Southern Music Playlist

For years now, I've toyed with the idea of creating music playlists for some of the trips that I've taken over the last eight or so (or more, even) years. You know, location-specific tunes to listen to while we drive around discovering whatever new place it is we are exploring. Maybe albums that were recorded or written in the city, state or country where we happen to be spending a few days or week or fortnight or whatever. Or music made by the place's native sons or daughters. Or even just songs about wherever it is we happen to be. It's a good idea, right? 

I always thought so, anyway.

I've never done it. 

But if there was ever a trip that called out for a need for a playlist, it was our tour of the American South, just because of the richness of musical history in that area. There's a first time for everything. This had to be done! So I made it so.

The idea was the simple part. The assembly of a list would be more complicated.

My initial idea was to make a list of 52 songs (one for each full year I've been on the planet) from my own music collection that represent to me the city of Memphis and the states of Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama with an emphasis on the four recording studios we planned to visit over the little more than a week we were spending down south. No new songs. No new purchases. Just stuff that I love and which are indisputably part of music history where we were headed.

I thought 52 was a good number but I also feared editing would be a bit of a problem on this sort of exercise, which is probably a big reason why I've never done this before. My list filled up pretty quickly and easily. I managed to find a good amount (but not too much) of music recorded in Memphis or northern Alabama or songs by artists from the places we visited. It worked. I made a couple of last minute changes but 52 came together well.

But then I thought there was some room for some extra stuff that would fit the mood of the trip (told you editing was an issue). So I added five wildcard songs that have a lot of meaning but maybe don't fit my initial criteria. 

Here's what ended up on my 52 (plus 5) song playlist. And no, I'm not writing something about every song. Or even every artist.

• Robert Johnson: Cross Road Blues / Ramblin' On My Mind / Love In Vain
• Sonny Boy Williamson: One Way Out / Checkin' Up On My Baby
• Muddy Waters: Rollin' Stone / I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man / Standing Around Crying
• Elmore James: The Sky Is Crying / Dust My Broom
• B.B. King: It's My Own Fault / Help The Poor
• Willie Nelson Featuring B.B. King: The Thrill Is Gone

So much of the story of American music started in Mississippi so it seems like the logical place to start my playlist. Without blues being sung by black musicians who were sons and daughters of sharecroppers who were sons and daughters of slaves, there might not be any rock and roll today. Black families fed up with a life of perpetual poverty and effective indentured servitude headed north along Highway 61 to Chicago, some to work in factories in the city and some to seek their fortunes making music. Some of those that didn't make it all the way to Chicago stopped and stuck in Memphis. 

All the artists above were born in Mississippi with the exception of Willie Nelson; I felt that Willie and B.B.'s version of "The Thrill Is Gone" would add another classic voice into the mix on my playlist. Sonny Boy Williamson and Muddy Waters are more famous as Chess Records (out of Chicago) artists, but Sonny Boy was instrumental in broadcasting music across the Mississippi Delta through his King Biscuit Time radio station broadcast out of Helena, Arkansas on radio station KFFA to black and white kids everywhere the signal would reach.

The most legendary of these musicians has to be Robert Johnson, an itinerant and ordinary guitar player who disappeared from Mississippi only to return as the most important blues musician of his time (and perhaps ever). That astonishing transformation led some folks to speculate that Johnson had sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads of Routes 49 and 61 in exchange for his talent. Johnson didn't dispute the story for as long as he lived. Which wasn't long. He died at age 27, which likely helped keep the crossroads mythology alive.

• Jackie Brenston with His Delta Cats: Rocket "88" 
• B.B. King: B.B. Blues
• Howlin' Wolf: How Many More Years
• Elvis Presley: That's All Right / Good Rockin' Tonight
• Johnny Cash: Cry, Cry, Cry / Guess Things Happen That Way / Ballad Of A Teenage Queen
• Jerry Lee Lewis: Great Balls Of Fire / Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On
• Live: I Walk The Line

First stop on our trip: Memphis, home of the blues and the birthplace of rock and roll. Its location at the north end of the the Mississippi delta (and within reach of KFFA's signal) allowed black musicians a place to play and make money and white kids to steal that music and transform it into something different which eventually would become rock and roll. I don't use "steal" in a judgmental way there because much of the history of rock and roll is adapting what those before you laid down as a foundation. But it was stealing.

All the tracks above were recorded at Sam Phillips' Sun Studio (or Memphis Recording Service as it was known before Phillips re-branded it) with the exception of "I Walk The Line" by Live. I think it was important to strike a little bit of a balance between the Jackie Brenston / B.B. King / Howlin' Wolf tracks and the later Sun tracks recorded by white musicians. All of them are excellent. If there's a regret here, it's that I didn't put B.B. King's "3 O'Clock Blues" on the playlist because I think it's far superior to "B.B. Blues". However, I didn't own it and so didn't include it. In fact, I still don't.

So about that Live track...

