As always, all images here, unless otherwise noted, copyright Deep Fried Kudzu.
Image used via Creative Commons, courtesy State Library NC. Thank you!
Vollis Simpson was memorialized on Wednesday by state lawmakers in North Carolina, and approved a bill giving the whirligigs he made recognition as North Carolina’s official folk art. Nice!
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A bit of historical background to the tent meetings article was given this week, in ‘‘Evicting the devil’ nightly at the tent revival in Fairview‘. The 1801 Cane Ridge revival was mentioned. BTW, the Cane Ridge location in Kentucky is called the Cane Ridge Shrine, and is believed to be the largest one-room log structure in the US.
Tent meetings are getting more and more scarce. This is in south Alabama:
Around 7 p.m., the congregation arrives in jeans, flip-flops and T-shirts. Many are young adults. Some bring children.
At one recent service, an offering bucket contains dollar bills, cigarettes, knives, prescription drugs and street drugs. At another, 28 people are baptized in the back of a pickup, lined with a tarp to keep the water in. There’s now a blue plastic pool for that.
“We believe the word of God, the power of God, works best in the worst places — where things are the most unmanageable and most out of control,” said Ramsey, whose past includes meth, rehab and even prison….
…There’s no set order for the nightly service. There’s a keyboardist who sings, but no choir. No bulletin. It’s more “organic” than that, explains Ramsey, also of Heber Springs. He says that what happens at the revival, including how long an evening service lasts, depends on what God puts on their hearts.
…The evangelists brought a trailer with equipment and a motor home, and applied for a permit to hold services on the vacant lot, once a plant nursery.
That was almost a month ago. The evangelists expect to remain until God tells them to leave. “We have no end date,” Ramsey said.
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“Symbols of Faith, Home and Beyond: The Art of Theora Hamblett” exhibit at the Mississippi Museum of Art ends Sunday. I saw the exhibit at both the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi and at the MMA and *loved* the MMA show and her memory paintings that were included. This is the one to see.
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When I read that a ‘Kitchen Nightmares’ restaurant had been shuttered for tax evasion, I thought of that strange bakery in Arizona too, but no. Instead, it’s Chappy’s on Church in Nashville, run by the same gentleman that had Chappy’s on the MS gulf coast before K. When the N’ville Business Journal polled whether the appearance on the show helped or hurt the restaurant, 77% responded ‘hurt’. Also, this should be common knowledge by now, but if this show is coming to your restaurant, make sure your walk-in is impeccable with labeled and dated stock, right?
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The Museum of Alabama at the Dept of Archives and History will open a new, permanent exhibit opening 2014: ‘Alabama Voices‘ “…will tell the story of Alabama from 1700 to the turn of the 21st century through the voices of the people who shaped its history. Taken from diaries, letters, speeches, songs and other sources, these voices will provide context for more than 800 artifacts and hundreds of images that will be included”
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Do you live in Waffle House America, or IHOP America (love this map)? And yes, there is a Waffle House every 20 feet in Atlanta.
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The life cycle of a cicada, that Southern summertime evening symphony.
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Randy Owen is irritated about how things are going at the Alabama Music Hall of Fame — or maybe that’s not going, as it’s been closed due to lack of funding (the state just cut funding off for it in 2011). Having it in the Shoals is appropriate if you know all the music that’s been made there, but there’s a big musical tradition that would make it appropriate to sit at the top of Sand Mountain, too. Probably having it move to one of the state’s largest cities would ensure that it gets the foot-traffic it deserves, which equals money. If it could sit as a function of one of our universities, that could be a good fit too, as it would make for a great synergy of resource/interest/documentation/etc.
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Chastain Park in Atlanta, what has to be one of the best outdoor spaces for a concert ever (having an elegant picnic while listening to live music…mmmmm…), is having a herd of goats keep the kudzu in check this summer.
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The Washington Post on ‘Our Mockingbird’ and the ghost of George Wallace: Segregation, 50 years on. It’s a documentary by one of my best friends’ sister-in-law, ‘which shows students from all-white Mountain Brook High School and all-black Fairfield High School blown away by the experience of collaborating on a production of “To Kill a Mockingbird”…’
…(the director) observes that there are any number of arguments about why we shouldn’t read “Mockingbird,” any more, “from the n-word to the marginalization of the black characters to Mayella Ewell,” who accuses Robinson after he rejects her.
Yet I hope we never get that correct, and every one of those who was in the play says he or she was profoundly changed by it, and by the collaboration. “I’d been around caucasians here or there,” Stephanie Porterfield, now 24, told me in a phone interview, “but now I can talk to anybody,” and does, in her job as a case manager for older Alabamans….
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USA Today and others are reporting on a ‘new’ mega-mosquito in Florida, but Floridians say they’ve known about it and it’s just another on the list of giant bugs to deal with.
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From the A Spoken Dish website:
It’s a simple question: What food tradition in your life reflects time, place, and people, or evokes a specific memory?
