People to Know

Marty Stuart Beats It Back to the Dirt Road

editor — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:14:47 -0700

Busy Bee Cafe (1982) -- Marty Stuart and a legion of country music legends
Photo: Amazon.com/Japan

Marty Stuart is a Renaissance good old boy. Most people know him as a country music performer with one platinum and five gold records and four Grammy awards. He’s that but a lot more. He’s also a producer, a writer, and accomplished photographer, and he's an historian and archivist of country music, with the largest private collection of country music memorabilia in existence. For my money, Marty Stuart is essentially a storyteller – an interpreter of life as he experiences it – and he uses all of the tools available to him to tell the story.

Stuart is a native of Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town best known for events during the civil rights struggles (incidents that its people, we imagine, would rather forget). Stuart was such a close friend of gospel/blues/r&b legend Pops Staples that when Pops died, his daughter Mavis gave Stuart Pops’ guitar. Another close friend was his ex father-in-law Johnny Cash, whom he honored with an album that may be the best tribute recording ever made (Kindred Spirits: A Tribute to the Music of Johnny Cash).

Stuart once initiated a booking on the WDVX Blue Plate Special, a live radio broadcast from Knoxville, with his band the Fabulous Superlatives. Curious as to what appeal a low-power radio station and a small audience might hold for a performer of Stuart's stature, the Yonder arranged for a phone interview. When asked how he had first heard about WDVX, Stuart said that it “came across the hillbilly grapevine that there was this station playing really cool music” in Knoxville. The station and the idea of the the Blue Plate Special were especially appealing to Stuart because he appreciates Knoxville’s vital role in country music history – a role that he believes is largely overlooked.

Benton's Hams Wait and Take Wing

editor — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:18:02 -0700

For the past 35 years, Allan Benton has been quietly perfecting the art of slow curing ham at his smokehouse/store, Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams in Madisonville, Tennessee. Benton's hams and bacon are shipped to some of the finest restaurants in the country, places like Luke in New Orleans, Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York, Five & Ten in Athens, GA, and closer to home Blackberry Farms in East Tennessee. Chefs from New York to Los Angeles use Benton's ham exclusively. The bacon is the thickest I've ever seen, and the most intense. You taste pig, salt, and smoke (definitely not in that order) in every inch of every strip.

'It's Time For An Accounting' — A Weekly Newspaper's Story

editor — Tue, 8 Jul 2008 13:45:54 -0700

Neshoba Democrat publisher Stanley Dearman at a memorial for the three civil rights workers murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964.

Photo: The New York Times

Jim Prince was a mid-20s reporter in Alabama in 1989 when he received his mailed edition of his hometown weekly newspaper, the Neshoba Democrat from Philadelphia, Mississippi. This edition was a special one. It contained a long interview with Dr. Carolyn Goodman, the mother of a young civil rights worker who was murdered in Philadelphia just a few months after Jim Prince was born in 1964.

The Democrat's editor, Stanley Dearman, conducted the interview with Dr. Goodman at her apartment in New York city. Prince had heard about the murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner from his first memories — how the three had been pulled over by a local law enforcement officer in Philadelphia on June 21, 1964, tossed in the Neshoba County jail, released and never heard from again. He knew that the car the three young men were driving was found a few days later, abandoned and burned, and that in early August of that year the bodies of the three — two white and one black — were eventually dug out of a earthen dam. He knew that seven men were eventually convicted on federal conspiracy charges, but none had served more than six years in prison. And he knew that the state had never prosecuted a soul for the killings.

It was Dearman's interview with Goodman, however, that "put a face on them for me," Prince said of the three slain civil rights workers. "I wasn't much older than Andy at the time I was reading the article. I was moved by the way his mother described him. He was athletic. He loved dramatic arts. He was a peaceful person who cared about people. That was a turning point for me, and I decided I had to be in Philadelphia for the (25th anniversary) memorial service." Prince left his job at the daily paper in Alabama and came home to work that summer for the Democrat.

On June 27, the Neshoba Democrat received an award from the Institute for Rural Journalism at the University of Kentucky. The Tom and Pat Gish Award is given for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism. The Neshoba Democrat, Stanley Dearman and Jim Prince have shown all that and more over the past four decades.

Emancipating the Jockeys

editor — Mon, 7 Jul 2008 21:14:24 -0700

Rolled up & ready to ride
Photo: Roxanne Weber

"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." -- Thomas Jefferson

My short career in journalism began at age 24 as a paperboy. The Louisville Courier-Journal hired me as a rural carrier. Some guy in a starched white shirt just showed up at my place and offered me the job. My responsibilities were 1) to drop off bundles of morning papers to eleven-year-olds out to earn their own cigarette money and 2) to drive the town route to homes on the back streets around the Peter's Peak, Walkertown, Wabaco, Du-ane, Darfork, Bomber Ball Park, Airport Gardens, and Frogtown sections of Hazard, Kentucky, my hometown.

The job paid a hundred bucks a week, back when that wasn't much money. But I was between gigs, as they say, and newly married to Jenny, the somewhat understanding granddaughter of the former editor and publisher of that very same crusading, Pulitzer Prize winning Courier-Journal. Call it kismet. (And here by “somewhat understanding granddaughter” I mean to say that she did not mind my spending my afternoons in the poolroom playing $5 Rook with guys called Bige, Basso, and Little Doc or my nights carousing with a more prosaic set of pals, but she did think paperboy was just too good a career move for me to turn down at that juncture.)

All I had to do was put an alarm clock in a pie plate for reverb, roll off the mattress at 5 a.m., and motor off toward my appointed rounds. What could go wrong?

Rez Vignettes: No Jam Pie

editor — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:29:09 -0700

Celia Moore and husband Hershel
Photo: Courtesy of M.A. Pember

I know now for certain that piecrust runs in my veins, passed down to me by my mother Bernice Rabideaux and my grandmother Celia Moore. I want to be clear, however, that these women were by no means the “Betty Crocker” types. They were often bitter, quick tempered creatures who could unleash an acid tongue or a crack upside the head if you got too close at the wrong time. They survived poverty, brutal men, Indian boarding schools and everything else the world had to dish out to Indian women in the 20th century. Those large chips they carried firmly on their shoulders kept most folks away, sending a clear message that these women were ready for a fight. Those prickly exteriors, however, camouflaged a capacity for deep, deep love. It was a dangerous love that could only be shown by veiled action. Some of that action was pie. Their pies had the power to make the meanest man swoon and have to sit down.

Beware the power of pie.

My mother’s mother, Celia Moore, abandoned several of her children who were fathered by an abusive husband. My mother, Bernice, never forgave her mother for leaving her at the “Sister School” where she was neglected and brutalized. As a teenager, my mother spent a few months with Celia who worked as a cook at a lumberjack boarding house. My mother remembers the time with bitterness, still stinging at the “too little, too late” parenting efforts by Celia.

During those months, however, Celia passed along her pie making skills. Celia was seldom spoken of in our house. Until this summer, I had never seen her picture. I was told only that she made good pies and had a foul mouth. My uncle Russell, who I met for the first time this summer, confirmed this information. He recalled sitting at the table with Celia and his father when his father began choking on one of her pies. Still angry at his previous nights drunkenness, Celia shrieked at him, “Choke then, you sonovabitch!”