Karen Peck seems incapable of projecting the cool indifference that many celebrities affect on a red carpet.

Instead, she waves giddily to the fans who are shouting her name along the roped-off pathway winding through Dollywood for the annual Southern Gospel Music Awards. Peck, looking belle-of-the-ball in a rustling black gown, would pause to hug each of them, like long-lost kin, if there were time.

The gospel singer, who studied music at Brenau for two years in the 1980s, is both a presenter for this awards ceremony and a nominee for “Favorite Soprano,” an award she has won 11 times. Karen Peck and New River have become a mainstay act of the “Gaither Homecoming Series” with five consecutive No. 1 songs and a “Song of the Decade” to its credits.

She walks past the Southern Gospel Music Hall of Fame, with its old-fashioned, hardwood church pews, yellowed sheet music, and other homey artifacts that date to the genre’s origins a century ago as men’s “quartet music.” While women have made jubilant inroads in the industry, Peck, 51, is one of just a few who front a band with her marquee name, and she is winding up her second term as the first female president of the Southern Gospel Music Association.

“It’s still a male-dominated field, but that’s changing,” she says, in between all of the hugging, back-and-forth compliments, and photo shoots backstage. “I have a passion for honoring our legends and preserving the music’s history, which is one reason I’m here.”

The atmosphere – part evangelical homecoming and part class reunion – noticeably lacks the catty tension that simmers behind the scenes at other awards ceremonies. “Our community,” Peck says, referring to gospel artists, “is like a great, big family. The singers of my generation all grew up together. When we have troubles, as people do, we pray for each other. We’re not perfect — and it’s human nature to be just a little competitive with each other in music — but we’re all engaged in a ministry. If we talk the talk, we try to walk the walk and support each other. We aren’t ‘stars’ anyway – Jesus Christ is the star.”

She does a last-minute mirror check in the “Hen House,” as the women’s dressing room in Dollywood is labeled (the vending room across the hall is the “Biscuit Basket”) with her longtime friend, Sheri Easter, a “Favorite Alto” nominee who earned her MBA through Brenau’s online program in 2006.

“But this is the mackdaddy event for our form of music!” Peck says.

Easter, smiling, says, “Karen can always bring out a laugh in me, especially when I need it most.”

While they are waiting in the wings, Paul Couch, entertainment director of Dollywood, approaches Peck and says, “Hey, aren’t you that girl in that movie? Can I get your autograph?”

She playfully swats him with her evening bag.

Peck will appear, alongside Dolly Parton, Queen Latifah, and Kris Kristofferson, in “Joyful Noise,” a movie about a struggling, small-town gospel choir in Georgia scheduled for release in January. The film’s much-anticipated soundtrack, produced by five-time Grammy winner Mervyn Warren, includes a song, “Mighty High,” performed by Peck, who plays the master of ceremonies for a sing-off.

“I think it’s great that a big, mainstream movie is celebrating Southern Gospel and including a track from an artist who has worked so hard and brought so much to the industry for years,” Couch says.

Adds Peck, in her cane-syrup drawl, “It’s just a tiny role, but I’m excited that I got to say ‘y’all’ on camera.”

The movie’s casting agency had scoured contemporary Southern Gospel music for an authentic, telegenic artist and settled on Peck, who did not have to audition. She has been playing that role since she was four.

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When Peck was growing up in Gainesville, Georgia, her parents would take their three daughters to the marathon, all-night gospel “sings” at the Atlanta Civic Center.

Standing on tiptoe in her chair to see the performers, Peck was enraptured, in every sense of that word, with the piano chords, the homespun pageantry, and the solace of old-time religion on tear-streaked faces. When the anointing came, as they say, on Vestal Goodman, the “queen of Southern Gospel” would start waving her trademark handkerchief over her bouffant in divine semaphore.

“I was uplifted and just mesmerized by it all,” says Peck. “I rededicated my life to Christ in the 11^th grade and said, ‘Lord, if it’s your will to give me a chance to sing, I’ll never stop.’”

She formed a girl group called The Joyful Trio and studied classical piano for 11 years, the last eight under Brenau faculty member and cosmopolitan taskmaster, Eliza Feldmann, WC’29, who became her mentor.

“Ms. Feldmann was so strict, so uncompromising, so tough,” Peck recalls. “She was a sophisticated lady who had traveled all around the world and returned to live on the edge of Brenau’s campus, and she would not accept anything less than your very best. At the time, I did not fully appreciate that – I probably grumbled about it, to tell you the truth — but I am so grateful to her now for her high standards, for giving me that foundation. I wish I could go back and thank her for all she did. She opened up my world.”

Feldmann, discerning potential in her pupil, helped Peck secure partial music scholarships in 1980 to attend Brenau.

“Brenau played a major, pivotal role in my life,” says Peck, who studied piano, voice, and elementary education. “It taught me that, while it’s great to sing and play by ear, I believe your voice is your instrument, and I always encourage younger artists to keep studying music, to learn the breathing techniques and keep refining their voices and their other musical abilities. It’s an ongoing, lifelong process.”

Karen Peck (center) and New River

A promoter asked the Joyful Trio to open for The LaFevres, one of Southern Gospel’s “first families” since 1921. Later, when Alphus Lafevre needed a soprano, he called Peck, who had just completed her sophomore year at Brenau. She began touring with the group when its founders were nearing retirement and passing the torch to Rex Nelon, who reconfigured The Lafevres as The Nelons.

“I was truly living my dream,” she says. “Instead of a poster of Shaun Cassidy on my bedroom wall, I’d had one of The Nelons. I had a crush on Donny Osmond, too, but I would look at that poster of The Nelons and pray, ‘Lord, if you can’t put me with that group, please put me with one just like them!”

Peck toured and performed with The Nelons for about 10 years.

“I was green as all get-out, wearing those fancy dresses and feeling like Cinderella, touring and traveling all over the place,” she says.

She also was developing her singular voice: a lyric soprano that confides, entreats, and reassures like the Balm of Gilead. “I think she simply has one of the best voices in gospel music,” says Stella Parton, the country music entertainer who conducted a master class earlier this year at Brenau. “It’s both delicate and powerful.”

The same could be said of her outsize stage presence. Peck, whose extracurricular music tastes include Lady Antebellum and Beyonce, comes across as a blond beatitude with a light heart and a killer wardrobe. She notes that ever since James D. Vaughan officially established Southern Gospel in 1910, its performers, like other sacred-music communities, have squabbled intramurally over issues of showmanship and solemnity.

“I believe entertainment can be a form of ministry,” she says. “I want the audience to love the music and to feel the love of Christ through the music. People are genuinely hurting out there. My calling, I believe, is to communicate hope and encouragement through music, to let folks know that the Lord is with them. And if I can make ’em laugh a little between songs, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.” She adds with a wink, “I may get in trouble for saying that!’”

