Eudora Welty preferred manual typewriters. William Faulkner hated air conditioning. Tennessee Williams adored music.
Ida B. Wells, shall we say, didn’t like being told where to sit.
We picked up these facts – and so many other ideas, vibes and general all-around feels – during recent road trips to the hometowns of those four Mississippi writers: Ida B. Wells (Holly Springs), Tennessee Williams (Columbus), William Faulkner (New Albany) and Eudora Welty (Jackson).
We broadcast the four shows in June and July to celebrate America’s 250th birthday.
They’re archived here this week (July 13-16).
Big thanks to our friends at America 250 – Mississippi and the Mississippi Hills National Heritage Area, the Mississippi Department of Archives & History, Mississippi Arts Commission and, last but not yeast, Red Panther Brewing Co.
Also the excellent staff of each venue! Please give them a holler – all worth a trip:
Holly Springs: Kate Freeman Clark Art Gallery – Visit Mississippi
Holly Springs: Home – Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum
Columbus: Tennessee Williams Welcome Center and Museum – Mississippi Hills National Heritage Area
New Albany: Union County Heritage Museum – New Albany, MS
Jackson: Eudora Welty House & Garden
The series was the brainchild of Thacker Executive Director Lucy Gaines and America250 Mississippi Executive Director, Nancy Carpenter.
“I immediately connected with Nancy through our love for southern writers and their homes,” Gaines noted.
“We designed this series to extend that connection of writer’s homes to all Mississippians who can take pride in our creative roots which are still very much thriving today,” Gaines added.
Big thanks to Nancy and Lucy for the idea and for everyone’s help in the execution.
Our Yalobushwhackers provided musical inspiration at every stop (don’t miss their blazing set with Lady Adrena at Eudora Welty’s!) Fiya!
At each town we heard from contemporary – and future – Mississippi authors including Michael Farris Smith, John T. Edge, Beth Ann Fennelly and the newest voice, Exodus Oktavia Brownlow, whose debut collection of stories, When It Gets Cold in the South, will be published January 2027 by Screen Door Press – The University Press of Kentucky).
Indeed. It was a bit head spinning to hear Exodus read at Faulkner’s birthplace as she mixed playful shots at John Grisham with very real shots at present-day racism. Behind her, as she read, a hulking train caboose loomed over her, evoking the doomed journey of Temple Drake in Faulkner’s Sanctuary.
The caboose is situated in the literary garden that is curated with plants and flowers found in Faulkner’s fiction. Verbena, Granny Millard’s poke salat berries, “narcissus,” etc.
There’s even a bear in the library.
Congrats to Jill Smith and the Union County Heritage Museum on such a cool facility and for their 35-year anniversary!
Then there was the story of Ida B. Wells that we heard on our visit to her friendly, tree-shaded hometown of Holly Springs.
Ms. Wells became known as an investigative journalist in the late 1800s, reporting on lynchings in the southern and eastern United States.
On a train commute into Shelby County, TN in 1884 – almost 80 years before Rosa Parks – she was forcibly removed by authorities after refusing to relocate to the smoking car. One of her assailants, a railroad conductor, ended that day with Wells’s teeth marks embedded in his hand.
Her investigative work in that era required that same kind of bite plus a now-rare full and active spine.
Wells, who didn’t have the right to vote until she was in her 50s, was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 2020.
Fun fact: All four of the Mississippi writers we visited won a Pulitzer Prize.
Our buddies Afrissippi, blending voices from Senegal and north Mississippi (including drummer Kenny Kimbrough) honored Wells and freedom struggles everywhere.
In Columbus, Mississippi, at the restored Victorian-style home of Tennessee Williams, we were reminded of Williams’s line from his play The Glass Menagerie, “In memory, everything seems to happen to music.”
Our Columbus show lived up to the thought. The fine W Jazz Combo played a tango and accordion set that met the moment.
Our buddy Bill Beckwith’s sculpture of Williams outside the front door of the home museum depicts the author looking up from his reading to greet a visitor.
It’s that kind of town.
In Jackson we were entranced by the spirit of Eudora Welty. A certain understated power (also rare nowadays).
Understated is a good word to describe Beth Ann Fennelly’s low-key brilliance that day as she charmed the crowd with soulful selections from her book, The Irish Goodbye – Micro-Memoirs.
Less understated were our musical guests, the Soul City Swingers and Lady Adrena who blasted funky jazz and straight up blues respectively.
In her 1941 short story, Powerhouse, Miss Welty wrote of her appreciation of the interplay, verbal and non-verbal, between Fats Waller and his band after seeing them in concert in Jackson, MS in 1940.
“Powerhouse is so monstrous he sends everybody into oblivion… What is it? Listen. Watch them carefully, hear the least word… don’t let them escape you… They can’t stay. They’ll be somewhere else this time tomorrow.”
I think Miss Eudora would have dug our show. We had cold beer too.
Perfect for cooling off after walking the “worn path” to her garden…
I would say, ‘These shows were great – you had to be there,” but you didn’t have to be there. We recorded all four of them in high-definition digital glory! You can tune in and dig it.
And the voices and stories don’t stop now that the nation has popped its collective cork for America 250.
Next week (July 16-19) is maybe the most Mississippi – and American – voice of all: Bobby Rush!
What a country!
—
Jim Dees
Thacker Mountain Radio Hour
Photos: Visit Mississippi, Union County Historical Society, Ida B. Wells, Tennessee Williams museums, William Faulkner Literary Garden, Eudora Welty Home and Garden, Red Panther Brewing, Screen Door Press, Thacker Mountain Radio Hour and Kenny Williams (Bobby Rush)