Live's version of Johnny Cash's "I Walk The Line" was pulled from the Good Rockin' Tonight: The Legacy of Sun Records album. My dad bought that album for me for Christmas years and years ago and features artists I love re-recording songs originally recorded at Sun Studio. It's an awesome album which would be even awesome-er if I could lop off the Kid Rock track at the end. Not because his version of "Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee" is a bad song but just because I object to all things Kid Rock. The best track on the album is Live's interpretation of "I Walk The Line". It's sinister and mean and I love it. Had to put that song on the playlist despite the fact it wasn't actually recorded in Memphis. Sometimes you have to bend the rules.

• Booker T and The MGs: Green Onions
• William Bell: You Don't Miss Your Water / Any Other Way 
• Sam And Dave: Hold On! I'm Comin' / Soul Man
• Eddie Floyd: Knock On Wood
• Johnny Daye: What'll I Do For Satisfaction
• Otis Redding: Respect / I've Been Loving You Too Long / (Sittin' On) The Dock Of the Bay
• Albert King: Born Under A Bad Sign / Laundromat Blues

There were two great record labels in Memphis in the 1950s and 1960s: Sun Studio downtown and Stax Records on the south side of town. Sun gets 11 tracks on the playlist; Stax gets 12. It's not a competition. It just worked out that way. But it does speak to the strength of Stax's catalog and my love for parts of that catalog that there are more Stax tracks than Sun. 

My favorite Stax artist is Albert King. There's no question about it. His voice and his guitar playing are so smooth and completely unlike anyone else. I could have stuck his entire Born Under A Bad Sign album (which is really just a collection of singles) on the playlist and been happy. But there had to be cuts, so Albert ends up with just two tracks. Stax was a family through and through. If you need any proof of that, look no further than the authors of the titial song of Albert King's album: William Bell and Booker T. Jones, who also have tracks on the playlist.

Two other notes about the Stax portion of my playlist. First, Otis Redding is just incredible. Among all the young deaths in music history, Otis' has to be one of the least well known. 26 years old. And he was just getting warmed up. Second, there is no situation that I wouldn't listen to the two Sam and Dave tracks on this list. These two songs always make me feel better.

• Aretha Franklin: I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You / Do Right Woman, Do Right Man
• Wilson Pickett: Mustang Sally
• The Rolling Stones: Brown Sugar / Wild Horses / You Gotta Move
• Paul Simon: Loves Me Like A Rock / Kodachrome

The Muscle Shoals portion of my playlist could have been a lot longer, but unlike Sun and Stax, most of the artists who recorded at FAME Studios and the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio were not from one of the states we visited. So I decided to just crop it at the best of the best.

Because they ended up on two of my favorite albums ever (with Sticky Fingers being THE favorite ever), I elected to include every song recorded by Aretha Franklin and The Rolling Stones on my playlist. But if there's a favorite story about an artist traveling to Muscle Shoals to record some music, it's Paul Simon visiting there in 1973 to record one song for his There Goes Rhymin' Simon album.

Simon booked four days in Muscle Shoals to record his song "Take Me To The Mardi Gras" with the black musicians he had heard on the Staple Singers' Be Altitude: Respect Yourself album. He got surprised twice in Muscle Shoals: once when he found out none of the musicians he heard on the album he loved were black and again when the band nailed his song in a half a day. He ended up recording half his album in the studio with the leftover time. I think it's worth watching the Youtube video of the four band members discussing Simon's visit. The link is here. 

Robert Johnson's grave, Little Missionary Baptist Church, Greenwood, Mississippi.

• Hank Williams: You Win Again
• The Band: Ophelia
• Pine Hill Haints: Trains Have No Names

There is not a lot of music made by artists from Alabama and Arkansas in my music collection. But we were spending some time driving through those states so I thought it was important to include at least some music made by folks from those two states. 

The Pine Hill Haints are my favorite all time band from Alabama. You likely don't know their music. I met them in a bar below a record store (the bar was appropriately called The Basement) in Nashville in 2006. Their approach to music, which included heavy washboard and washtub bass action on most all their songs, intrigued me and I ended up buying a few of their albums which I still pull out and listen to way more than I listen to a lot of other music in my collection.  And when I say "met them" I really mean that. I was talking football while watching a preseason game with some dude at the bar when I was waiting for the show to start. That dude turned out to be Jamie Barrier, who is the lead singer and guitarist. 

I also knew that any playlist that was meant for a trip to Arkansas had to include at least one track sung by Levon Helm in The Band. "Ophelia" is perhaps my favorite track by The Band. I find it to be one of their most musical tracks and it's for sure my favorite Levon Helm vocal. Easy choice on that one.

Hank Williams made the cut because has Alabama produced a more influential musician? I tried to pick a track that was not too denigrating towards his wife, as most of his songs were.

Beale Street at night, Memphis.

• Elvis Presley: Jailhouse Rock / Suspicious Minds
• Dusty Springfield: Son Of A Preacher Man / Willie & Laura Mae Jones
• Big Star: In The Street

For the last five of my original 52 songs on my playlist, I went back to Memphis for more Elvis, one song off Big Star's #1 Album record (which is renowned by musicians but I can't for the life of me see the genius of the album) and two tracks by Dusty Springfield.

