opportunity.  I hope Mayor-elect Gene Allen will make the most of it.”

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