I first visited Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market near the hamlet of Money in Leflore county Mississippi in 2009 with my friend Mark Bonta, who was a professor at the local Delta State University in nearby Cleveland at the time. Before that visit I’d not heard much of the brutal murder of Emmett Till and [...]
By Mark Butler.* SOME time in 1970, while I was still pretending to be a student at Macquarie University, I gave a lecture outlining my belief that Bob Dylan would one day be seen as a great poet on the same level as Eliot, Yeats and Auden, at that time my touchstones for poetic greatness. [...]
Bob Gosford This post is the first in an occasional series looking at music that I’m … Spinning … on my recently acquired turntable. The following text is from the website of Fat Possum Records, where Mississippi Hill Country musician R. L Burnside recorded what for mine was his best work. His 1994 recording Too [...]
A tinnie, chockas with evacuees, stalled in Giles street in the flow of the fourth street river. The force of the river smashed it into a light pole. The light fell just missing the occupants. When the dinghy flipped and everyone went under the festive mood immediately evaporated.
Clearly built without the aid of an architect, Po' Monkey's Lounge crazy structure sat in the middle of a cotton field — a mile and a half off Highway 61.
So what are the connections between Baptists, blood and billboards? Bob Gosford explores the backroads and dusty doctrinal tracts of southern Baptist theology to find out.
"The next challenge will be to reach the White River. A route will have to be scouted through the briars, snake-infested woods and alligator swamps. The explorers will then manually portage all of their gear and canoes from the Arkansas River to the White River, a process that might require one long dirty day."
"The Big Muddy" follows centuries of human efforts to conceptualize this landscape of mud as a place with firm barriers between water and land, and then make these conceptions reality. A few examples: early French explorers repeatedly failed to locate the mouth of the Mississippi out of an inability to imagine a vast, multi-channeled delta. Rice, and then indigo, tobacco, and sugar encouraged settlers to drain, divide, and levee the landscape.
There are certain moments on the River that shine more brightly than others. When they happen, they’re sharp like dreams. It’s like the energy of the earth surges, rises from its core, and lights up something very small. Ditches, low fogs, rocks, and other unremarkable things become geysers of this glow.
Margaret’s Grocery and Market is almost indescribable – it is at once evidence of an incredibly fertile imagination, a religious shrine, a jumble of thoughts and musings on the nature and power of religion and a work of architectural art. More than anything it is a validation of the freedom of expression in the built environment that is so apparent as you drive around the south – you can build just about anything, anywhere and anyhow here.
