Open Tabs / 1

A new series at The DETOURIST featuring what's feeding my soul this week.

Back in July, I wrapped up the ADS 12-Stop Program, a month-long book tour in support of A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road. The epic journey kicked off at the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta and took me to some of the best independent bookstores in the Southeast. Here, as a nod to one of the best running bits in print journalism, Harper’s Index,¹ is a breakdown:

Miles travelled: 6,000+
Total events: 13
Bookstore events: 11
Museum events: 2
Slashed tires: 2
One-way flights: 1
Old friends met: lots
New friends made: lots
Coffee consumed: ungodly gallons
Wardrobe changes: just the one, not including:
Minor league baseball hats sported: 7, including one featuring:
The greatest mascot ever: The Pimento Cheese Sandwich
New statues of Nathan Bedford Forrest unveiled during the tour: 1
Unplanned run-ins with my brother at a random off-ramp in Alabama: 1
Being recognized by the manager while browsing in the Greatest Bookstore in the World: priceless.

I’ve devoted a lot of space to long-form essays in the last few years, but since I’ve given y’all a long and dense book to read, I thought I would shift the vibe here to shorter bits and bobs from around the region, and from “the region in my mind,” to borrow from James Baldwin. Jimmy would have been 100 this year, so I hope you’ll join me in observing his centenary with an occasional reading of his work. (In the near future, I am going to offer something in the way of a read-along of some of Baldwin’s work, along with another author or two. ADS is all about unlikely yet generative convergences, and I love putting authors in conversation with one another around that imaginary dinner table in my mind. But more on that anon.)

Also—I am preparing an opportunity for you to give me your own feedback about what you do or don’t want to see here at The DETOURIST henceforth, as we move into a new post-book-writing phase. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts you want to share right now, then by all means 👇

If not, then let’s get to it. Here are some of the tabs I’ve currently got open on my web browser (literally and/or metaphorically), or, a jumble of probably-related items that have been on my map lately.

The Barn
Be warned: if Patrick Weems ever asks you to go on a little drive, prepare to have your world turned upside down.

I thought I had a decent handle on the basic outlines (and geography) of the Emmett Till story until a couple of years ago, when my good friend Patrick suggested we take a drive out to a barn west of Drew, MS. That adventure turned out to be one of the most disorienting segments of any road trip John and I have ever done together.² After we parted ways with Patrick in Sumner, and headed northbound on Mississippi Highway 3 to Marks from Tutwiler, John Hayes and I listened to a 2021 essay by Wright Thompson about the Barn for The Atlantic, which completely reoriented my understanding of that horrific—and in many ways, definitively American—episode. On private property, unmarked, and miles away from miles away, The Barn is where Emmett Till was tortured and killed in August, 1955, and it has been missing from almost every standard account of what happened to Till that dark night many decades ago. The deeper story of the Barn is the subject of Wright’s new book, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, which dropped yesterday. Wright, a veteran journalist whose sports writing for ESPN is some of the best you’ll ever read, is a Delta native who—like me—didn’t learn much about the Emmett Till case growing up. But in Wright’s case, that horrific crime took place in his area code. He brings a very personal and local perspective to this story in a book that is going to bring a lot of attention to a side of a story that has “hidden in plain sight” for decades.

(N.B.: I shot the photograph above at the Barn last August 27, on eve of the 68th anniversary of Till’s lynching. Much more to share about that event in a future posting.)

Murmur Trestle
I am fresh off a trip to Athens, GA last week, where I had the opportunity to attend the opening of Jason Thrasher’s Murmur Trestle exhibit at Ace/Francisco Gallery, celebrating the release of his book of the same name, published by The University of Georgia Press. Jason is a veteran of the Athens music scene, and has been photographing many of Athens’ legions of great musicians for 20 years. Murmur Trestle documents the famous railroad trestle in Athens that appeared on the back cover of R.E.M.’s debut album, Murmur. The trestle was demolished in 2021, but rebuilt last year as part of The Firefly Trail, a pedestrian/cycling rail-trail that, when finished, will span 39 miles between Athens and Union Point in Greene County. Which is nice.

Athens Potluck
Jason’s got a lot going on these days, including curating a show at the Special Collections Library at UGA entitled Athens Potluck. Based on a book of the same name, the show features 33 stalwarts of the fabled Athens music scene from Vanessa Briscoe Hay of Pylon to some of the younger artists who are shaping the scene today. The show introduced me to a slew of Athens musicians I had never heard of, and made me realize that the musical legacy there is much deeper than R.E.M. and The B-52s (although that would be enough!). I’m working on an ADS playlist for some of these artists, so stay tuned. I am generally a slow learner and a late-adopter, and tend to assume that everyone else already knows this stuff, but whether you do or do not, have a listen to a couple of the outfits that are currently in rotation on the ADS jukebox: The Glands and Now It’s Overhead. Also in rotation: Since it is now officially fall, because they are the most autumnal band there is, and just because I love them, R.E.M.

Special Collections
Did you ever get to visit The Georgia Music Hall of Fame in Macon? Did you ever wonder what happened to it? It closed in 2011, but most of the museum’s collection is now in the hands of the Special Collections Libraries at UGA. (Read Jerry Grillo’s story about what happened to the collection, for Atlanta Magazine.) There is every reason to hope for exciting new things from the collection, under the direction of “rock ‘n’ roll treasure hunter” curator Ryan Lewis.

McDowell St.
Speaking of music: on 13 September, my eldest son Henry and his jazz ensemble, Unit 229, released their debut record, McDowell St. It is a brilliant piece of work, performed by five Asheville high school students who have done something truly countercultural, radical, and beautiful on this record: they performed and recorded this album (which includes two original compositions) live in the studio, in an age when many of the musicians we all listen to often make “albums” with people they never even meet. Unit 229 have an incredibly advanced knowledge of the jazz form, and an ability to converse with one another musically that is frankly astonishing. Oh, I know you never would, but just in case you are tempted to think this is just some high school garage band vanity project, the record was produced by Kevin Moloney, producer-in-residence at Citizen Studios here in Asheville, who started out as an engineer on the first five albums made at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin by a little four-piece outfit called U2.

Check it out:

OK that was a lot.

I’ll be at The Brooklyn Book Festival in New York this week, so if you’re in the area, holler! As always, thanks for being here, and drop me a line!

1. A special nod is due to the creator of the Index, the great Lewis H. Lapham, two-time editor of Harper’s and subsequently, Lapham’s Quarterly, an unfailingly eccentric, brilliant, and unclassifiable feast of words and images intended “to bring the voices of the past up to the microphone of the present.” Lapham died in Rome two months ago. The future of his eponymous Quarterly—an unabashedly analog outlier in an increasingly digital publishing universe—is currently in limbo.

2. I recount the story of that journey, which really began much earlier, in 2018, in A Deeper South, pp. 221-257 (and it begins with one of my favorite sentences in the book, in case you need a nudge).