By the 1990s, when Peck was hitting her stage-stiletto stride, gospel music could be divided into several subgenres (defined by stylistic interpretation rather than ethnicity), including Southern Gospel, still quartet- and hymnal-driven and dominated by white Protestants; traditional Black Gospel, with its roots in African-American spirituals and the expressiveness of the Holiness church; and Progressive Southern Gospel, which spotlights more soloists, with the smoothing influences of pop and contemporary country. Karen Peck and New River fall under the last heading. Their hair lacks the vertiginous volume and their costumes the rhinestones of their forebears, but they still sparkle with some strategic Swarovski crystals. “Our look is more subdued these days, and we try to keep up a little more with trends, within reason – we’re not teenagers any more!” Peck says. “That’s something that I think more people are realizing – that gospel music does not always have to sound and look so old-timey.”

Over the past decade, the music surged in popularity through impresario Bill Gaither’s “homecoming” series of concert videos, which air ubiquitously on cable television. In 2004, the Gaither Homecoming concert tour ranked 16th in Pollstar, out-selling Elton John and Rod Stewart, among others, and Peck reigns as a Gaither favorite. A recent study ranked Southern Gospel was the ninth most popular format for AM stations and the 21st most popular for FM.

Of a recent show in Sweden, Peck says, “We were using an interpreter, who didn’t really understand the word ‘y’all,’ to try to talk to the crowd. I told them that was ‘Southern Swedish.’ Judging by their faces, I don’t think they got that joke. But the spirit of God knocked down all the language barriers. Even if the audience didn’t understand the lyrics, they felt the anointing through the music.”

When she married Rickey Gooch, the vocalist had planned to retire, more or less, and start a family. “I thought maybe I’d just perform locally from time to time, but God had other plans,” says Peck, who homeschools her two children.

In 1991, she renewed a familiar harmony with her alto-range sister, Susan Peck Jackson, who is married to David Jackson, from Nashville’s Sho-Bud pedal steel guitar dynasty, and they since have added pianist Jeff Hawes to the mix. The name “New River,” she says, had refreshing, regenerative associations, plus “the Lord loved to be near water.”

Peck’s husband, a hairstylist and builder, converted his family’s Lumpkin County homeplace in Yahoola (“Yay-hooler,” in the local dialect) into a gospel compound called New River Park, with a stage designed to look like a country chapel, covered in weathered, reclaimed wood with a tin roof.

“There’s such a beautiful, quaint, serene feeling there, especially when the sun is setting, and you can see the cross outlined against the sky,” says Susan Jackson.

For the past decade, the couple has held “Christian Music Nights,” an annual festival on Father’s Day weekend. It usually attracts a crowd of around 600, including gospel stalwarts such as the Lewis Family, The Primitive Quartet, old friends Jeff and Sheri Easter, and up-and-comers like CS&K and Brian Free and Assurance.

“For days before the event, we talk about the menu – fried chicken, casseroles, corn, the best Southern cooking you’ll ever put in your mouth — and for days after, we declare we’ll never eat again,” says Sheri Easter. (Her son, Madison Easter, also studied for a year through Brenau’s online program, and her daughter-in-law, Shannon, is enrolled at the university now.) “The community that is created there is a direct reflection of Karen.  She welcomes everyone in with arms wide open, and the people feel that warmth.”

The progressive, upbeat sound of Karen Peck and New River – with album titles such as “Taste of Grace,” “No Worries,” and the latest, “Reach Out” — has earned the act three Grammy nominations; multiple Dove nominations; and a place among the evangelical gentry with appearances on Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN) and gigs aboard Alaskan cruises with Mike Huckabee and the Rev. Charles Stanley. Peck is the first woman to serve on the board of Abraham Productions, a driving force behind arena-scale Christian entertainment, and lately, she has focused her personal ministry on churchwomen with seminars and conversational presentations, mingled with music. “I have a soft spot for pastors’ wives, and for all ladies who are dealing with life’s ups and downs,” she says. “So I sing a little, but we also share stories from our lives, and, well, I over-share. I don’t have a lot of boundaries when I’m talking.”

Peck’s faith, the source of so much joy, also has sustained her through tragedy, she says, recalling a devastating accident: “We were on our tour bus, headed back from a show in Branson, about 20 miles from home, when an elderly gentleman pulled out in front of us, and we hit him. The man, who did not survive, turned out to be a retired pastor,” she says, pausing to gather her thoughts. “We have been persevering through that aftermath with a process of faithful prayer, striving to view events like that as preparations, not punishments, to remember that the darkest times also come with great blessings. It’s part of us now, part of our story. All of us are more keenly aware that we are not promised tomorrow, that today is a gift. An amazing gift.”

Then, to lighten the mood, she says, “I do love my job, and I couldn’t ask for a better boss. And I have one great retirement plan, let me tell you.”

Like an heiress settling in for her weekly spa ministrations, Georgia, a white Standard Poodle, stands stock-still and holds her muzzle high while the clippers skim her coat, forming the round “rosettes” on her knobby hips. Because of its density, a poodle’s fur lends itself to shaping and sculpting, so when the primping is complete, Georgia looks like a fantastical topiary at Versailles — a bouquet of pompoms on stems. Just add a diamond-studded collar and Westminster ribbon.

“This cut is called the ‘Continental’ and gets used a lot in shows,” said the man with the clippers, Larry Hulsey, after rewarding Georgia with a gluten-free treat at Showtime Pet Grooming in north Macon.

If you assume this lace doily of a dog will be claimed by an equally froufrou Cotton Belt socialite, guess again. A sort of in-house floor-model as well as pampered pet, Georgia belongs to Hulsey, who at first glance looks more like a coonhound or Rottweiler kind of guy. He operates Showtime as a family enterprise with his 27-year-old son, Kyle.

Meticulous, detail-oriented perfectionists who insist on the “scissor finish,” the Hulseys take pride in their award-winning work, but they also represent a different breed of canine aesthetician. They wear leather and ride motorcycles to work, and with their “long-haired country boy” ponytails; mellow, porch-swing manners; and Middle Georgia drawls, these alpha-dog groomers might have stepped off the cover of an Allman Brothers album. Where tattoos meet Shih-Tzus, Showtime is perhaps the South’s only biker-operated beauty parlor for dogs and academy for aspiring pet beauticians.

“Hairdressing and Harleys run in our family, going back several generations,” Hulsey said. “We just brought dogs into it.”

The consistently fun and incongruous visuals that arise at the salon on Forsyth Road – tough guys tenderly tying bows around the topknots of teacup yappers – have proved an effective selling point, both to the midstate’s gentry and its animal-loving hipsters.

“The first time I went there, I was intrigued by all of these Harleys parked out front and these guys with long hair behind the counter,” said Lisa Love, who was the director of the Georgia Music Hall of Fame and now works in music and film promotion development for the state. She regularly hauls Cooley, her family’s rambunctious West Highland White Terrier, to Showtime from her new home in Atlanta. “At first, I didn’t get that these guys were the groomers. They were super-friendly, though, and when I picked Cooley up, he was drop-dead handsome with the best Westie cut he’d ever had in his life. When I realized these bikers were the talent behind Showtime, I was sold, lock, stock and barrel.”