It is difficult for me to describe how incredible Dusty In Memphis is. On the first play, it sounds like it belongs on an easy listening station that only people old enough to be my parents would really listen to. I first bought this album on reputation sometime in the 1990s I'm guessing and one day started listen to it a few years later. The sexiness and sultriness set against the hot, sticky South where it was recorded lingers on every track. It is desire, it is forbidden, it is desperate, it is seductive. It never gets old. It's one of the most incredible collection of songs I've ever heard. I've consistently maintained that if I could have only five albums to listen to for the rest of my life they would be Sticky Fingers (The Rolling Stones), Abbey Road (The Beatles), a Mark Knopfler album, a Bob Dylan album (my preference on the Knopfler and Dylan albums keeps shifting) and Dusty In Memphis. It is that good.

Perhaps obviously, Dusty In Memphis was recorded in the Bluff City, specifically at Chips Moman's now long gone American Music Studio. To be more accurate here, I guess I should say that the instrumental tracks were recorded in Memphis. Dusty couldn't sing in Memphis. Just couldn't do it. Stage fright or shyness or whatever. Her vocals were recorded in New York.

The most famous song on this album is Dusty's version of "Son of a Preacher Man". The other song on my playlist, "Willie & Laura Mae Jones" was not on the original album, but it was on the expanded edition I fell in love with when I really got into the album. I think it's the most southern track on the deluxe edition so I included it on my playlist, even though it was not recorded in Memphis at all. I cheated with Live's "I Walk The Line". I'm cheating here too.

Real Deal Cowboy Neal, King's Palace Cafe, Memphis. Sometimes the best blues is found in an alley.

The living room at Graceland. The stained glass peacocks are amazing. Seriously!

• Bob Dylan: Only A Pawn In Their Game
• Neil Young: Southern Man
• Paul Simon: Graceland
• Depeche Mode: Personal Jesus
• U2: Pride (In The Name Of Love)

So this is my "plus five" list. Five songs that are completely relevant to the area of the country we visited while also being written and recorded by artists who have little to no historical connection to the deep South.

The Dylan and U2 tracks are both about assassinations of Civil Rights leaders. "Only A Pawn In Their Game" is about the driveway slaying of Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi in 1963. I find this song a little strange because while Dylan is (appropriately) pointing the finger of blame at the politicians who were convincing poor uneducated whites to kill for them, it sounds like he's absolving the man who pulled the trigger of responsibility. U2's "Pride" is about the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

"Graceland" and "Personal Jesus" are both on this list because of Elvis. "Graceland" is about a man feeling compelled to visit Elvis Presley's home, Graceland, but it's really about the dissolution of his marriage. There are some awesome lines in the song that represent the area of the country in just magical ways ("The Mississippi delta is shining like a national guitar"). Depeche Mode took their inspiration from a Priscilla Presley penned memoir about her time with Elvis. Elvis is her "Personal Jesus".

Finally, I couldn't add five songs to my playlist and not add Neil Young's "Southern Man". It is a scathingly accurate condemnation of how the southern states kept black men on the bottom rung of society through an institutionalized system of violent intimidation and frequent lynchings. It (along with Young's equally scathing "Alabama") caused Lynyrd Skynyrd to pen "Sweet Home Alabama" in response and in defense of the South. As much as I love Skynyrd's music and particularly their first two albums, Neil Young is in the right here.

So that's it. That's the story of the music I took with me on a trip to explore the Civil Rights Movement. This was a lot of work and I'm not sure I'm making a trip-specific playlist again any time soon. But it was probably the right trip to do this for the first time. And never say never again. 

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How We Did It

We ended up visiting a lot of music sites in our 10 days in the American South. I've discussed some of them in my post about the four studios we visited but I thought it would be worth writing down the others we stopped by to pay our respects (literally in some cases) to some of the artists that I put on this playlist.

First of all...yes, we went to Graceland. It's overblown, far too self-important and way too expensive (the cheapest ticket to get inside Graceland is $75!!!!) but it had to be done. I visited way back in 2006 and it was nothing like this. We met someone later that same week who blamed it all on Lisa-Marie. Maybe that's true. I guess if you can get people to pay that much, go for it. But it is ridiculously priced. The property is open daily (wouldn't you be if you could get at least $75 from every visitor?) and the website encourages you to purchase tickets in advance. We didn't and did just fine, but we were also visiting at the tail end (maybe) of the COVID-19 pandemic. I'm deliberately not including a link to the Graceland website.

To get the complete Elvis experience, we also visited the Elvis Presley Birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi. I think it's worth a stop if you are in the area. Admission to Elvis' first home and birthplace, his original (relocated) church and a museum are all separately priced at $9 each, although there's a discount if you buy admission to more than one of the buildings. We visited the home only and it took about five minutes. You can walk the property for free and if you don't care that much about seeing two rooms of a 1930s shotgun shack, you can probably save the $9 each and still have just as good an experience as we did.

