‘The blues at gunpoint’

Last night as I was leaving work I saw two rockabilly dudes with tight jeans and plaid shirts and slick black hair peering into the windows of Sun Studio, taking pictures through the glass because the place was closed. It made me smile. I get a kick out of living in a place that’s a mecca for a lot of people searching for some cultural roots.

My co-worker David wrote this this morning and it’s just about as perfect a description of life in the Dirty South as there is:

OK, this is me. I like living in Memphis. I like the whiff of lore and hijinks here — and of the Wonder Bread plant, when the wind is right. I like driving past Sun Studio on my way to work every morning. I like a chopped pork sandwich piled about four fingers high, but hold the slaw. I like the South. Yeah, the North thinks we’re mostly hicks down here, thinks we wear the taint of defeat like it’s this new cologne. But we write like sons of bitches, down here. I mean William Faulkner. I mean Eudora Welty. I mean Flannery O’Conner. I mean Tennessee Williams. I mean William Gay and Tim Gautreaux and Cormac McCarthy before he went Out West or to the End of the World or wherever he’s hanging these days. I could go on. You give me a snort of Kentucky bourbon and I will. And we sing like sons of bitches, too. I mean Hank and Patsy and our boy Elvis, Carl Perkins and the Drive-By Truckers, too. I mean Memphis’ own Lucero, the best rock ‘n’ roll band running. I mean Blue Mountain. I mean Amy LaVere. Those Avett Brothers. Emmylou, the queen. I mean Robert Belfour, who sings the blues like he’s got them at gunpoint.

Yeah, I quoted the whole thing. It was too good to chop.