However, there is more to Showtime than the novelty of its proprietors, who bring a trained skill set and unusual comfort level to highstrung clients – not just the dogs, but their owners as well. The Hulseys serve as the region’s only “Certified Master of All Breeds” stylists.

“My Shih-Tzus require more grooming than most because of their undercoat and overcoat, and they used to be very apprehensive about those appointments,” said state senator and Macon politico Miriam Paris, “but they actually enjoy going to Showtime. They’re excited in the car and can’t wait to jump out and go in. I think it’s because these guys genuinely care about dogs, and the dogs instinctively pick up on that feeling; they sense the love. I’ve never seen an angry, uncooperative dog there, which is unusual. It’s always a friendly, tip-top, professional environment, and, believe me, I wouldn’t settle for anything less for Sebastian and Lily.”

Larry Hulsey grew up in Macon, where his mother was a stylist at Four Seasons. He was working in construction when he noticed that his dog, KISS, a “party mix” cocker spaniel named after the fire-breathing rock band, seemed sluggish. “The groomer didn’t clip his toenails, and one of this nails was growing into the pad of his paw, so he was in pain,” Hulsey said. “I shaved him all the way down at home to get a better look at what was going on and realized how much weight he’d gained. Turned out he had a thyroid condition.”

Hulsey was dismayed by the lack of standardization, regulation, and certification in the pet grooming industry. “Anybody with a set of clippers can hang out a shingle and start charging to work on animals,” he said, shaking his head. So he relocated temporarily to Knoxville to study at the Concord School of Pet Grooming, which is accredited by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, and then he trained his son. They since have won numerous grooming and styling competitions and seldom place outside the top three.

“There’s so much more to it than just cutting hair,” Hulsey said. “In addition to the cosmetic benefits, there are health issues we’re trying to address with a total-body cleaning. One of our customers joked that it doesn’t cost as much for him to get his hair trimmed, and I said, ‘Well, do they also clip your nails, clean out your ears, remove the plaque from your teeth, and relieve your anal glands while they’re at it?’”

Hulsey opened Showtime in 2009 and added the School of Pet Grooming a year later, as a way to elevate industry standards statewide. Currently training one student, the academy has applied for status as a nonpublic, post-secondary educational institution. Instead of a clinical-seeming, clanging kennel atmosphere, Showtime looks like a Romper Room for dogs, with brightly painted wooden enclosures and a “Tiki Bar” recovery area. Spa music, and the occasional Bob Marley tune, help calm the clientele. Recently, Jana London joined the staff and added the “Bow Wow Bakery” with homemade treats (reportedly tasty enough for people, too) and a pet boutique with a variety of accessories and snugglies. One tee announces: “Karma is a Bitch.”

“We haven’t had any requests yet for the kind of feather hair extensions that are popular with people these days, but if we do, I’m prepared,” said London, who used to work as a hairstylist for people.

Hulsey was not quite sure what to expect when he set up shop during an economic downturn, in the heart of Georgia.

“I was worried there might not be a big diversity of breeds around here to get really creative with,” Hulsey said, “but I was wrong.”
Among his favorites is the Bedlington terrier, whose sheep-like appearance can be exaggerated dramatically with a “lamb cut.” As if on cue, a Bedlington prances gamely into the lobby of Showtime, looking like an odd, ambiguous bundle of wool.

This sort of inter-species drag is popular. “We can groom them to look like lions, peacocks, camels, whatever,” Hulsey said. “Look at this – now talk about a lot of work,” he added, pointing to a photo of a dog primped and dyed to look like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

“I like for Cookie to get the ‘lion cut’ to make her look like a little lion,” said model and media personality Tosha Walden, of the Pomeranian that often accompanies her during interviews and fashion shows. “It’s important to me that Cookie looks perfect as she attends different functions, and the Showtime folks are perfectionists. Dogs leave there ready to strut around Westminster. Being a fashionista myself, I’ve rubbed off on Cookie, and her little wardrobe is quite extensive for a dog, so we both just adore the selection of outfits Showtime has to offer.”

Her husband, music impresario Alan Walden, and their son, Christian, have three miniature schnauzers who also go for regular preenings. “As a family, we are serious ‘dawg people,’ and so are they,” Alan Walden said. “Our dogs enjoy being there so much that they’re kind of reluctant to come to me to go home.”

Showtime’s specialized services include “hand stripping,” a razor technique used on schnauzers for the show ring (the effect is similar to flat-ironing). “Boy, you can really tell when a schnauzer hasn’t been cut correctly because a lot of people won’t scissor the hair to blend it,” Hulsey said.

What about cats? Hulsey rolls his eyes and lets out a low whistle. “We have the training to groom cats, but they pretty much have to grow up accustomed to a show environment, and most cats around here aren’t – owners may get them groomed once a year, if that,” he said. “Cats are ten times more difficult to groom than dogs and ten times more dangerous. But we’ve never encountered a dog we couldn’t groom.”

“Pawdicures” with shea butter and a variety of spa treatments, including aromatherapy mud masques with lavender, mint, and chamomile soothe and detoxify itchy, scaly skin and remove “tear stains” from beards. As London massages a creamy concoction all over a well-fed Chihuahua named Bella, the dog’s plump body slackens and her eyes grow heavy-lidded with bliss. Finally, Bella gazes up at the humans around her with melting gratitude.

“Now that’s the kind of face we like to see,” Hulsey said. “Another satisfied customer.”

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2011/11/singin-praisin-raisin-the-foxfire-45th-anniversary.html

Confronted by a claustrophobic newcomer who wanted to “reach out and push back the mountains” in Appalachia, poet Byron Herbert Reece observed: “It depends upon whether you feel you are shut in or the world shut out.”

Most of us who grew up in the Southern Highlands can see both sides from our vertiginous vantage-point: Hermits by default, we have been hemmed in—miserably, at times—but also sheltered and safeguarded by a rugged landscape and a clannish culture. This isolation has yielded some distinct, if not gloriously peculiar, folkways celebrated, once again, in Singin’, Praisin’, and Raisin’: The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book, an expansive oral history collected by high-school students in the Foxfire program, based in Mountain City, Georgia, and edited by Joyce Green and Casi Best.

Published in August by Anchor Books, it features the usual entertaining cast of moonshiners, conjure-wimmin, and “boogers and haints”—all of them flinty, hard-working types—with a special emphasis on music. For the first time in the series, this edition offers a companion compact disc of twangy pickers from its “Echoes” chapter, including mainstays like The Primitive Quartet, as well as others such as LV and Mary Mathis, a seasoned, husband-and-wife duet never recorded until now. (The initials stand for “Lyin’ Varmint,” Mary jokes.)

