Turnrow's first Mississippi Delta Lay-By Literature & Music Festival kicked off Thursday evening with shots of Wild Turkey. Sadly, participating author Ace Atkins (left) was the only taker. If unwilling to hit the sauce straightaway, it was a fine and curious crowd who came to hear Atkins and fellow author Martin Clark speak about "The Dirty South," a landscape both writers have surveyed —
Atkins as a crime reporter and Clark as a circuit court judge in rural Virginia.
Both authors agreed that real-life crimes inspired their fiction, and both admitted they could never dream up stories as rich and compelling as those that prompted their latest novels. For Wicked City, Atkins researched Phenix City, Alabama, a vice-ridden town that made national headlines in the 1950s. His noir-style novel captures the heated feud between local citizens and the gangsters who overran the town. (Read more in this interview.) Clark's novel, The Legal Limit, is a riveting tale of an attorney whose judgment is swayed by a long-buried family secret, and through this story, also inspired by true events, Clark hopes to make readers reconsider the blurry line between law and justice. (He expounds on this in an interview at his publisher's website.)
Feeling dirty and sober, we all headed over to the Blue Parrot Cafe for some sanctifying blues courtesy of the Revelators, who consisted of Duff Dorrough, Bobby Harris and Carl Massengale.
Among the audience members was Tom Rankin, a filmmaker, photographer and folklorist at Duke University who was traveling with Duff and taking photographs of the Delta. He explained the genesis of the Revelators, which originated not on someone's backporch one sweaty night, as expected, but surprisingly at the Smithsonian Institute. They had asked Rankin to recommend the best all-white gospel group in the Delta. Having heard Duff and a few friends perform at the funeral of Mississippi musical icon Charley Jacobs, Rankin recommended Duff, who put together a full band but came down sick when it was time to play in D.C.
The group has performed in many incarnations throughout the years, but it was refreshing to see this variation, with Bobby Harris (center), a powerful singer from Drew, Mississippi, who sang with the conviction of a thankful man snatched from damnation. Massengale, from south Mississippi, is a walking repository of gospel knowledge with a heavenly voice. He seemed incapable of rest, playing off to the side while the band took a ten-minute break. And then there's Duff, who can pull some of the sweetest notes you've ever heard from his guitar and can sound like Elvis if he'd been humbled and came back home to Mississippi. Topping it off were the shrimp hushpuppies by Regina LaVere, such a heavenly taste on this, a fine night to be redeemed.
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