In case you were wondering…

I’m still alive! To anyone who checks up on this blog regularly or even looks at it at all, thank you. And if anyone was interested in an update on the life of Miss Tweedy Blue herself..

I guess you could say I grew up.

A deadly deliverance.

The mountains of Appalachia have always been a source of mystery and enchantment for those who have taken the time to get to know them. They are the alleged haunt of many a distinguished ghost as well as the breeding grounds for some of the best American urban legends whose validity you will ever question. Appalachia harbors centuries of history, many modern-day hillbillies, and billions of tons of coal. So far removed is this ethereal part of the Lower Forty-Eight that it is widely assumed by the outside world that it is acceptable to marry your cousin in places like Kentucky and West Virginia. Indeed, so much myth shrouds these magnificent mountains that it can be a little tough to tell what is truth and what is rotten, media-based generalization. One particularly intriguing Appalachian custom you have probably doubted, however, is no fabrication. Somewhere on the far side of those haloed, blue mountains are a handful of people who have been both admired and ridiculed since as far back as 1901. They are “normal folks” like you and me; hardworking men who settle down with good girls who turn in to good wives who bear and raise any number of rambunctious children. Members of this unique group are notoriously approachable, passionate, and gregarious – especially when discussing religion. The only thing that might distinguish them from your favorite next door neighbors – yes, the only thing that might rouse in you even the slightest shade of dislike – are their snakes.

Some shake their heads dismissively at these “nut-jobs” who so rigidly tread the perilous path they believe God has set aside for them. Some people are genuinely repulsed, shaking their fingers and crying out “blasphemy!” to the highest courts in the land. Others still are merely curios. What does it feel like? How is it done? It is not unheard of, however, for even the most innocent of observers to be caught up in and swept away by the spiritual fervor of those who take up serpents in the name of Jesus Christ. Renowned Southern journalist Dennis Covington was one such nonbeliever. He showed up at a tiny church in Birmingham, AL, to gather information for a piece he was writing on Glenn Summerford. (Summerford was a snake handling preacher who, in 1991, attempted to kill his wife by forcing her hand in to a box of rattlesnakes. Darlene survived but Glenn was ultimately convicted and sentenced to 99 years in prison for attempted murder, though some say he only tried to kill her out of self-defense when she attacked him because “she was going back on God”.) After just a couple services with the handlers, Covington found he could not deny the pull that the church had on him. Once the members of the congregation established that he was not there to ridicule them for their beliefs, they gradually accepted him in to their confidences. So began a journey that consumed five years of Covington’s life (documented in his nonfiction novel “Salvation On Sand Mountain”) as he tried to decipher whether he did or did not believe in “signs following”.

You might be wondering at this point just what it is that possesses an otherwise orthodox Christian to add rattlesnakes to a Sunday morning church service. This uniquely Southern phenomenon was believed to have been born in the early 20^th century when a Church of God preacher named George Went Hensley was driven from his own parish for taking part in religious snake handling. He later started his own ministry, keeping the name “Church of God” but tacking “with Signs Following” on to the end. Hensley soon had a brand new group of followers, all because they chose to take this scripture literally: “And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” (Mark 16:17-18) Were those verses meant to be taken so deeply to heart? Should Signs Followers “test God” by handling deadly snakes that could, and sometimes do, take their lives? Though any and every member of a snake handling church knows the risk involved with what they are doing, many people believe the practice should be banned completely. Legislation to outlaw the possession of snakes for religious purposes (in such cases they are indeed classified as “deadly weapons”) has been passed in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. The only state still free of any restrictions on handlers is West Virginia. Handlers in other states, however, are rarely bothered.

It is difficult to prosecute a group of people who purposefully put themselves in harm’s way. It might seem irrational and grotesque to you, but for Signs Followers, handling is an acceptable, even necessary, manifestation of their relationship with God. It is a path they choose to travel, even when they can clearly see the man at the front of their church is holding his Bible in a hand that has three missing fingers due to snake bites. The injuries and the deaths and the bad press do not phase them. They are in search of the truth; their eyes are fixed heavenward, and they believe with every bit of themselves that Mark 16:17-18 was meant to be taken literally.

