RECOLLECTIONS & REFLECTIONS

   In the last years of my life I’ve had to make sacrifices. The material kind. Moving out precious memories in the forms of travel items, writing materials, cooking vessels — about anything I’ve accumulated in sixty years of marriage and eighty years of living

   Today I spied a white box sitting in the living room.  I intended checking the contents and discarding any and all within. Inside were the best annuals I’d collected from my own school and college attendances. Also were a number of yearbooks from the various school in which I’d taught.  For the next hour I revisited those schools, remembering the students I either taught or  with those I came in daily contact. I mulled over each photo on every page.  I searched the faculty and could count most of them had passed.  Only a few like me were still functioning. 

   Yearbooks are memories we want to cling to.  High school was a remarkable experience. In her article “Why You Truly Never Leave High School,” published in New York Magazine (Jan. 20, 2013), Jennifer Senior makes these observations based on studies by sociologist, developmental neuroscientists and psychologists:

   “Not everyone feels the sustained, melancholic presence of a high-school shadow self. There are some people who simply put in their four years, graduate, and that’s that. But for most of us adults,s the adolescent years occupy a privileged place in our memories, which, to some degree, is even quantifiable: Give a grown adult a series of random prompts and cues, and odds are he or she will recall a disproportionate number of memories from adolescence.”

   Senior goes on to state the music sung and danced to as adolescents remains with us throughout life.  Oh,  I’m happy to know that music of the 1930s and 1940s I still enjoy listening to is okay.  I can sing almost every line of every song written and performed over the radio. I’m okay, the writer says, since neuroscience has proven this.

   To round out my family stories I searched Google for a list of 100 songs of the 1940s and spent  time going through the list singing as many lines as possible.  I thought printing that to include with my memoirs would tickle the readers who take my place in this world.  

   Who writes songs with titles like “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” Ac Cent Tchu Ate the Positive”, “Shoo, Shoo, Baby,” or “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy?”  These songs covered all aspects of living. Also during WWII love songs and patriotic songs kept our spirits high.

   So it is with the yearbooks I’ve kept from 1949 until 1994.  They comprise pictures of life which swirled around me as I grew to became an adult.  They comfort me, more than reunions with people I don’t recognize but once taught or shared a classroom.  My hope is my descendants will hold onto these memories as a keepsake of what life was like in “the old days.”

The Wedding's Over

It's history. Gone are the confusion, the searching, the decisions. Our oldest son married January 24 and the entire time we chided the whole process of spending so much money (not ours entirely) for such an elaborate outpouring for a simple ceremony. But as one couple of friends said,when expressing their feelings about their son's wedding, there was a euphoria after the weekend. The fuss and bother, the strain and stress, the anticipation and results were worth all the preparation.

I'm reminded of the old hymn that begins with "Precious memories, how they linger..." They do. But memories that are precious don't have to cost and arm and a leg, in my opinion. If our newly-weds could have had the dollars that were spent on an elaborate cake, flowers, expansive buffet dinner, music, clothing and the likes, they would have been able to furnish their home, maybe put a little in savings...but I'm a penny pincher, and many would disagree with me. In the long run we are proud of our son's choice for a mate and they are happy. Why should I worry about expenses?

Our family was grateful to watch our oldest experience a weekend of his own. And that...is a precious memory.


Sister and Brother waiting for ceremony to commence.

Mississippi Music

The Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame, founded by Jackson Jim Brewer to single out legendary musicians not honored previously, recently named Jimmy Reed,the Rev. Cleophus Robinson, Blind Roosevelt Graves and the Mississippi Jook Band, Freddy Waits, Charlie Feathers and Tommy Johnson. They represented the fields of gospel, rock, R&B,jazz, country and blues, in that order.

Now retiring Brewer is handing the reins over to another Jacksonian who has plans for continuing the tradition set by the founder. Despite Brewer's consistency with his Hall of Fame (1998 til now), I've only noticed his work. Perhaps that's because I now have more time to reminisce, remember...

On a visit to Yazoo City last spring with my sister who was gathering information about the town for a magazine article, we were reminded in the chamber's museum located in an refurbished school building, that the city claimed a few blues musicians who originated there. John Lee Hooker and Arnold "Gate Mouth" Moore were the only two we recognized by name.

However, other towns around the state, notably the Delta area, keep these musicians alive through various venues.

Clarksdale, in the Delta, honor musicians with their Blues Museum. The Delta Blues and Heritage Fest held annually is one not to be missed. Despite the heat that sits with you in September, the music is deep-down great. While there you can eat at any of the three restaurants in Clarksdale owned by actor Morgan Freeman, who lives in a nearby town.

