After some locals opened with a set perhaps too soft for the likes of that night’s crowd, two strange men took to the tiny stage, a platform rising maybe only a foot from the floor and only slightly larger than most people’s dinner tables. It was almost completely devoid of equipment when the men, who called themselves The Hooten Hallers, began to set up. While Andy began assembling a drum kit, John began to pace, wringing his hands, and grinning weirdly. The look on his bearded, sweaty face was wild, hurried, and almost nervous. He moved around the tiny stage like a panther in a sideshow cage.

Finally, Andy gave John a nod. Someone slipped a guitar into this strange beast’s hands, and everything about John changed. With the addition of his instrument he was complete. His entire being relaxed, and his eyes swept over the crowd with an unnerving look of total confidence.

A hard, dirty blues riff unwound itself into the air and a mean, pulsing rhythm beat forth from the kick drum. John swayed in his Carhartt overalls, his head cocked back and to the side, his eyes closed. When the lyrics came they were the mournful roadhouse lyrics of a man who has truly known blues in his life.

His voice isn’t so much gravelly—it’s more like broken glass. There are times that John’s voice finds a real Tom Waits quality in its deepness and grit, but sometimes it’s more like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins in its ascending-pitched growls of lyrics. But maybe it’s more accurate to say that John’s vocal cords are the conduits by which the ghosts of John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf communicate. When The Hooten Hallers perform “Tonite, He’s on Death Row,” John appears to weep the lyrics and bleed the notes onto the neck of his guitar.

That night they played all the songs from their album Greetings from Welp City! Immediately obsessed, I bought the CD and wore it out waiting for another release.

Chillicothe Fireball came out in 2014, introducing Kellie Everett on bass and baritone saxophones. The Midwestern-blues sound had evolved into something else, emanating a sense of swampland magic as sorrowful and alluring as a French Quarter funeral. It’s mournfully aggressive, the kind of music you want blaring from your car when you step out to do the most badass thing you’re ever going to have to do.

The Hooten Hallers have channeled the songs of all the heartache and anger and triumph that anyone living on the fringes has come to know. I shiver when I hear “I Know Everything” or “I’m Used to the Truth,” with the beautiful instrumental work and simple-yet-profound lyrics like, “I’m stronger than dirt and I ain’t in no hurry. I’m used to the truth, I’m from Missouri.”

So the band is in no hurry, but something new is being painstakingly crafted somewhere as I write this. An acoustic EP is due out this summer, and rumor has it a full-length album will follow in 2017. From what I’ve seen around YouTube I get a sense that the band’s acoustic sound will bear the influence of some wonderful, dead country outlaws, but I don’t think the Hallers could completely depart from the blues even if they’d want to.

So whenever the new music comes, I’ll be waiting for it, and I hope it’s dirty…that’s the truth.

The post The Hooten Hollers appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

River-Horse Pavilion
Columbia, Missouri

By Kit Salter

In March 1995, my wife Cathy and I went to wish Godspeed to Columbia, Missouri, resident William Lewis Trogdon as he was leaving for New York City to begin a 103-day nautical journey, which he would chronicle in the 1999 book, River-Horse: A Voyage Across America, under the pen name of William Least Heat-Moon.

Trogdon called his newly acquired boat Nikawa, which means “river-horse” in the Osage language. This 22-foot C-Dory with twin engines was nestled in a solid towing trailer. As the author prepared to ease both his boat and his hopes into motion, Cathy presented him with an ivory amulet of a sea otter. I handed him a Timex Expedition watch that had been my trusty travel companion. On that spring day, little did we know that the C-Dory being carefully pulled into traffic would later stand in a bold wooden pavilion just outside Columbia.

Today, as you drive north on Highway 63 just coming into Columbia from the direction of Jefferson City, the massive red metal roof of the Boone County History and Culture Center catches your eye. Then you see an open structure next to the parking lot. This is the River-Horse Pavilion, built in 2006 to celebrate Heat-Moon’s journey in Nikawa, the very boat we saw leave his home some years earlier.

Heat-Moon wrote on the final page of River-Horse that he had ridden Nikawa “5,288 watery miles from the Atlantic.” At the very end of that trip, to celebrate arrival at the Pacific, he reached for a pint of Atlantic water he had safeguarded for 103 days. He writes, “I raised the bottle  high, sunlight striking through the glass, salt waves rising to it as if thirsty, and I said, ‘We bring this gift from your sister sea — our voyage is done. Then I poured the stream into the Pacific and went back to the wheel of our river horse, and I turned her toward home.”