The Pope of Pop: A Look at Andy Warhol

Tags

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol – born Andrew Warhola, on August 6^th of 1928 – was a famous American printer maker, painter, and film maker. It was his unique style that inspired the pop art movement. He was born into a family of Slovakian immigrants. Warhol had two older brothers (neither showed any artistic tendency, but the son of Pavlov – Warhol’s eldest brother – did go on to become a successful illustrator of children’s books). After a sickly childhood in Pittsburgh, PA, Warhol moved to New York City in1949 to better pursue his trade. He had studied art in Pittsburgh at what is now called the Carnegie Mellon University, then began a career in magazine illustration and advertising after moving to NYC.

 

Through the years, Andy dabbled in every artistic medium from record producer to author. However, undoubtedly created the most impact via his paintings. Like his colorful, somewhat obscure-looking artwork, Warhol himself was definitely an eccentric human being. In photographs he is almost always wearing a pair of gaudy, overly-round glasses. His hair appears eternally windblown, and he wears a perpetual smirk on his face. Unsurprisingly, he was also famous for the company he kept; Bohemian street people, celebrities, and weird but distinguished intellectuals.

 

Warhol worked with many different designs but was best known for his pop art – an experimental art form that several artists were independently adopting (among them, Roy Lichtenstein) at the time. Known as the “Pope of Pop”, Andy Warhol turned to this new style, where popular subjects became part of the artist’s palette. His early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements, hand-painted with paint drips. Those drips emulated the style of successful abstract expressionists like Willem de Kooning.

 

The title of the Warhol painting I’ve chosen to be my inspiration is very simply “Flowers”, the underlying theme of which is said to be life and death. Despite its extremely basic subject matter – a cluster of brightly-colored hibiscus flowers against a backdrop of dark grass – “Flowers” was actually a fairly controversial painting for Warhol. It earned him critical acclaim as well as a lawsuit, after a lady named Patricia Caulfield claimed the painting was a replication of one of her photographs. The matter was settled with money, but after the incident Warhol was more careful to use pictures he had taken himself when looking for subjects to paint.

Heaven Come Down

Thesis statement: Snake-handling is an obscure but real spiritual medium in a few churches found throughout the eastern and southeastern United States. Though the practice is frightening to those who do not understand it and sometimes deadly to those who do, it is a personal choice (under religious freedom) and it should not be made illegal.

 

1. The act of “taking up serpents” during Christian fellowship was believed to have emerged as early as 1909.

   A) The first man to ever handle a living snake because he felt that a higher power wanted him to was probably George Went Hensley, a Church of God minister from southeastern Tennessee. It was said after much fasting and praying that the Holy Spirit led Hensley out in to the woods and told him to take up a Timber Rattler. Hensley handled the snake as directed by what he believed to be the voice of God, and no harm was done to him.

   B) After his experience in the woods, Hensley began to spread what he believed to be a new-found gospel, a literal interpretation of Mark chapter 16, verses17-18: “And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover…”

2. How much do you really know about snake handlers? The practice is unfamiliar to the majority of us, and seeing someone preach the word of God and then turn around and pick up a serpent undoubtedly seems like a sinister paradox.

   A) Snake-handling churches are widely Pentecostal in their belief system, even though the alleged “founder” of the movement was from the Church of God.

   B) The events at these churches do not just consist of only snake-handling. Services usually include preaching, spirited singing, praying, and speaking in tongues. They may last for two or three hours. The parishioners also follow Christian tenets of baptism by water and by the Holy Spirit, healing, cleanliness in daily living, and the washing of feet.

   C) People attending services at these churches, even official members, are not required to handle snakes. In fact, picking up a serpent would be strongly discouraged unless the person doing it was completely sure they were “anointed” by the Holy Spirit. (If they are not “anointed”, their faith would be more likely to fail and thusly, get them bitten.)