In interviews throughout the South, our team of Whole Foods documentarians asked this, and as a result, captured heartfelt stories about the Civil Rights Movement, Hurricane Katrina, the Great Migration, traditional hog killings, magic pickling rocks, southern spaetzle, paw paws, gumbo, and more.
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June 27th is Helen Keller Day — this article is on Helen Keller’s reaction to the German book burnings of the ’30s:
“History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas,” Keller wrote. “Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them. You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels, and will continue to quicken other minds…”
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By next summer, Purity will be distributing their new flavor ice cream “Graham Ole Opry” — an ode to the Opry and Goo Goos. Pizza Hut is going for regional flavors too, in Canada, where they’re now selling ‘Cheesy Beef Poutine‘ pizza.
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From the AP:
One of New Orleans’ favorite confections is closer to a comeback.
New Orleans’ City Council voted 7-0 Thursday to approve a permit for Hubig’s Pies to establish a bakery in the city’s Marigny neighborhood, in the same general part of the city where a fire last July gutted the bakery that had operated since the early 1920s.
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The National Trust’s list of ‘America’s 11 Most Endangered Places‘ is out. Included: the James River, and…the Astrodome.
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The Alabama Historical Commission and the Alabama Trust for Historic Preservation have come out with the 2013 ‘Place in Peril’ list, which includes Painted Bluff in Marshall County (80 drawings at least 600 years old).
Here is the Georgia Trust’s 2013 list. Someone should snap up this $60k 3000sqft antebellum home in Sparta, too. 1912 home for sale in Barnesville with a foot washing tub.
2013 Texas’ Most Endangered Places.
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Photo, public domain, courtesy LOC Historic American Buildings Survey HABS MISS,1-NATCH,4-1
The owner of Arlington Plantation in Natchez will be in court on July 1 to address violating city ordinance against overgrown property. Above, how Arlington appeared in 1934 — this is how it appears as of 2009; these are pics from the fire and just after.
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The Sotheby’s auction of several Faulkner lots was mostly unsuccessful. From Oxford’s DMOnline:
According to Agence France Presse, the response to the auction was underwhelming. Several of the most important pieces, including the family letters and a new-found short story, had no buyers. Only 24 of 39 auction lots were sold during the Faulkner auction.
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Good, good, good stuff:
Made in The Magic City | Yellowhammer Creative from 2ThreeFive on Vimeo.
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It won’t be finished until fall 2014, but work has started on the 350-mile Mississippi Mounds Trail, “a project to help interpret and preserve the prehistoric earthworks, educate the public about Mississippi’s rich Native American history, and promote heritage tourism. Reaching from Desoto County to Wilkinson County and following the Highway 61 corridor, the trail will highlight thirty or more earthworks built by prehistoric American Indian groups.”
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Spanish moss does not hurt trees (which we all knew) but the best part of the article in the Tallahassee paper was given by Sam Hand, Jr., Associate Professor and member of the Extension Faculty at Florida A/M University:
“One of the most common questions asked about Spanish moss is “how did it get its name?” No one seems to really know, but of literally dozens of fables, the one I find most appropriate (given its name “Spanish moss”) is that of a mounted Spanish Conquistador, who was pursuing an Indian maiden through a heavily wooded forest, and got his long black beard caught in the branches of an oak tree. The beard was torn off, and over the years it turned gray with age, and ultimately began to be spread by the wind from tree to tree where it began to grow and spread throughout the forest.”
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Scene at a local cabbage packing shed, 1936. Courtesy: Mississippi Department of Archives and History
Bless those who make their archival photographs available at The Commons on Flickr (‘hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer’), and that now includes Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
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The American Folk Art Museum has received a $1.6MM grant from the Henry Luce Foundation which will enable its exhibit, Self-Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum to travel to five US cities in three years, after it shows at the AFAM next summer.
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From Mississippi State:
“A pictograph that remained in the dark for almost 6,000 years has come to light with the help of a Mississippi State anthropologist.
Featuring what appears to be a human hunting, the image — certainly the oldest ever discovered in Tennessee and among the oldest yet found in America — is providing new insights into prehistoric life, according to Nicholas Herrmann, MSU associate professor of anthropology and Middle Eastern cultures.”
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Faulkner is a big reason behind the push to keep natural turf at a field at the University of Toronto and the Toronto city council is deciding on the issue this week.
Toronto city council decides this week if the field should be protected as a “cultural heritage landscape.”
That’s where Faulkner comes in.
In 1918, Billy Falkner from Oxford, Miss., too short to enlist in the U.S., faked a British accent, grew a moustache, added a ‘u’ to his surname and came north to train with the Royal Flying Corps. He was billeted at Wycliffe College. Archival photos show the back campus, where he spent part of his training, a field of tents for new recruits.
Faulkner wrote a fabulous account of Armistice Day, which involved a “crock of bourbon,” and some dubious aeronautical hijinks that caused a limp that endured for years. It’s a story biographer Jay Parini dismissed as an improbable “testosterone-drenched tale.”
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What Layers in Photoshop are for: photographing lightning bugs in the May-June Audubon Magazine.
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Everybody needs this in their summer:
http://8tracks.com/mixes/1855965/player_v3_universal