The sepia-toned nostalgia of Foxfire deepens in its valediction with Singin’, Praisin’, and Raisin’, which is stuffed with wistful reflections on the program itself from some of its first researchers, who, in middle age, still marvel at their role in this ongoing, idealistic, intergenerational phenomenon. Foxfire, named for the eerie, bioluminescent fungi found on rotting logs, began in 1966 as a writing project at Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, where Eliot Wigginton, a Cornell-educated teacher determined to fire up his classroom, charged his students with interviewing and recording their backwoods elders to produce a quarterly magazine. In 1972, faced with a growing demand for back issues, the budding folklorists published an anthology of their writings, a curious hodgepodge of “olden days” storytelling and how-to advice on hog-butchering and the like. Pickled and preserved with corn likker and salt of the earth, The Foxfire Book quickly became a national bestseller, appealing to back-to-the-land hippies as well as antiquarians. A dozen more books, including this recent installment, followed.

For homefolks, Foxfire has served as benediction—and ammo. Note the timing and setting. In 1972, a movie that was filmed in the same county stigmatized the entire region with its enduring stereotypes of inbred, toothless, predatory hillbillies. However, the homespun anthropology of Foxfire offered a note-for-note, “Dueling Banjos”-style counterpoint to “Deliverance” by honoring the ingenuity, resilience, and, above all, the unassailable dignity of Appalachian people. Throughout the rambling anecdotes of “Aunt Arie” the widder-woman, Lawton Brooks in his overalls, and other high-lonesome, no-bull voices, their devotion to family and intimate understanding of nature, their sustaining faith, their mulish work ethic, and their native wit shine through like mica in a creekbed. In effect, they announce to nervous outlanders: Not only are you safe on our rivers, but you also will find sincere nourishment for your mind and spirit—along with biscuits made from the freshest lard—around these parts.

Even so, the Foxfire series affectionately serves up enough grotesquery for fans of Southern Gothicka.

My redheaded grandmother, who wielded a hoe with a vengeance, prized her collection of the books, and while she encouraged me and my cousins to study the properties of yellow-root tea and planting by the signs, she also was leery of our grubby, destructive fingers. So we would read the tales of “boogers and haints” by flashlight at night, growing increasingly spooked and primed to scream. I remember feeling especially terrified by the “hoop snake,” which reputedly takes its tail into its mouth and rolls like a bicycle tire after its prey. My grandfather claimed to have been pursued by one, but he probably was messing with me. Of course, there also were the elaborate engineering plans for whiskey ’stills, presumably run by Baptists since almost everyone claimed that affiliation (a contradiction that continues to bedevil me).

In Singin’, Praisin’, and Raisin’, I again find myself drawn to the juicy bits, starting with the true-crime stories in a section called “Knoxville Girl,” after the old-timey murder ballad, with chapter headings such as “Hell-Bent and Whiskey Bound: A Scaly Mountain Murder” and “Yeah, that stuff’s a-growin’ wild up there,” about bush-hogging the first marijuana seized in Georgia. The legends, Old World and otherworldly, under the heading of “Barbara Allen”—the “little people,” “the deer and the witch,” and one man’s “true encounter” with the devil—probably were exchanged by ancient Celts around a peat-bog campfire.

I had wrongly assumed that the “Raisin’” part of the book was about child-rearing and would involve some controversial one-upmanship about the “strops” and “hickory switches” used in corporal punishment (a favorite dinner-table topic in my youth), but instead it chronicles the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School Farm Family Program, which provided a top-drawer academic education for its tenant families along with its boarding students, with all of them getting their hands dirty with pullets, udders, and cane syrup mills.

My grandmother would have enjoyed reading, and listening, to the “Echoes” component of the book, with its themes of music as salvation, ministry, and respite from back-straining labor. To her, a banjo was, to use an arty phrase she would have sniffed at, a vehicle for transcendence, not the ominous cue for trouble around the bend, as portrayed in “Deliverance.”

The how-to guides that wrap up this edition cover “Tying a True Lover’s Knot”; “Chair Bottoming with Poplar Bark”; and “Braiding a Leather Bullwhip,” among other tasks, which prompted some unwanted, melancholy thoughts: Will anyone bother to follow these instructions? Moreover, now that most of us no longer plow with a mule, will the Foxfire field soon go fallow?

I hope not. The project initially homed in on the arcana of a few hollers in Rabun County, but it has evolved into an educational methodology, known as the Foxfire Approach to Teaching and Learning, applicable anywhere, from a Muslim community in Detroit to the Navajo Reservation—wherever a dialogue between the young and the old can flower.

Co-editor Casi Best offers these reassuring words: “I am a mere nineteen years old. If you mention iPods, Wi-Fi, netbooks, text messaging, iTunes, or anything of today’s modern technological world, I’ll know exactly what you’re talking about…however, mention a water dipper, a mess of greasy white half runners, a sling blade … and I’m lost.”

So she began seeking out those faces cross-hatched with age and experience, asking questions, and “simply falling in love” with her Appalachian heritage. These mountains may close in around us, but they also offer a panoramic view if we scale their heights.

“If you remember anything from this book,” Best writes, “I hope it is this: Every person has a story, and they’re simply waiting for someone to say ‘hello.’”

Candice Dyer writes regularly for Atlanta magazine, and her work has appeared in Men’s Journal, Garden & Gun, and Georgia Trend. She is the author of Street Singers, Soul Shakers, and Rebels with a Cause: Music from Macon.

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2007/07/karen-abbott.html

Long before Hef, a palace of pulchritude

Ada and Minna Everleigh, the Victorian sisters behind the expression “get laid,” might relish their enduring place in the lexicon, but they’d likely sniff at its frat-house vulgarity. In their brothel, the Everleigh Club, Venuses swathed in French couture recited Longfellow while kings sipped champagne from their slippers. Pleasure was an art, hard-won and forever under siege, as Abbott, an Atlanta-based journalist, reveals in this engaging account of Chicago’s bawdy, turn-of-the-century belle époque.

“I want to stress that this is a work of nonfiction,” she writes, as if to wink, “You won’t believe this!” before affectionately introducing her rogues gallery of crafty courtesans, underhanded aldermen and Bible-waving crusaders. Their schemes culminate in a showdown over “white slavery” that heralds, with a ragtime beat, American ambivalence about the pleasure principle.

If only their puritanical detractors had understood: The Everleighs strove to cleanse the red-light district, too, with their own high-end (and scrupulously hygienic) brand of gentrification.

Everyone has a Cherokee grandmother.

“We never hear about the grandfathers, just the grandmothers,” a laughing woman with high cheekbones says at the welcome center in Cherokee, North Carolina.

I just had conspiratorially relayed some of my own genealogy only to learn it sounded cliché. Too bad I forgot to bring the grainy snapshot of my foremothers, weaving baskets and looking shamanic in their long braids. However, others in the growing tide of visitors no doubt have thrust similar photos at my greeter. After centuries of near-genocidal repression and poverty, the Eastern Band of the Cherokee lately is channeling its casino money into a cultural renaissance that high-minded boosters predict will turn the dilapidated resort known as “Little Las Vegas” into the “Santa Fe of the East.”

Judging by the changing mood of the Qualla Boundary, as the tribe calls this misty, 56,000-acre homeland, such claims are not all talk, though the value of talk should not be underrated. “English Stops Here,” warns a red, octagonal sign at the Dora Reed Tribal Childcare Center. In this pre-kindergarten immersion program, even the toy blocks are etched with the tribe’s ornate lettering instead of the forbidden ABCs. For eight hours a day, about 30 students, newborn to four years olds, burble exclusively in their ancestors’ tongue – a cheerful rebuke to the institutionalized sadism of the old American Indian boarding schools.