We spent one long day elsewhere in Mississippi which included stops at three music-related sites. We stopped by the crossroads of Routes 61 and 49 on the way down to Indianola, Mississippi to visit the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center. If you can't find the crossroads, plug Abe's Bar-B-Q into the directions app of your choice; it's right next to the crossroads itself (we actually parked in their parking lot). I'd completely recommend a visit to the B.B. King Museum. B.B. was such an awesome human being but the museum also conveys really well what it was like to be a sharecropper in Mississippi between the two world wars. 

In between the crossroads and B.B. King's Museum, we stopped at the likely grave of Robert Johnson. I say likely because there are multiple sites out there that claim to be the last resting place of Johnson. Based on my research, the one at the Little Missionary Baptist Church in Greenwood, Mississippi seemed to be the most credible. The grave is towards the back of the cemetery, which sits to the left of the church itself. Look for the collection box next to the grave under a pecan tree. There is a sign describing Johnson's life at the entrance to the driveway to the property. That sign also describes a visit made by Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant to the site. Can you imagine driving around rural Mississippi looking for Johnson's grave and finding Robert Plant hanging out there when you arrived? 

Finally, some words about Beale Street. While pulling our itinerary together for this trip, I read some information online about the poor quality of music on Beale Street and that you might be better off going elsewhere in Memphis to hear some live music. While I agree that you might have to search a bit for the specific type of music you want to listen to, I found the quality of the music to be no different than what I listened to on my prior two trips to Memphis. And I found the music to be excellent on all three trips, although admittedly I found some venues to be less than satisfactory. If I were heading back to Memphis any time soon, I'd head straight for the outdoor venue at King's Palace Cafe and the indoor Blues City Band Box. I would avoid B.B. King's Blues Club (too many covers of classic rock rather than blues songs) and Rum Boogie Cafe (the bands here have not matched the quality I've found elsewhere on Beale Street). But there IS good music to be found on Beale Street.

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Emmett Till (1955)

I really didn't want to go to Mississippi on this trip. I wanted to skip it entirely. Pretend that it wasn't there. That nothing ever happened in that state at all.

I don't mean that literally. We pretty much had to pass through Mississippi to get from Memphis to Birmingham and I really wanted to discover some music history in Greenwood and Indianola and just a bit north of Clarksdale. But from a Civil Rights point of view, I wanted to skip it for one reason and one reason alone: because visiting Mississippi would involve dealing with what happened to Emmett Till. And I really wasn't sure I wanted to do that.

The Civil Rights Movement is littered with inhuman crimes. I am sure there are tales and legends of indiscriminate violence and senseless hate in any number of towns in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and most other states below the Mason-Dixon Line (and above it, for that matter). But what is so horrific about the killing of Emmett Till for me is the personal nature of the crime. I'm not saying any hate crime is better than another but it's one thing to plant a bomb somewhere and have it blow up and kill whomever happens to be nearby; you don't have to see the victims or personally kill them with your own hands. Emmett Till's killers tortured and killed him with weapons they wielded and they did it to a defenseless child by meting out the blows themselves from feet or inches away. They knew who and how they were going to kill before they started and they were willing to do it from close range. They would hear and smell and taste the results of what they were doing and they didn't care.

In the end as it related to this particular crime in the Civil Rights Movement, I reasoned if we were really sincere about this type of a trip, I couldn't really pass on the stuff that made me really uncomfortable. So we went to Mississippi. For Emmett Till.

Emmett was a 14 year old kid from Chicago who in the summer of 1955 managed to convince his mother to allow him to visit his cousins in Mississippi. I am sure this is a trip many, many kids made when they were younger. I know I did when I was growing up in England. Never in a million years would I even contemplate that I wouldn't come back from such a trip. But Emmett didn't.

Emmett arrived in Mississippi on August 21, 1955. He was welcomed into the home of his great-uncle (his mother's uncle), Mose Wright, a sharecropper and minister living in the town of Money, Mississippi. Three days after his arrival, Emmett and a cousin decided to skip church and head to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market to buy some candy. Carolyn Bryant, the 21 year old (white) wife of store owner Roy Bryant, was working in the store that day.

There are a number of different accounts of what happened that day inside and outside of Bryant's but two things seem certain: (1) for some time, maybe as little as one minute, Emmett was alone inside the store with Carolyn Bryant and (2) Emmett whistled at Carolyn Bryant when she exited the store after he did. I thought there was some debate about whether the whistling ever actually happened but we watched a video in the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center (E.T.H.I.C) where his cousin, Simeon Wright, said plain as day that Emmett whistled at Carolyn. His next sentence stunned me: "It scared us half to death."

So a black kid whistled at a white woman. What's the big deal? Well, in 1950s Mississippi, that was an offense that could get you in serious trouble. It's astonishing and disgusting that a simple, really non-offensive gesture like that could get people upset enough to commit physical violence, isn't it? I mean, let it go. But this was 1950s Mississippi. And it wasn't let go. Not in any way.