Some years after completing that adventure, Heat-Moon presented his already fabled C-Dory to the Boone County Historical Society.  The Society was proud to have such a fine bit of Missouriana from one of the state’s most productive and creative authors, but they had to ask, “How do we display it?”

The historical society wanted to make Nikawa available 24/7, yet protect it from the weather and potential pilfering. Local architect Nick Peckham (himself a marine engineer) worked with volunteers to design and build the wooden pavilion that stands adjacent to the Society’s main building.  This open structure provides easy viewing of the boat (behind plexiglass), a map of Nikawa’s route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and photographs of the craft and the author. Nikawa, in fact, was now home, resting and lending its stature to all of Boone County.

But the backstory of this literary landscape possesses two more elements. In 1978, Heat-Moon was teaching at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, when it had to let him go because of declining enrollments. At the same time, he and his wife decided to divorce.

Heat-Moon reacted to that pair of events by undertaking a 13,000-mile solo trip in his 1975 Ford Econoline van. That 90-day journey (which began on Earth Day in 1978) resulted in the 1982 book, Blue Highways: A Journey into America, which spent 42 weeks on the NYT Best Seller List and has never been out of print. In the early pages of Blue Highways, Heat-Moon declares, “A man who couldn’t make things go right, could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life.”

With Nikawa’s historic voyage across the continent, William Least Heat-Moon showed again that he “could at least go,” and this time he took contemporary travel exploration to a new level of innovation. To complete the circle, I have my Timex back — but the amulet remains with the author.

Kit Salter lived in 22 different places by the end of high school. He graduated from Oberlin College and took his Masters and PhD at Berkeley. He is professor emeritus of geography at the University of Missouri and taught for UCLA, the University of Oregon, and National Geographic. He has been married to writer and geographer Cathy Lynn Salter for 38 years.

The post William Least Heat-Moon – Columbia, Missouri appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Parkview
St. Louis, Missouri

By Devin Thomas O’Shea

The epigraph of The Tunnel reads, “The descent to hell is the same from every place,” but William Gass chose to set his magnum opus in a leafy suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, called Parkview.

Parkview is one of the first White Flight subdivisions ever constructed. It was a planned neighborhood, a prototype that would use winding lanes and a single outlet to discourage “traffic.” In the basement of one of these darling mansions, based on William Gass’ real house, Gass imagined a history professor at an upscale *cough* Wash U *cough* Midwestern university. Professor Koehler sits to write the introduction to his career-defining work, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. But he faces a block and pens The Tunnel instead — a messy, dark, lyrical portrayal of Koehler himself.

Instead of the neat, well-researched book dissecting the Nazis, Koehler describes the fascism in his own heart. In his basement, digging down in the soil of his soul, he also literally tunnels in the dirt floor of his Parkview cellar.

According to Gass, “[t]he reader is to feel, as he or she doubtless will, as if they are crawling through an unpleasant and narrow darkness.” We learn Koehler threw a brick on Kristallnacht. He kills his wife’s cat when it gets in the way of his digging. He runs out of space for all his soil, but luckily the history professor’s wife is an antiques shop owner. Their second floor is lined with Martha’s restored bureaus, and though Koehler fears Martha’s gaze — and wants to hide the tunnel (and The Tunnel) from her — he loads soil from his basement dig into her furniture, where she’ll surely find it one day. At the end, Martha finds Koehler’s filt­h and confronts him in the basement. She tips a drawer onto his manuscript, and the dirt goes everywhere: in his lap and all over his pages. Martha orders him to clean her cabinets, and Koehler wonders if she understood his pun about soiling her drawers.

Gass and Koehler both lived in secluded Parkview, a neighborhood built upon the philosophy that rich people shouldn’t have to share the sidewalks with poor people. In the 1900s, downtown St. Louis was busy and dirty. The rich built Parkview far away, just across the city limit, literally on the edge of the county. The Tunnel — written and set in the center of this planned community — is a deeply moral book about filth hiding below the surface of respectability. Like Gass, Koehler is an esteemed American intellectual with a wife, a house, and tenure. His research aims to find what was so unusually nasty about the villains of history, but long before he starts digging in the St. Louis mud, Koehler concludes that the Germans were just like you and me. Fascism is not aberrant. It has always been down in our subconscious basement; it lives in everyday hatreds.

