GRITS & other Southern Miscellany

(ham country) craft: pig pillow stitched from a ham sack 

Laura Gilpin (1891-1979). "Basket of peaches," c. 1908-1916. (1979 Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of the artist)

Many precious cassette tapes were ruined by leaving them in that West-facing hot window sill, melting in the heat.   

Fried cornbread pic from a recipe featured on a website mainly concerned with custom made turkey calls and spiritual notes.

Eldridge Holmes - “Pop Popcorn Children” - that horn break is everything.

Some lovely vintage Southern Living covers (before they got too wordy).

by Mrs. Harvey F. "If you want to make this famous Southern candy you will find this an easy recipe” Rostiser.

This excellent little record first released in 1993 features two funky numbers (reportedly written on a bus to New Orleans) callin’ out two Southern locales—“Augusta Georgia (Here I Come)” and “South Carolina” on the flip.

“Southern Magnolia Flowers” - a vintage linen postcard 

- photo via the Richmond Times-Dispatch Archive

Spotted in a pile of "gently used" paperbacks, Rita Mae Brown’s Southern Discomfort

Photo by Greg Dupree for Shane Mitchell’s essay Kiss My Grits via Bitter Southerner. According to the feature, this marvelous "Grits Patrol" car is a 1967 Impala (originally a state vehicle used by the late U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond) that Greg Johnsman of Geechie Boy Market & Mill in Edisto Island, SC bought and restored. Honey, hush!

Roach was born in the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp in Pasquotank Co. North Carolina. A noted pioneer of bebop style, he collaborated with many famous jazz musicians during his lifetime and made numerous musical statements relating to the Civil Rights Movement. This track is an interesting sort of duet featuring Roach drumming along with King’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech. It’s the opening track to Roach’s 1981 album Chattahoochee Red, so named after the Atlanta Child Murders of 1979-1981 when a series of murders committed in Atlanta, Georgia  claimed the lives of at least 28 children, adolescents and adults. Atlanta native Wayne Williams was arrested for and convicted of two of the adult murders, and sentenced to two consecutive life terms. The album cover is a sepia-toned photograph of Roach wiping a tear from his eyes.

But Lord knows I can't change what I saw Say God rest his soul

I wish we could hear more from this group. The band’s bio on AllMusic starts off stating, “Very little is known for certain about this group -- which may actually have been two groups, or possibly two incarnations of the same group...” and devolves from there into a murky timeline pocked with noted shifts in personnel, creative differences and other unfortunate turns. Despite the many mysteries that plague the band or two, or four, caught up in the Gritz continuum, one of the only solid takeaways from the linked bio is the tantalizing reveal that a whole “LP’s worth of material” cut from the same sessions this rusted, deep delta molasses-riffin’ slab of mud-bogged salt n’ pepper swamp rock comes from exists somewhere out there in the world, yet still unreleased.