A few days later, at 2:30 in the morning on August 28, two armed men (Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam) and maybe one other man burst into Mose Wright's home and demanded to see the boy who had talked to Carolyn Bryant. After identifying Emmett, being offered money to leave him alone, and telling Mose Wright that if he made any trouble he wouldn't live to see his next birthday, they took him. Emmett's family never saw him alive again. A couple of days later two boys fishing in the Tallahatchie River found Emmett's body attached to a cotton gin fan blade. The body and face was so badly mutilated that Emmett could only be identified by his father's ring, which his killers had somehow left on his body (they didn't leave anything else on his body).

Emmett Till was taken from his great-uncle's home in a green pickup truck.

If a 14 year old child being taken from his family's home in the middle of the night by two grown men and showing up dead later that same week is upsetting (and it is extremely upsetting), that's not even the half of it. This was not a simple killing. This was a hate-filled torture session of a helpless child that likely lasted hours. It is not difficult to suppose that the men who carried out this crime generated some level of satisfaction from their acts and the terrified screams of a little boy. For maybe a whistle and maybe a hand touching a hand when transferring payment for some candy when Emmett was alone inside the store. Maybe. 

There is no way to relate what happened to Emmett Till that night with any firm degree of accuracy so instead I'll write here what I wrote down after our time at E.T.H.I.C., a converted cotton gin once owned by J.W. Milam which is now a museum to document and preserve what happened to Emmett Till. The old gin is, by the way, possibly the actual building where Milam and Bryant got the fan that they used (unsuccessfully) to keep Emmett's body submerged.

There is a section of the museum that details the sequence of events of that night. There are four separate displays titled "Abduction: Home of Mose Wright", "The Truck of Torture", "The Barn" and "Glendora Cotton Gin". After abducting Emmett from his great-uncle's house, Bryant and Milam (along with two black men they forced into assisting) took Emmett to a barn on the Sheridan Plantation (owned by Milam's brother) in the nearby town of Drew and beat and tortured him and most likely killed him there. 

On the opposite wall of the museum from that display, there is an account of what was done to Emmett. Here's what it said, word for word.

Pistol whipped. Kicked. Teeth knocked out. Eye gouged. Knife cut ear off. Axe separated the nose. Front of face severed. Shot with .45 caliber handgun at least three times. Strangulation with barbed wire around his neck. Fan tied to neck and thrown in the river.

Later on in the museum, there is a note indicating that one of Emmett's eyes was dangling from the socket while the other was gouged out.

This was not a simple killing. It was not dispassionate or impersonal. Just the amount of implements use to hurt this kid is shocking: feet, knife, axe, gun, barbed wire. How many other things? How much hate did these two men pour into killing a child? A child who was a complete stranger to the place where he'd been taken who didn't do anything to deserve anything really. I can't imagine doing something like this to another human being no matter what they might have done to me, let alone a 14 year old boy who might have offended someone's wife with words and a whistle and maybe a touch. Maybe.

The Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center, the former cotton gin owned by J.W. Milam. Glendora, MS.

Bryant and Milam were never convicted of killing Emmett Till. They were tried for kidnapping and murder in the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner, MS in September of 1955. The trial lasted five days and deliberation by the all-white, all-male jury took all of 67 minutes. The verdict was of course not guilty, even though Bryant and Milam had admitted to taking Emmett from his great-uncle's house (they claimed they scared him and dropped him off at the Grocery and don't know what happened to him after that). 

I realize devoting a paragraph to a trial as important and complicated as the abduction and grisly murder of Emmett Till is skimming over the details. It's not my intent here to be comprehensive as it relates to the specifics of the trial, but suffice it to say that Bryant and Milam literally got away with murder. I know this because the next year the two men gave an interview to Look magazine where (and thinking they could not be tried twice for the same crime) they admitted to the killing.

I am sure that in 1955 Mississippi, the killing of Emmett Till was not a singular occurrence, either in its outcome or the nothing nature of the perceived offense that gave people an excuse to kill a black man (or in this case, child). I am equally convinced that this killing could have been forgotten as easily as any other lynching (because that's what it was; it was an unjustified killing to preserve the white power structure in place in the South). But Emmett's mother, Mamie, wasn't going to let that happen.

The Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner, MS. The sign was installed in 2007.

The aftermath of most lynchings of black people after the Civil War pretty much went the same way: no real justice was delivered and the friends and relatives of the murdered man, woman or child (or any witnesses to anything for that matter) were scared into silence by overt threats or the tacit understanding that if they said anything, they would be the next victim. Emmett's great-uncle Mose Wright was the first black man in Mississippi to ever identity a white man as the perpetrator of a crime in a court of law; he moved out of the state after doing that or he likely would have been next.

And by "no real justice was delivered" I mean that the murderers were rarely even charged, let alone tried or found guilty and that any evidence of the crime was promptly literally or figuratively buried. Indeed, in the case of Emmett Till, the county sheriff tried to do just that. He ordered the burial of Emmett's body pretty much as soon as it was found. But Mamie Till stopped him. She demanded his body be brought to Chicago for services and burial. Despite the condition of her son's body, she decided to have the services with an open casket and invited the press to document what two strangers who decided to kill Emmett out of pure hatred had done. I can't imagine how painful losing her son, seeing how badly mutilated his body was and then deciding to let the world bear witness was for Mamie Till.