My first teaching year was spent in the Delta. Despite my college education, I hadn't ever visited the Delta, a treeless plain that used to get refreshed with the overflow of the Mississippi River. My fellow teachers and I would travel from the little town of Drew on Saturdays to Clarksdale to shop and see a movie. There was no Blues Museum, nor a Ground Zero restaurant where my husband and I ate in 2000, nothing of particular interest. Just a good movie theatre without rats running across our feet.

Quoting from the chamber website is a sketch of Delta Blues:

"Mississippi Delta Blues is globally recognized as one of the most America's important musical forms. A major catalyst for American popular culture, it exists in both a folk context and as a product of the commercial music industry. In the face of a historically brutal social experience, black folk in America affirmed their humanity by remembering and creating a rich expressive culture of poetry, tales, crafts, ritual, dance and music. This system embodied techniques of cultural transmission, transformation, adaptation and survival. Early Blues developed out of this rich fabric and cross-fertilized the work-songs, love-songs, slow drags, rags and spirituals. Delta Blues soon became the emotional and literary voice of black singers across the south."

Growing up and living in the city I was only accustomed to popular music. Once when visiting my relatives in the South Mississippi countryside, I was invited to go with cousins to a party. The music was name-denying. Three grown men with their fiddles and violins played in the small living room in the tiny house, windows open wide so guests could mill around outside, talking and dancing and singing along. As a thirteen year old I was in a strange environment. The singing made me laugh. Laugh at the plain-ness, the countryside patois that unknowingly entered my soul to remain there for a half century. Nowadays I am reminded of the music of the early century that snapped in and out of my life as a child. How wonderful now to have this music slre-recorded and available.

Thanks to Mr. Brewer for singling out these musicians and making us more aware of the rhythms that have emanated throughout this landscape for over 100 years.

Blues Music in Recent Movie

Recent articles have made me aware of the significance of music in our state. Most people know that rhythm and blues has been predominant in Mississippi for decades. Two recent articles from our local paper interested me.

Oxford-based writer Scott Baretta reported that he put together the music for The Great Debaters movie starring Denzel Washington, which is now showing nationwide. As he tells it he was called by the music supervisor G. Marq Roswell to help put together "a band that could perform music that one might have heard in the Marshall, TX area juke joints in 1935."

Baretta contacted Alvin Youngbood Hart, a Memphis-based acoustic blues master and the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a NC-based threesome now reviving early African-American string band traditions. He states that this combination was intended to "recreate the sounds of the Mississippi Sheiks, the most popular African-American string band of the pre-WWII era." There is a re-recorded album "Honey, Let the Deal Go Down: The Best of the Mississippi Sheiks" that has something for everyone.

(NOTE: In case you've not heard string bands, go to Amazon.com for string bands and listen to "String Bands, 1926-1920" In the list find and listen to the music of the Mississippi Sheiks and you'll understand the sound Baretta was reaching for.)

As in most movies large portions of filmed material are edited to fit the time frame, and the scenes with this music is no exception. However, the soundtrack features some great work by Hart, Chocolate Drops and singer Sharon Jones of the retro soul group Dap-Kings. Later guitarist Mabon "Teenie" Hodges also of Memphis, lent his guitar of soul sounds to the final songs. Be sure and buy the CD after you've seen the great movie. You can bet this addition was enouraged by Washington, upon hearing the music and wanting more. Tofurther realism, the musicians can be seen in the scenes inside the juke joint.

See The Great Debaters and what Baretta achieved to enhance the story.

See online:
www.carolinachocolatedrops.com

...But the Memories Linger On

I've attended two concerts at the new BethelWoods in NY. The beautiful site is easy to maneuver by car and foot. Beautifully landscapted lawns make enjoying the concerts from either an indoor seat or on the lawn.

"Hippifest" was so much fun. Some of the presenters included names I've never heard of:The Turtles, the Rascals, Mountain Zombies, Badfinger, to name a few. Only two songs did I recognize and now can't remember them, so you know I have been out of the loop as far as rock bands are concerned. However, I felt good being at an historical event, seeing the original hippies of earlier times now in their 50's and 60's singing along while revisiting memories. Everyone, including original band members were reliving a bang-up time.

The lawn was no longer a muddy slush, but a green carpet stretching to everywhere. Plantings were minimal and the buildings were architecturally fitting. The amphitheatre in which we were seated followed the contours of the lawn that once held bodies packed like sardines.

A wonderful experience.

The following weekend we attended the performance of the Boston Pops playing music from oscar nominated movies and tony awarded television musicals. My date R declared that the Pops' selections were almost too tame after the rock 'n' roll music--this coming from a guy whose music listening extends no longer than 10 minutes.

Now we are preparing to hear "Earth, Wind, and Fire." What they play I have no idea; I just remember our kids having their albums. Maybe I'm more interested in sitting on the lawn while enjoyable music drifts by...

Note: Check out for a glimpse of past shows. First-rate for so little fee.