Twenty-plus years of documenting the South's vernacular art, visionary environments and traditions….plus modern art exhibits, Faulkner and Eudora, and This Week's Various. Welcome.
There’s a historic marker outside Georgia Gilmore’s home:
It reads Georgia Gilmore
February 5, 1920 – March 3, 1990
Georgia Gilmore, cited as a “solid, energetic boycott participant and supporter” lived in this house during the days of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Once arrested on a bus, Gilmore was ardent in her efforts to raise funds for the Movement and organized “Club From Nowhere” whose members baked pies and cakes for sale to both black and white customers. Opening her home to all, she tirelessly cooked meals for participants including such leaders as Dr. Martin Luther King and Dr. Ralph Abernathy. Her culinary skills continued to aid the cause of justice as she actively worked to encourage civil rights for the remainder of her life.
and her home was not far at all from the parsonage where Martin Luther King Jr lived:
The NYT did one of their “Overlooked No More” obits for her in 2019, and in part:
She organized women to form the Club From Nowhere, a clandestine group that prepared savory meals (fried chicken sandwiches, fried fish, pork chops, greens, lima beans) and baked goods (peach pie, poundcakes) and sold them out of their homes, in local establishments and at protest meetings.
In a 1986 interview in “Eyes on the Prize,” the award-winning PBS documentary about the civil rights movement, Gilmore elaborated on the club and its name: “We decided that the peoples on the South Side would get a club, and the peoples on the West Side would get a club, and so we decided that we wouldn’t name the club anything, we’d just say it was the Club From Nowhere.”
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freezer photo by William Eggleston, 1960, from a visit to the Ogden Museum in 2017
Now the space is chock-full of decades of amassed memorabilia, including a 1926 Ford Model T truck. There’s also a makeshift altar packed with prayer candles and religious objects. The latter is fitting. Eating at Ray’s Drive Inn is tantamount to going to church. The restaurant is hallowed taco ground. History and tradition and community intertwine to create an uplifting experience in which to enjoy wonderful puffy tacos (see “Puffy” in the Tacopedia). Crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside, and impossibly light, they are pure joy.
Susan Berger’s 2015 “Quiet Streets,” a set of photographs on different cities’ Martin Luther King Jr Ave or Blvd, at Oxford American
Casey Cep at The New Yorker writes The Real Places that gave Rise to Southern Fictions on Tema Stauffer’s collection of photographs, Southern Fiction. There are the images one would imagine: visits to Rowan Oak (the kitchen curtains), Welty’s kitchen, the muddy drive up to Mt Zion in Rodney, town murals, country churches, the occasional gin or gas station with the scrolling numbers…
In 1914 there were 182 ice factories in Texas. Every single one of them was EXTREMELY welcome in whatever town they were situated. 😀 This photo Charlie Thorn carrying a 300 .lb block of ice was taken in 1926 by the great Basil Clemons. More here: https://t.co/VS501KkOh7pic.twitter.com/qOUAQIBTos
Taschen has issued a reprint of Dali’s Les diners de Gala, with recipes from Paris restaurants like Maxim’s and La Tour d’Argent, and of course, his art
…he began to realise he had little to guard, because the musicians he respected never meant for their work to be sealed in amber. He recalled meeting members of the Skillet Lickers, a venerated Georgia string band formed in 1926, at a Georgia folk festival in the 90s and understanding they were more than a static stereotype. “They weren’t wearing string ties,” he laughs. “They were wearing windsuits and puffy Nikes. That’s what folk singers wear.”
from a visit to Sunray, Texas, in the early aughts
On the 60th Anniversary of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, another writer makes her own trek across Texas at Texas Highways
In an effort to reconnect with “regular people,” Steinbeck did what anyone would do: He got a lucrative book deal and commissioned carpenters to transform a GMC pickup truck into an elaborately outfitted camper van that he named Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s trusty but haggard steed. It came complete with maple interior, double bed, four-burner stove, and refrigerator.
And beyond the nostalgic value, Lipscomb told me, there’s something to be said simply for the Osage orange’s aesthetic qualities. “I think a lot of people love the look and feel of the tree,” he says. “It’s kind of like a beautiful mesquite tree—they have ambience, they have character, they have style, and wonderful bois d’arc trees are in that same category. They just look cool. They have beautiful bark, they branch beautifully, and they live to be a long, old age.” The average lifespan of these trees ranges from 75 to 100 years, though their maximum lifespan is estimated to exceed 300 years.
Hi friends! Hope you’ve all been hapily busy or maybe comfortably resting. Keeping warm either way, right? We’re doing a lot of cooking and some tiny home improvement projects and making plans for nicer weather. Shugie got second place in the district spelling bee! Shug had a couple of really terrific holiday choir concerts. One of my friends moved their business which was a pretty big undertaking, and I sort-of inherited from that a really great french-door fridge for the garage which…can’t even say how happy it makes me to have extra room now for cooking for others and Passover. We ‘adopted’ for winter break a couple of the international boarders and went on a terrific holiday trip that I’ll post about next week. On January 1, I became president of a really big volunteer org here and wowwww he have so many terrific projects going on. Lots to look forward to and I imagine you’re doing the same! xoxo!
Several years ago, I started a Google Map for the Slugburger Trail — slugburgers / breadburgers / Dudie Burgers / doughburgers are a tradition of making hamburgers with a filler, like flour, crackermeal, or breadcrumbs. It got started in the Depression as a way to make the meat go further. Restaurants who make hamburgers this way make up a swath of north-central and north-east AL up to southern/sw tennessee and down to north-east Mississippi
One is Willie Burgers in Hartselle, Alabama, which opened in 1926:
Earlier this month, a friend and I were in Athens, Alabama and we stopped at Dub’s Burgers, which has been in business since 1961:
…and this summer, we were in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and had them at Phillip’s Burgers, open since 1948 — this building was originally a saloon
I love these. If you know of a slugburger place not on the map, please let me know. Thank you!
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