I said in my opening blog post about this trip that one of the most frustrating things about visiting Civil Rights sites in the South is that there is never any real victory or feel good moment about any of these events. If there's anything achieved, it's a small step forward towards something that might stick or may be erased sometime in the near future. In the case of Emmett Till's murder, there was no justice but the step forward is that some people (maybe not white people in Mississippi) who didn't understand what was happening to black people in the South might understand a bit more about what was going on. That's it. That's the feel good stuff. It doesn't feel all that good considering what happened to Emmett.

Chasing down some sites related to Emmett Till's murder and the resulting trial of Bryant and Milam is like taking a step backwards in time. We spent hours driving around the Mississippi countryside seeing absolutely nothing except flat Mississippi River delta farmland punctuated by occasional stands of trees and swampy bayous. We criss-crossed the freight rail tracks I don't know how many times without seeing a single train. The most evidence we saw of any human habitation were the two prisons we drove past (including the notorious Parchman Farm), a stark reminder that Mississippi locks up people at a greater rate than pretty much any other state in our nation (Mississippi is third as of this writing, behind Oklahoma and Louisiana).

Two scenes from the Mississippi landscape we drove through earlier this month.

I am sure it was mostly my imagination and the subject matter of our quest that day but it was honestly creepy. The vibe was not good. We felt like outsiders taking pictures of things that some residents of the state of Mississippi would rather have forgotten by the world. The high percentage of cars with tinted windows in the state didn't make it any better. Our imaginations ran a little wild based on who we could not see in cars following us or driving past us. Was it someone there to do us harm? Imagination, I'm sure, but the car that drove up as we exited E.T.H.I.C. that nobody got out of until we left was a bit unnerving. At least it didn't follow us.

Our agenda had us stopping at three sites that day: Bryant's Grocery, the excellent but quite remote E.T.H.I.C. which preserves Emmett Till's story; and the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner. Bryant's Grocery is now almost completely collapsed and consumed by the trees and vines now growing over almost every remaining standing surface; it is shown in the cover photograph of this post. It's a stop that's going to take as long as you need to contemplate the chain of events that started there. 

Walking through E.T.H.I.C. is the only real chance we got to spend any significant time in one place on this day. Being inside that building that used to belong to J.W. Milam is chilling. The creaking of the building with any gust of wind and the fact that there was nobody else in the museum and that the motion sensors kept killing the lights on us when we stood still for about 30 seconds didn't help the atmosphere. Maybe it was an effect of the pandemic but it seemed to me that the number of visitors stopping here was extremely low. 

But the place that shocked me the most was the town of Sumner which we drove through to see the courthouse where Bryant and Milam were tried. The town is ridiculously small. There is literally almost nothing there. It seems difficult to believe any sort of business or commerce gets done in this town at all. If you were looking the wrong way when you drove through it you might miss it entirely.

Except for the massive, perfectly maintained, Richardson Romanesque courthouse planted right in the center of town, that is. If Sumner is ridiculously small, then the Tallahatchie County Courthouse is ridiculously big. It feels completely out of place. It feels like someone was determined to let everyone know how important the law is in Tallahatchie County by constructing the biggest, most expensive and intimidating building they could possibly imagine. If that was their intent (and I'm just supposing here, right?) then it worked.

Everything else I needed to know about this courthouse is what's on the lawn and incorporated into the landscaping in front of the building. To the right of the building is a sign titled "Emmett Till Murder Trial". It was placed there in 2007. To the left of the building is a monument to the Confederate soldiers who fought to preserve slavery in the South during the American Civil War. It was placed there almost a century earlier. Priorities, right?

The Tallahatchie County Courthouse, with its white monument to those who fought to preserve slavery.

Sumner, MS. This is the street right in front of the Tallahatchie County Courthouse. 

The day we spent chasing the torture and murder of Emmett Till was the worst day of our trip. It took us into some places that seemed hopeless, with a dark, dark past. I would have preferred to blog about this day as the last Civil Rights post of this trip but it's the earliest of the four events I'm going to write about and the Civil Rights Movement makes more sense generally speaking in chronological order. So it's first.

There is very little comfort in anything we encountered during this day. Sure, the decision by Mamie Till to allow the world to see what two cruel, racist murderers did to a child who did nothing to harm anyone raised the nation's consciousness regarding lynchings that were ongoing in a country that continually boasted about its citizens being more free than any other country on Earth. The ability and speed of the press to broadcast events that ordinarily would have been regional news also helped tremendously, as it would throughout the Civil Rights Movement. This crime is not something I really wanted to know more about but it was important that we did this I think, particularly in 2021 when we are still dealing very much with the same issues as we were in 1955.