“I grew up speaking only Cherokee,” Arneach Walkingstick, a 61-year-old teacher, whispers in English, briefly breaking the rules out of students’ earshot. “When I first went to school and tried to talk to my teacher, she just kept shaking my shoulders and yelling angrily into my face. I couldn’t understand a word she said, but I still remember her teeth, the back of her throat. I became pitifully shy and preferred being outside, where I wouldn’t have to talk to nobody.”

Now Walkingstick takes the floor like a born orator. In a few years, organizers hope, English will be spoken only in “foreign language class” through twelve grades at the Kituwah Academy, just as it is shrunken into subtitles beneath the bold Cherokee glyphs on several storefronts. Expect a growing library of fiction, too, from the Yonuguska Literature Initiative, which recently produced a monumental translation of Charles Frazier’s “Trail of Tears” epic Thirteen Moons, the first novel published in an American Indian language.

A blond tourist, bewildered by Sequoyah’s 85-character syllabary spooling so proudly through the valleys these days, might start rethinking America’s immigration debate — from the long view — and conclude that what is at work in Cherokee is a necessary Nativism in the truest sense of the word. Before these language initiatives began three years ago, a survey found that only seven percent of the 13,400 members of the Eastern Band were fluent speakers, with an average age of 53.

“We do not separate language from culture,” says Renissa Walker, director of the Kituwah preservation and education program. “I asked my mother, who is fluent, what happens if we lose our language? She answered, ‘We lose ourselves.’”

  ———————————————————–

When Frazier, who tripped over his share of arrowheads while growing up in nearby Andrews, was writing Cold Mountain, he came across an intriguing real-life character.

“I read about an old, old man in a mental institution who at times would speak only Cherokee,” Frazier says, referring to William Holland Thomas, the tribe’s white chief who helped many of his adopted people avoid the forced removal in 1838 and stay in the Southeastern mountains. “I thought fictionalizing his story might help me explore the culture of these people who had lived on the land not so long before mine occupied it.”

Frazier presented the resulting Thirteen Moons in a tribal meeting before publication.

“I told them it might bring some attention to them,” he says. “If they did not like the book and didn’t want to be implicated, I would try to deflect the attention as much as possible. But if they liked it, I wanted to see how it might benefit them.”

Before the powwow was over, Myrtle Driver, an outspoken elder, had volunteered to translate the text, and the Yonuguska Literature Initiative was established at the Museum of the Cherokee to produce more books in the language. (Yonuguska was a heroic chief who resisted the Removal and reorganized the Eastern Band.) 

The deciding factor in her decision, she says, was a response not usually associated with the “Trail of Tears”: laughter.

“We find humor in every situation,” says Driver, who customarily addresses every friend as “goober.” “If you walk into a Cherokee home, and they don’t start picking on you, you best pack up and leave because they don’t like you. Cutting up and laughing at each other – that’s how we show affection. How we heal. Humor popped up at the right moments in the book.”

Driver frequently joins Frazier for lively, bilingual readings of Thirteen Moons. One crowd-pleasing passage involves the noises a chief makes during lovemaking. To dramatic effect, Driver imitates the animals his groans evoke: “boar hogs rooting in the ground, groundhog whistles, buck snorts, crow calls.”

“She always gets more laughs than I do,” Frazier says.

This drollery tempers the overall cultural reclamation as the town strives for greater authenticity in its attractions – a pottery guild, a downtown facelift with traditional stonework, high-end art instead of plastic tomahawks made in China. Several institutions have joined forces in a marketing effort that employs the Anikituhwa Warriors, who glower beneath their war-paint from billboards and ads with menacing captions such as: “We’re looking for you.” It makes for imagery that, as Driver might say, messes with folks.

“We dug into our history books to get the details right,” says Jeff Goss, whose advertising agency designed the campaign. “The Cherokee, in addition to this rich, fascinating history, consistently engage with humor, which is always a good selling point.”

“They had a word for a hog bite,” muses the narrator of Thirteen Moons. “Not two words, one word. Satawa. My opinion was that if hogs are biting you so often that you have to stop and make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your most pressing problem.”

Or maybe it is.

  ———————————————————–

You have not seen this production of “Unto These Hills”

When “Unto These Hills,” debuted in 1950, the outdoor docudrama presented the history of the Cherokee as a soap opera told largely from a white, European perspective and starring a largely non-native cast.

Written by Kermit Hunter, a grad student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it also featured ballet, modern dance, and unrealistic dialogue.

“The male actors all spoke in the third person, which was just ridiculous — an outdated Hollywood version of Indians,” says John Tissue, executive director of the Cherokee Historical Association.”

In 2005, the tribe commissioned Hanay Geiogamah, a Kiowa playwright, to overhaul the play, but his extensive changes met with mixed reviews.

“It was tremendous, but some people felt it was a little too native in the sense that it drifted away from a lot of the storytelling that people like,” Tissue says.

Now two Hollywood writers, Ben Hurst and Pat Allee, are doctoring the play for “narrative expression that maintains authenticity.”

“Some of the tribe want more scenes of everyday life so that the biggest chunk is not the Trail of Tears,” Tissue says. “They want to communicate that, while it was awful — absolutely awful — their lives are not all woe-is-us.”

Maria Ebrahimji had gone to bed early the first Sunday night in May to rest up for a special occasion. She was taking some time off from her hectic job as an executive editorial producer for CNN in Atlanta to launch her first book, I Speak for Myself: American Women on Being Muslim. The release party for this anthology, scheduled the following day in Washington, D.C., was sure to attract an engaged and vocal crowd at the Buxton Initiative, an interfaith think tank that promotes dialogue among Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

“I woke up excited about getting the book out, and then I was stunned to see something like 450 messages on my BlackBerry,” she recalls. “I knew something newsworthy had happened overnight.”

Terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden had just been shot dead, and, if Ebrahimji, WC’98,  had clocked in as usual at CNN, she would have been urgently reaching out to heads of state, military leaders, reporters, and other newsmakers and commentators to coordinate interviews and intense, live coverage.

“The timing was strange and ironic,” says Ebrahimji, who majored in mass communications and political science at Brenau. “On the one hand, it was the biggest story in 10 years, and, for once, I was not at work. I felt remorseful because it’s your natural instinct as a journalist to be right there in the mix when those history-making stories break. At the same time, I knew my news team could handle it, and this book was the culmination of years of hard work; it was important to me, a moment I needed to seize. As it turned out, the death of Osama bin Laden ended up giving an unexpected news peg to the book and prompting a lot of questions and lively discussion at our promotional events around the capital that week.”