Parkview’s wealth has been resilient in the face of St. Louis’s century-long economic decline, but just down the street, the city’s racial segregation has made poverty in the Black community worse every day. The so-called “Delmar Divide” represents one of the largest economic cliffs in the country. On the south side, White professors raise families in leafy, historic neighborhoods with old-timey gas lamps. Just up the street from Koehler’s basement, the redlining starts. Black suburbs like Mill Creek were destroyed to ghettoize Black St. Louisans in the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects. The city defunded Pruitt-Igoe soon after it was completed in 1956, then condemned and demolished it in the 1970s. Now, even the North County homes are falling down or being deconstructed because the bricks are worth more than the walls. Beauty is everywhere in North St. Louis — but people go hungry, police violence runs rampant, schools are pipelines to the prisons, and poverty abounds. And you don’t have to dig to find it.

Devin Thomas O’Shea’s writing is in Boulevard, Paterson Literary Review, Midwestern Gothic, The St. Louis Anthology, and elsewhere. Chapter one of his manuscript, Veiled Prophet, is published in Embark Literary Journal. He graduated Northwestern’s MFA program in 2018. Find him on Twitter.

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Central Elementary School
Ferguson, Missouri

By Taylor Fox

There’s a haunted feeling that comes with walking around an empty schoolyard. Barren playgrounds and darkened windows convey emptiness, dejection. It’s unnatural for playgrounds to go quiet. Yet, outside the historic Central Elementary School in Ferguson, Missouri, that eerie feeling is missing, replaced by a comforting glow provided by the towering trees, climbing vines, and community garden of fragrant herbs.

Did you know there was a time Ferguson was all a farm?

Central alumna Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry is filled with imagery that conjures up the aura of her former school. She specifically reflects on the Ferguson of her youth in a poem honoring Jamyla Bolden, a 9-year-old black girl shot and killed in her Ferguson home in 2015 when a man shot into the house, targeting someone he believed stole from him.

The poem illustrates the commonalities between the author and Jamyla, who attended Koch Elementary School, just over three miles east of Central. In the poem, Nye wishes she could pass her own lived years on to the girl who was taken too soon.

Drive down Florissant Road today, and it is hard to imagine as farmland. The asphalt street is lined with barbecue restaurants and dozens of murals honoring the Black Lives Matter movement. Outside the Ferguson Police Department stands a row of signs and artwork remembering those killed by police violence in the United States.

Leaving Florissant Road and all of its restaurants, you immediately enter the quiet, calm neighborhood surrounding Central Elementary. Nye has described the area as a “leafy green historic suburb” and fondly remembers her old brick school. Built in 1880, the school flaunts a plaque acknowledging its listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The original bell tower — visible from both the playground and the community garden — still crowns the old building.

Considering Nye drafted her first poem when she was six years old, it’s easy to imagine the young artist gazing out the school’s wrought iron windows onto the large garden below and piecing together her earliest works.

Nye attended Central from kindergarten until sixth grade, and in 1966 her family moved to Palestine, her father’s country of origin. She has often spoken on her experiences as a Palestinian-American going to a then all-white school and in a 2014 essay wrote, “In Ferguson, an invisible line separated white and black communities. In Jerusalem, a no-man’s land separated people, designated by barbed wire.”

Nye’s poetry often reflects the parallels between her two childhood homes. Her first published collection, Different Ways to Pray, is entirely on the topic of cultural similarities and differences, using her own Palestinian-American identity as a model.

As a first generation Cuban-American with an ethnically Jewish heritage, my own parallels to Nye are too striking to ignore. I can imagine the feeling of other she must have endured in Ferguson, accepted in neither the white nor black communities. After moving to Palestine, where she may have felt even more of an outsider, she began to study culture and identity, perhaps to find her own sense of belonging. I too have felt the drive to study my heritage in order to feel enough, to feel like you deserve to claim your roots.

Despite our commonalities, it is also not lost on me that, while I cannot trace my ancestry back to Israel, we are from opposite sides of that barbed wire fence, belonging to two cultures with more in common than they are willing to admit. We are from two cultures that historically villainize the other without the effort of understanding and respect.