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How We Did It

We visited three sites on our search for Emmett Till's story. We did them north to south which was in reverse chronological order because it worked well with other spots we had on our itinerary for that day. The sites are described below in the opposite order we visited them in.

The Bryant Grocery and Meat Market is almost long gone at this point. There are parts of the exterior standing but only barely and the structure is almost completely overrun with vegetation. There's a sign describing what happened here but not much else. Type "Emmett Till Historical Marker" into Google Maps and you'll find the location where Bryant's used to be.

The Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center (or E.T.H.I.C.) is about 20 miles north and west of the former Bryant's location in the town of Glendora. The museum is for sure worth a visit, despite how painful the subject matter is. It doesn't seem like much at first but the displays really are well done. As of this writing, admission is just $5. They are open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. but will open on weekdays after 2 p.m. with a call in advance. 

The Tallahatchie County Courthouse is about 12 miles further north from E.T.H.I.C. in Sumner. Note there are two county courthouses in Tallahatchie County: one in Sumner and one in Charleston. Make sure you go to the correct one.

There is museum in Sumner called the Emmett Till Interpretive Center. As of this writing, they are open by appointment only and offer tours both of their museum and the adjacent Tallahatchie County Courthouse. During our trip planning they were closed so we did not visit, although we did see their storefront across the street from the Courthouse. We thought it was possible to enter the Courthouse but deliberately avoided this. The last thing I wanted to see was a room where two men got away with murder.

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Civil Rights

Taking a trip into the deep south of the United States to explore some of the sites that defined the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s is not a lighthearted proposition. It involves dealing with some pretty unpleasant issues like abduction, torture, death, subjugation, humiliation, voter suppression, beatings, abuse of power with no consequences, rape, castration, lynching and much more. It's uncomfortable. It's upsetting. It's shameful. The stories of the Civil Rights Movement are brutal and disgraceful to the ideals that the United States claims it stands for. But after the presidency of Donald Trump and the events of 2020, it seemed like the right time to take this trip. We dipped our toes into these waters in March with a trip to Richmond, Virginia and then a bit further west to Farmville. Memphis, Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama would be for the most part an entirely different sort of America from Richmond.

I think it's worth spending a few words on just how segregated America was in the 20th century. There is a chapter in Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste where she writes about a meeting held by a committee of Nazi bureaucrats in Berlin in June of 1934 to determine how to institutionalize the inferiority of Jews into the Third Reich. They started by studying the United States. You read that right; the Nazis admired the racial separation in the USA. They were apparently fascinated by the way America could be held up worldwide as a beacon of absolute democracy while simultaneously legally separating black people from the rest of its society. This was their starting model. They studied how America classified people as black vs. white and thought that might inform their own efforts to classify Germans as Jewish or non-Jewish. Ultimately, they rejected America's classification rule that even one drop of African blood in your ancestry meant you were black; they thought it was too harsh. 

Don't believe it? I don't mean the June 1934 meeting (they took minutes after all). I mean America as a legally separated and unequal society. There was a time when I was a lot younger that I wouldn't have either. It sounds farfetched. It sounds like some sort of delusional conspiracy theory. But it's real. Think about it. Talk to people who don't look like you. Put yourself in someone else's shoes. America, the self-proclaimed land of the free and home of the brave, was an obviously segregated society. 

And guess what? It still is. Maybe not so much legally today but all men (or women) are still not created equal even in 2021. If we had made this trip 60 years ago, it would have been way more obvious. We'd have been in a part of the country where laws and the attitudes of society would have made it clear that white folks and black folks are distinctly different classes of people who should not under any circumstances mingle in any way resembling equals. It sounds stupid, doesn't it? It was very, very real.

16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, AL where four little girls were killed in a bombing in 1963.

Statue of Rosa Parks, Montgomery, AL near the spot where she boarded a bus and refused to give up her seat in 1955.

So I can admit I'm not likely the best person to write about the Civil Rights Movement. I'm a white man who grew up in the mostly white suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut. I had no non-white friends growing up in this country. My upbringing was free from prejudice based on my appearance. Race relations were not something I had to deal with before attending college, so I formed my own opinions from the zero experience I had with it as I grew up. I'm only writing all this because I feel inadequately experienced to write about the subject I'm writing about today and for the next few weeks. I do not claim to be an expert or feel anything like the pain someone non-white might feel on a trip like this. On the other hand, nobody else is going to write about my trip and experiences in my blog. So I bring whatever unconscious bias to my experience based on my background.

Our journey this month started in Memphis. From there we made day trips into Arkansas and Mississippi and retreated back to Bluff City for the night. Eventually, we drove east and south for good, stopping overnight in both Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama. The number of sites we visited was extremely limited. We only had a bit more than a week down south. At the same time, we stopped at so many places that bore the scars of segregation. It was staggering. It was everywhere. And that's because it really was everywhere. It was an integral part of society. Everywhere. And yes, even today.