In fact, I Speak for Myself, published by White Cloud Press,  is expected to serve as an eye-opening resource during these changing times as we progress — inshallah, or “God willing” — toward a more just, peaceful, and understanding community. After a decade of fallout from 9/11, including the “War on Terror,” protests of mosques, school bans on head-coverings, hate crimes, and other controversies, misunderstandings, and hurt feelings surrounding the practice of Islam, here is a collection of affecting and affirming perspectives from vibrant, homegrown Muslim women — just in time for the geopolitical shifts of Arab Spring.

Maria Ebrahimji

Ebrahimji and her co-editor, Zahra Suratwala, a Chicago-based writer, compiled these essays from 40 women under the age of 40. Varying widely in their approaches to faith, family, work, and lifestyle, they share only this singular feature in common: a Muslim upbringing in the United States.

“What we want to convey is that we are your neighbors and always have been, and we proudly claim this country as ours, too,” Ebrahimji says, “These pieces are not lengthy life stories, just glimpses that reveal us as women you probably would enjoy having over for coffee and conversation.”

The eclecticism and self-discovery of their experiences, the writers hope, will help demystify their religion and counter the persistent stereotypes of women-as-chattel, stifled miserably and mutely beneath a cloak of monolithic orthodoxy. Contributors include the first Muslim woman elected to the Michigan legislature; a Georgia Tech student who researched terrorist recruitment and training in Dubai; a feminist engineer who home-schools her children and wears the hijab and niqab; a fashion designer who finds beauty and flair within traditional Islamic ideals of modesty (“My life revolves around a hemline,” she writes);  a zumba instructor who competed in the Miss Arab USA Pageant 2011; and firebrand poets, bloggers, hipsters, attorneys, teachers, social activists, homemakers, and other lettered and devout professionals, including the volume’s editors.

“Although the purpose of this book was to showcase the incredible diversity among Muslim American women, I myself didn’t realize how much I had to learn about this community until I started receiving and editing essays,” says Suratwala. “This project has deepened my already great respect for not only Muslim American women but women of all faiths, as I begin to understand not only how diverse we are, but also how unified we are in our humanity and our womanhood.”

American-born Queen Noor of Jordan pronounced these writers “a new generation of peace-builders”: “Through their honesty and courage they are making a lasting contribution to the search for cross-cultural understanding. Maria Ebrahimji and Zahra Suratwala’s book joins the mission for global tolerance; it is truly a step in the right direction.”

In the fall, these editors plan to organize a web-based, intra- and interfaith “40 to 40″ outreach project in which their contributors initiate a one-on-one relationship with Muslim women in other countries, eventually encouraging women from other backgrounds to ask questions and weigh in. “We want to create a dialogue worldwide because even within the Muslim world there is stereotyping of Americans and other groups,” Ebrahimji says.

In her essay, titled “In Search of Fatima and Taqwa,” the CNN producer relates an unsettling exchange in Yemen with a sheikh who counseled her to decelerate her fast-track career to land “a good Muslim husband.”

“My women’s college-educated mind urged me to stare him down and set him straight,” Ebrahimji writes, explaining that his comments “made me feel small, less respected, and in some ways, less worthy of being the fearless and self-supporting woman I thought I had become. Personal sacrifices of time, emotion, or money I have always lived with, but never once had I been told to pare back myself to get what I wanted in life. All at once, this aroused in me both a resoluteness and curiosity. … Was I Muslim enough?”

———————————————————————-

Ebrahimji is fit, driven, warmly gregarious and fond of the word “empowerment.” Her Indian parents met in Africa, where her mother attended art school, and then decamped for the United States with a nest egg of only $120 as refugees from dictator Idi Amin’s atrocities in the 1970s. Her early childhood was spent in Maryland before her family moved to the small town of Toccoa, Georgia, where she was the only Muslim girl in her high school.

“It was a little scary when we first moved there because there were KKK posters on the telephone poles, but I honestly never experienced any discrimination in north Georgia,” Ebrahimji says. “I was a country girl in the mountains, hiking and water-skiing on the lake and going to Passion Plays and prom with a non-Muslim boy. But I was also fasting for Ramadan and striving to adhere to the tenets of Islam. I didn’t wear my Muslim-ness on my sleeve, but I didn’t hide it, either. My taqwa, or ‘God consciousness,’ made me Muslim at the core.”

To help their daughter fit in, her parents usually introduced her with the more familiar Latin version of her name, even though it is properly pronounced “MAH-ria.” “People assumed I was Mexican,” she says, “and my teacher described me as ‘white with a really nice tan.’ I still speak with this little Southern twang, so even now people often don’t know quite what to make of me!”

A conscientious student, Ebrahimji was awarded several scholarships at Brenau, where she became the first woman of color to pledge a mainstream sorority, Alpha Chi Omega. “Brenau is fairly representative of the South and was not really that diverse when I was a student,” she says. “But five years after I graduated, I was sitting at an Internet cafe in Bombay, and someone emailed me a photo of that year’s pledge class. I was so astonished at the progress in diversity — at all of those very different faces smiling back at me — that I burst into tears. Brenau, like the rest of the South, keeps evolving and developing a more international culture and spirit.”

Journalism professor Clara Martin helped her secure a coveted internship at CNN, and the network hired her shortly after graduation for an entry-level position, rolling teleprompter for anchor (and fellow Muslim), Riz Khan. While working full time, Ebrahimji earned a master’s degree in international relations at Georgia State University, studied Arabic, read 20 or more newspapers each morning, and began ascending the ranks of the 24-hour news outlet.

In South Africa, Ebrahimji conducted the first broadcast from the historic church were demonstrators had sought refuge during the Apartheid-era Soweto Uprising, and about six years ago in Davos, Switzerland, she produced a panel discussion of “young, rising leaders of the Middle East, including Gaddafi’s son and the crown prince of Bahrain — mostly people who no longer seem that relevant in light of recent events,” she observes. “Strange to think that no long ago we took it for granted that they would be in charge now. It’s great for me to see the images coming out of current protests in the Arab Spring — this organic movement with women standing side by side for the first time with men and claiming their identity, demanding the right to choose their government.”

After the planes struck the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, Ebrahimji did not sleep for 36 hours, she recalls, and since then has vigilantly monitored the network’s depictions of her faith. She is the vice chair of the diversity council at CNN. “I look at both our content and our workforce to make sure they’re inclusive and accurate in what they reflect,” she says. “One thing I like to do is get more Muslims in front of the cameras who have other topics of interest outside the context of just the religion or terrorism — Muslims who are talking about a health issue, a passion for jogging or environmental cleanup, education costs, or other concerns that everyone out there faces and can relate to. It’s important for the public to see ‘regular Americans’ who just happen to be Muslim.”

She is one of them, after all.

In the soul-searching that followed the sheikh’s advice, Ebrahimji looked to the example of Fatima, daughter of the Prophet Mohammed.

“While my outward appearance may suggest my faithfulness to the world, my real faith, my inner taqwa, is only known to God and me — as it should be,” Ebrahimji writes. “I think Fatima would say to both the sheikh and me that all is possible. She maintained her inner taqwa, and she bore the qualities I see important in all women. I can be who I want to be and still be like Fatima. … And while I can choose to pare myself down by choice or grow myself stronger through circumstance, I am no more or less Muslim than I was in the beginning. What tormented me in the Yemen desert has only reaffirmed the writing of God on my solidly Muslim American Indian — independent — soul.”