We share this severing too with Ferguson itself, represented by the seeming innocence of the empty Central Elementary School across town from the home where Jamyla was killed and next to a street so often shown as a scene of violence against black people — violence portrayed to make a point, without respect for the motivation behind the movement or any attempt to amend the systemic issues that have led to this point.

Taylor Fox recently graduated from the University of Missouri with a Master of Arts in Geography. A former Peace Corps Volunteer, she has spent her career learning and writing about cultures and hopes to continue sharing this passion with others. Fox has also been published in Missouri Life Magazine and the Columbia Daily Tribune.

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Brick District Playhouse
Fulton, Missouri

By Alex Dzurick

The 1940 novel Kings Row once so offended residents of Fulton, Missouri, that you couldn’t find a copy on the shelves of the local library. You could, however, in the very same town, find a copy on my mother’s bookshelf. She was a history teacher who taught classes on Missouri history, so even as a child, I had heard the rumors: Kings Row was based on Henry Bellamann’s life growing up in Fulton, and his frank portrayal of the darker side of life in my hometown did not earn him admiration by its social elites.

With all my mother’s connections to the book, I’m not surprised her copy occupied such a prominent place in our home, next to heirlooms and family photographs. In middle school, I asked if I could read it to complete a book challenge. She said that I could as long as I was careful with her copy, and I remember stretching out on the living room sofa, devouring the novel over just a few days. It’s a shocking story, exploring topics like euthanasia and incest, so looking back I’m surprised that I was trusted enough as a young teenager to handle the material.

Take a drive down Fulton’s Court Street today, and you’ll still see the Victorian-style homes that those elites once lived in. It’s easy to imagine how young Mr. Bellamann must have felt seeing those homes and knowing it was their occupants who bullied him, ostensibly for his German heritage and friendships with kids from the poorer, industrial neighborhoods. In Kings Row, on the other hand, Bellamann’s alter ego Parris Mitchell is quite well liked by everyone. Still, he discovers the sinister side of those wealthy residents while apprenticing under the secretive Dr. Tower, who is likely based on a real local doctor.

A bit further down Court Street, you’ll find the Brick District Playhouse, which served as the town’s only movie theater from 1928 to 2006. My mother worked there part-time for decades, and I followed in her footsteps when I turned 16. The small cinema had just two screens, with one built into a former balcony, and the lobby doors opened directly onto the brick streets of downtown Fulton. The brick building’s marquee was changed by hand even in its last years, and it wasn’t unheard of for birds and bats to swoop down from the ceiling during a film. Today, the building has been converted into a live performance venue, hosting plays, concerts, and lectures.

The theater itself is part of Kings Row lore, thanks to a 1942 film adaptation starring Robert Cummings as Parris Mitchell and future president Ronald Reagan as Drake, one of Parris’s wealthy friends. The movie did little to appease Fulton’s residents, exposing their town’s secrets to an even wider audience. Tensions had eased by the later part of the century, however, and several cast members came to Fulton in June 1988 to celebrate their source material (Reagan did not attend, as he was busy politicking). My mom had the opportunity to meet them at the theater. Her copy of Kings Row has a red autograph inside the front cover — “To Beautiful Lola. Love, Bob Cummings.”

Later, I had the chance to watch the film, which brought characters like Parris, Drake, and Dr. Tower to life in new ways for me. The novel’s darkest themes were removed to satisfy film codes, but it remained a tale of small town hypocrisy. And the film’s visuals are eerily reminiscent of the older parts of Fulton, as evidenced by the historic photos and sketches that hung in our home. Despite the passage of some 50 years between the film’s release and my own youth, it became apparent to me how easily Fulton’s residents would have seen themselves in Bellamann’s work.

I now live just outside of Philadelphia, where Bellamann was a dean at a prestigious music school before writing Kings Row. When I return to Fulton these days, and I pass those grand old Court Street homes just a few blocks north of the movie theater, I can’t help but look at them through Bellamann’s eyes, seeing the town in its honesty, with all its grandeur and all its faults.

Alex Dzurick is an educator and writer originally from Fulton, Missouri. He has published in The New Territory, NSTA’s The Science Teacher, and NAAEE’s Urban Environmental Education. Currently living in the Philadelphia region, Alex spends most of his time (when he’s not teaching) writing quizbowl questions, building crossword puzzles, or reading random Wikipedia articles.

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