I am not going to write about every site, every building, every museum that we visited. Instead, I'm going to concentrate on the experiences that had the greatest impact on me rather than giving a blow-by-blow of every stone of history we unturned. That's not intended to diminish or minimize some of what we saw. Instead, I see it as placing emphasis to differentiate the most uncomfortable, upsetting and shameful events that we learned about. And I really do mean those words. For the most part, the most cruel, the most visceral and most bloody events are the ones that I'll elaborate on in more detail. They stuck with me the most.

Separate and very unequal drinking fountains at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

This was not my first shot at some of the places we visited. I'd toured through the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis in 2018 and walked around Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham a little more than two years before that. Those experiences, along with our March trip to Richmond and Farmville this year, allowed me to start to connect the dots of this movement in ways I could not before this spring. My second trip through the National Civil Rights Museum was invaluable as an overview of the history not only of the Civil Rights Movement but of the events decades and centuries that laid the groundwork for a United States distinctly separated along racial lines.

There's also nothing like being where history happened. I know it's been between 50 and 70 years since the events we learned about occurred in the towns, cities and countryside we drove through, but the atmosphere, the vibe and the details made an impression and heightened the experience. Reading about history is one thing. Being where it happened drives concepts and moods home like nothing else.

We love to travel and we were for sure looking forward to this trip after many months effectively confined to our home during the global pandemic of the last 15 to 16 months or so. At the same time, there was a good amount of apprehension. We knew it wouldn't be as enjoyable as a trip to see wildlife or nature or sports or architecture or any of the other amazing things we've done over the past almost eight years I've been writing this blog. But it had to be done. We did manage to sprinkle in some other themes like music and food. I'll blog about those too.

The focus here for sure was on a lot of suffering. The difficult part about the entire trip is there was never any real victory. Sure, some laws changed in significant ways but there was never a feel good moment when it felt like the war was won. It is difficult to claim that countless black men and women dying and suffering other inhuman abuses was worth it to get to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which is where a lot of the narratives about the Civil Rights Movement end. On the other hand, their deaths and suffering definitely paved the way for change, as callous as that seems. As we've seen in 2020 and 2021 and 2019 and pick any year really between now and then, the issue of racial inequality in this country is still not solved. At what point do we stop taking incremental steps forward and then ignoring the issue for a couple of years at a time?

Most posts I've written on this blog have been fun and easy to write. These next few posts will not be like those other posts.

The balcony outside Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. Memphis.

I Am A Man Plaza next to Clayborn Temple in Memphis used as a rallying point for the 1968 sanitation workers' strike.

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How We Did It

There is so much to explore in the South related to the Civil Rights Movement. There are museums and statues and buildings and memorials and signs and just open fields or corners of streets seemingly everywhere that had an impact. Something happened seemingly everywhere. Some of these places are shown in or suggested by the photographs above. I'm also electing not to devote future posts to these places.

For a pretty complete overview of the Civil Rights Movement from the landing of the first slave ship in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, I'd suggest a visit to the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The centerpiece of the Museum is the motel wing including the balcony where Dr. King was shot by James Earl Ray's bullet from an adjacent boarding house (the boarding house is also part of the Museum). That event is the terminus of the Museum's timeline and the end point of the exhibits. There is a ton of information to digest in the Museum; we spent a little more than five hours (that time admittedly includes a stop for lunch at the nearby Central BBQ) on this trip. You could easily spend a couple more hours and still miss some things. The Museum is currently open Thursday through Monday.

If you are ever in Birmingham, Alabama, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute offers similar subject matter as the NCRM but with a distinctly Alabama focus. We spent a little more than 90 minutes in the Institute which is located across the street from both the 16th Street Baptist Church and Kelly Ingram Park (which contains a Freedom Walk documenting some of Birmingham's troubled history). The Institute is currently open Thursday through Saturday.

The 16th Street Baptist Church was the target of a Ku Klux Klan bombing in 1963 that killed Addie Collins, Carol McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley (aged between 11 and 14). Under non-global pandemic situations, there are tours of the Church available. The KKK members who planted the dynamite that killed the girls were not even charged until 1977 and it took almost 40 years to get a conviction despite pretty overwhelming evidence of who was responsible for the crime. 

One of the best museums we visited on our trip was the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. It details the story of Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat in the non-white section of a Montgomery city bus in December of 1955. It's a little confusing to visit (you have to buy a ticket then go outside to the other side of the building then go back to the original side where tickets are sold) but it tells the story of Mrs. Parks and events leading up to the more than one year long Montgomery Bus Boycott in an interactive way that we didn't get in other museums on this trip. There's a Rosa Parks statue on the corner of Dexter Avenue and Commerce Street near where she boarded the bus.

The last picture in this post is of the I Am A Man Plaza in Memphis. It's a monument to the men involved in the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers who went on strike to protest unequal pay and benefits for non-white sanitation workers. It's located at the side of the Clayborn Temple in Memphis where the workers gathered before marching to protest the unequal treatment they received. During the protest, most strikers wore signs reading I Am A Man. Clayborn Temple is located at 294 Hernando Street just a short walk from Beale Street in downtown Memphis. The Plaza tells the story of the strike through a timeline around the Plaza's edge.

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