Days in the Sun

Tags

1950, Elvis Presley, Memphis, Music history, Rockabilly, Sam Phillips, Sun Records

Sam Phillips of the legendary Sun Records is best known as the man who put his foot in the door of the music industry so that “Rockabilly” could enter. But Sam, by his own definition, was “just a struggling cat down trying to develop new and different artists, get some freedom in music, and tap some of the resources and people that weren’t being tapped”. Born Samuel Cornelius Phillips in Florence, Alabama, 1923, Sam always knew he was destined for great things. The great things he had pictured for himself, however, had nothing at all to do with discovering talent that would eventual shape the entire feel of the music world. Quite the opposite, in fact. He wanted to be a lawyer. Fortunately for Elvis fans like myself, Sam was the son of a cotton farmer. His father did not have the funds to send him to law school. Consequently, a lot of time was spent at home on the farm. That’s when Sam started listening.

 

What he heard was the blues, in its most pure and stringent form – gleaned as it was from the hard work and tattered hymnals of slaves on a cotton farm. It was on his father’s farm that Sam Phillips first began to imagine what music would be like if the world did not pay attention to the ethnicity of the singer. It was a simple and yet incredibly unconventional idea that would ultimately carry him to success and make his name legendary. Having perhaps the slightest inkling of his genius, or maybe just a passion for the music itself, Sam shrugged off his dead lawyer dreams in favor of broadcasting school. In the 1940s, Sam landed himself a position as a disc jockey at a radio station out of Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The station was called WLAY, and wouldn’t you know, it had an open format – meaning the station spun the hits of both white and black musicians. This reminded him of his time back home on the cotton farm, and he cites WLAY as a big inspiration for what he would later do in Memphis.

 

On January 3rd, 1950 (actually two days before his birthday), Sam opened a business called “Memphis Recording Services” at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee. I have to wonder if God blessed that day or what, because it certainly was the beginning of something miraculous. Memphis Recording Services allowed amateurs to make their own records for a meager fee of two dollars. The thing about amateurs is, a lot of them don’t even know how good they are. It was in this fashion that Sam stumbled upon artists like B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf; it was all “accidental”. In ’52, Sam would launch his own label: Sun Records. From there, things really got cracking. The 50s was a volatile time in the music industry by anyone’s account and there were a lot of new sounds just begging for a chance to be heard. Sam Phillips was known to specialize in R&B music, but he actually ended up recording what was considered to be the first Rock ‘n Roll record: “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats. That was just the beginning. Sun Records produced more Rock ‘n Roll records than any other record label of its time during its 16 year run, with a total of 226 singles.

 

Sam had a passion for fresh sounds. He sought after music that made him feel something, not just the type of stuff he knew was doing well on the charts at the moment. Maybe that’s why his ears perked up when a scrawny kid from Tupelo, Mississippi came to see him in the summer of 1954. Elvis Presley sang a cover of Arthur Crudup’s “That’s Alright (Mama)”, and Sam was impressed. He signed Elvis, and though not nationally acclaimed, Elvis gained massive popularity in the South and became the calling card for Sun Records. Soon Sam was signing lots of local talent. Some names you might recognize being Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and Johnny Cash. Unfortunately, regional acclaim could not keep the wolves from Sun Records’ door. By mid ’55, Sam was having trouble paying the bills. He sold Elvis’s recording contract to RCA Records for a total of $35,000.

 

It seemed that as the 50s faded, so faded the shine of Sun Records. Sam sold the contracts for a lot of his major talents and sent them on their way. In the 1960s, he sold Sun itself. But that was not the end of Sam’s story, it was merely the closing of a chapter. Sam pursued lots of different business ventures throughout his life, including but not limited to opening the first all-female radio station (WHER) and investing in a large portion of the Holiday Inn company before it got off the ground and became the massive hotel chain that it is today. There was no doubt that Sam had an open style and insightful guidance that seemed to allow musicians to search and feel their way to a point to where they would perform beyond Phillips’ and their own expectations. Sam also seemed to have a sense for when the artist was about to reach the point of their best performance.

 

All his life, Phillips recorded looking for a feel – not technical perfection. Emotion; isn’t that what music is all about? Sam actually told Elvis the worst thing he could go for was perfection. I think that was a great part of Sam Phillips’ genius, and a definite part of his success.