Signs of Joey Stuckey’s curiosity and free-range eclecticism are scattered all over his downtown recording studio, Shadow Sound.

His equipment includes both knobby, old-school analog and the latest in high-end digital, and his instruments vary from the usual strings, keys, and percussion to ukuleles; a dulcimer; a Japanese shamisen used in kabuki theater; and a tarango, a Colombian mandolin with a resonant belly crafted from an armadillo’s armor. “All kinds of crazy stuff!” says Stuckey, who sings, composes, and plays his own music when he is not recording others. “If it makes a sound, I’m interested.”

Stuckey’s versatile enthusiasms achieve a kind of harmonic convergence on his latest album, “The Shadow Sound,” an omnivore’s buffet of blues, jazz, rock, and pop released by Virtuoso Music in February. “With this collection, I want to bring back the era of the ‘Guitar Hero,’ a time when names like Clapton, Page and Stevie Ray adorned the pages of every rock magazine on the planet,” Stuckey says. “Back when music was what really mattered.”

Of course, for Stuckey, music has always mattered, always has flooded his senses and pooled in the deep, sustaining chambers of his imagination. “Sound is my whole world,” he says — by default. Stuckey, 34, is blind. He survived a brain tumor as an infant, but it caused him to lose his sight and his sense of smell. Consequently, he became a sort of sonic savant, a human tuning fork.

“I don’t think my ears are necessarily, magically better,” he says. “The difference is that visual stimulus is so powerful that it dominates what you perceive. When I’m listening, that’s all I’m doing; I’m not staring out the window at the trees the way most people do. I get very excited about the hum of an air-conditioner or the burst of a car starting. There’s beauty in the sound of an elevator. My head is always full of beats and melodies, and I feel a rhythmic pulse going through me at all times. That’s just the way my spirit works.”

As a teen-ager, he discovered the hooks and riffs that drowned out most of the other racket. “I knew how to turn the radio on and off, but one day I realized that if I turned the knob, it changed to different stations,” Stuckey says. “One day I heard this very energetic music that knocked me out. It was a revelation. It was rock ’n’ roll. I knew that was what I wanted to do.”

He was born in Green Cove Springs, Florida, and moved to Macon when he was 15. Yes, he is kin to the dynasty of the Stuckey pecan log — beloved snack of sweaty, Dixie road trips — and his father was one of a set of musical twins named Eugene and Talmadge (a nominal hat-tip to the populist governor) who performed as “The Stuckey Twins and the Dodge County Playboys.”

“Um, I’m Southern,” Stuckey says with a laugh.

An academic prodigy, he already had graduated from a regular public high school in Florida by the time he moved to Macon, and he enrolled, at age 16, at Mercer University. Not content simply to play by ear, Stuckey, who had studied Braille, also wanted to read music. He found a mentor in professor Terry Cantwell, and together they embarked on some tactile, Helen Keller-style lessons, with the instructor scratching music notations into sand, which Stuckey then would touch and trace. So unlike many of the rootsy musicians he records and performs with, Stuckey actually can decipher those notes.

Stuckey went on to study with jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan, and he since has established himself as “a blind musician with an insightful vision.” He modeled his playing style after rocker Jeff Beck and the jazzier Wes Montgomery, while his vocal influences include Mel Torme and Gregg Allman (possibly the only time you will see those two names in the same sentence). A cuddly, barrel-chested Teddy Bear of a man, Stuckey possesses a set of pipes girded by a mighty diaphragm that powers some high-decibel blues shouting — no amp necessary.

At 21, Joey released his first album, Take a Walk in the Shadows, and he followed it later with Live and Stuff, and Live and More Stuff: The Sequel to the Prequel, both recorded at the historic Douglass Theater.

Around that time, another mentor, punk impresario Ian Copeland, who was a booking agent for Sting, observed, “Joey is one of the most amazing guitarists I know.”

In the 1990s, Stuckey worked the soundboard at Phoenix Sound Studios, which like its namesake “rose from the ashes” of the old Capricorn headquarters, and he started opening for acts as diverse as James Brown, Wet Willie, Trisha Yearwood, Ted Nugent, Bad Company,  and Clarence Carter.

“Joey is a joy to play with because his timing is so tight — he never misses a cue,” says Macon drummer Stephen Chanin.

Stuckey named his studio after a song he wrote as a way of explaining his blindness to curious strangers.

“In my youth, I had some trouble being accepted because of my handicap,” he says. “The best way I new to talk about being blind with out getting crazy-detailed and going overboard was to go with a familiar concept of shadows. While not entirely accurate as to how I actually see the world — or don’t — I thought it would make a easy concept for folks to grasp. Later, because being blind is part of what makes me special as a recording engineer and brings something different to my projects, I named the studio Shadow Sound Studio.”

He acquired, among other bells and whistles, the console used by Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics. It draws artists from around the globe, such as Brazilian guitarist Felipe, as well as Capricorn veterans like Jimmy Hall, and it keeps Stuckey busy with custom studio work.

“I’ve done a ton of jingles, for everybody from politicians to chiropractors, to tattoo parlors,” he says.

Stuckey, who lives in north Macon with his wife, Jennifer, a professional midwife, is nothing if not a melodious multitasker. He devours audiobooks, and — as articulate as he is pitch-perfect — he writes reviews and columns for several music magazines. He teaches music technology at Mercer while operating www.WTMT.net, a streaming, 24-hour Internet radio station that promotes indie music in all genres. In 2006, his guitar chops and hail-fellow-well-met disposition landed him the role of Macon’s “Official Ambassador of Music.”

“I’ve been so busy recording other people and putting food on the table with the commercial stuff that I haven’t taken much time for my own music until now,” he says. “And I’ve never cared much for boundaries around genres.”

“The Shadow Sound” came about as a collaboration of sorts with Virtuoso founder Victor McLean, who has worked with Quincy Jones, George Benson, and Diana Krall, among others. McLean, as executive producer, helped Stuckey sift through his “eclecticka” and remaster some older tracks, and they rounded up an all-star ensemble to play on the project, including Randall Bramblett, Chuck Leavell, and David Ragsdale, the violinist of Smashing Pumpkins and Kansas.

“Joey will be an inspiration to the many kids out there picking up a guitar for the first time, and also to music fanatics who are searching for something unique,” McLean says. “We feel that Joey will have a Phish or a Dave Matthews-type following when you consider his material and the caliber of performance that he is capable of delivering.”

The album so far has enjoyed favorable reviews and climbing sales on iTunes and amazon.

“Everybody’s favorite track seems to be the last one, ‘Truth is a Misty Mountain.’ That one was recorded live for public radio, and it’s just me and my guitar,” Stuckey says. “The album has gone over big in Belgium, for some reason, and is getting a lot of radio play there.”

With any luck, some child, maybe in Brussels, is switching radio stations as Stuckey once did, or browsing the web, and discovering this fresh interpretation of rock ’n’ roll.

A Rebel flag criss-crosses that first vinyl single of “Shout Bamalama,” released by the Confederate Records label in 1962.

Consequently, African-American disc jockeys chunked it in the trash without even putting the needle in the groove to hear Otis Redding belt out his jump-blues tribute to Bamalama, a one-eyed busker who played a washboard with a thimble. It was another inauspicious break for the Macon vocalist, who was booed off the stage, in tears, the first time he performed away from church.

Redding’s galvanic talent, though, could not be stopped.

With his pained, pleading tremolo, the singer-songwriter set an unassailable standard for soul music at its rawest and most sublime. He could “worry a note,” as he put it, to wring arias from the field hollers of his sharecropping roots; the call-and-response of the choir; the wits and sweat required of black survival in the segregated South; and something transcendently his own. Filtered through Redding’s larynx, lust never sounded so sacred.

Rolling Stone magazine ranks Redding No. 21 in the “100 Greatest Artists of All Time,” and Billboard named two of his compositions, “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay” and “Respect,” in the top 20 tunes of the 20th century. More musical benchmarks no doubt would have followed if he had not died at 26 in a plane crash 40 years ago, on December 10, 1967.

So the original “Shout Bamalama” 45 rpm (with the song “Fat Gal” on the flipside) adds a distinctly Southern, ebony-and-irony note to “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember,” a sweeping exhibit of about 200 Redding artifacts that opened last fall at the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in Macon and runs until September 8, 2008. Much of the memorabilia – posters, unrecorded song lyrics, candid photos, even receipts for hay to feed his beloved farm animals — has been sealed for decades at the “Big O Ranch,” where Redding’s widow, Zelma, still resides. Visitors also can listen to oral histories, which reveal little-known facts about the singer.

“I wanted to show not just the arc of his career but the kind of complex man he was,” says Ellen Fleurov, curator of the exhibit. “A consummate entertainer, he also was an astute businessman who soaked up every possible lesson from whatever situation he was in. He was a talented A&R guy who, if he’d lived, probably would have started his own record company and gotten more involved in the civil rights movement. I think he would have been the South’s answer to Berry Gordy.”

At the time of his death, Redding, having recently dethroned Elvis as “top male vocalist in the world” in Melody Maker magazine, was mulling over television and movie offers. “Even in his relaxed time, Otis was coming up with something new to try,” says Newton Collier, a horn player who worked with Redding. “I don’t care how long you’d been rehearsing, if Otis walked in the studio, you’d say, ‘Let’s do some mo’! Wherever he was, he inspired everybody. Interesting word, ‘respect.’ He could write about it because he commanded – and got – it.”

As an award-winning actor and an outsize personality who, even in the hammy social circuit of Hollywood, stood out for her straight-talking, no-bull charisma, Octavia Spencer was accustomed to stealing scenes, holding court, and generally being watched.

She did not know, however, that an unpublished writer was quietly scrutinizing her and finding in her a heroically cantankerous muse. As a result, Spencer is now enjoying one of those monumental, art-imitates-life twists on the Hollywood dream. She is starring in “The Help,” the much anticipated Steven Spielberg-produced movie opening in theaters on August 10, playing the role of “Minny Jackson,” the character she originally inspired in the best-selling book.

In 2002, during a vacation in New Orleans, Spencer, a 1994 graduate of Auburn, met Kathryn Stockett, a softspoken, belle-ish alumna of the University of Alabama, through some mutual friends. Both had been English majors, and Stockett was exploring an idea for her first novel.  Spencer was trying, grudgingly, to slim down for the camera.

“I was 100 pounds heavier then and on a diet,” Spencer recalls. “It was August, so it was hot, and I was hungry and surrounded by all that rich New Orleans cuisine that I wasn’t supposed to eat. I was extremely grumpy.”

Stockett, drawn to Spencer’s amplitude of form and attitude, took notes for her novel-in-progress, and the resulting “Minny” — a plump and deliciously defiant maid — became one of the principal narrators and most memorable characters in this story of race relations and female friendship in segregated, 1960s-era Jackson, Mississippi.

“Minny was probably the easiest character for me to write because of Octavia,” says Stockett, who grew up in Jackson and now resides in Atlanta. “At the time we were more acquaintances than friends, but I would watch her at parties – her mannerisms and gestures. She’s just hysterical. She’s extremely intelligent and well-educated, but Octavia will definitely tell you like it is. You can just imagine the look on her face when some skinny white girl came up and said to her, ‘I’ve written a book and you’re one of the main characters.’ She rolled her eyes and said something like, ‘that’s good,’ and walked away!”

Spencer, who lives in Los Angeles, puts her harrumphing reaction in context: “In Hollywood, everybody – and I mean everybody — is shopping around a book or a screenplay or a video or an idea at every turn.”

All of that shopping around paid off. The Help became one of the publishing world’s seersucker Cinderella stories, released by Putnam to crest The New York Times best-seller list for 103 weeks. Spencer, like book clubs around the country, was won over once she started reading.

“Frankly, I approached it reluctantly – I bristled at the dialect,” she says. Minny’s first words are: “Standing on that white lady’s back porch, I tell myself, Tuck it in Minny. Tuck in whatever might fly out my mouth and tuck in my behind too.”

Spencer says, “I thought, ‘Oh, God, not another one of those books about the South.’”

Her reading tastes lean toward Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Maya Angelou, she explains, so she feared that the The Help might be just another exercise in moonlight-and-magnolias cliché, a hoop-skirted white author rhapsodizing with the vapors over some one-dimensional “mammy.”

“I was naturally curious, though, about this ‘spitfire’ based on me, and once I cracked the book open, I ended up skipping a party to sit down and devour it, and decided it was one of the best books I’d ever read in my life,” Spencer says. “It really resonated with me as a Southern woman, and I realized immediately that the important themes and the rich complexities of these characters would resonate with readers across racial, regional, socioeconomic, and generational lines. Suddenly, I had high hopes.”

Spencer grew up in Montgomery, a bookworm in a family of seven children.

“Most people in Hollywood are dreaming of acting, of being in front of the camera, but ever since I was at Auburn, I’ve called myself a writer,” she says. “I had a minor in theater arts, but I had to be more or less dragged in front of the camera.”

That pivotal moment came when was working behind the scenes as a production assistant on “A Time to Kill.” A director asked her to read, and she landed a small part in that Mississippi-based film. On that set, she became fast friends with another up-and-comer, Tate Taylor, and they lit out for Los Angeles and lived as roommates for four years, eventually accumulating a coterie of “expat Southerners” in the dues-paying stage of their red-carpet aspirations. Taylor had grown up in Jackson with Stockett.

“We all had culture shock in L.A.,” Spencer says with a laugh. “I remember the first time my car broke down on the side of the road, and I thought, ‘Back home, 10 people would’ve stopped to help by now.’ I missed the manners and the warmth of the South, so I surrounded myself with other Southerners who felt the same.”

The reluctant actress began burnishing her resume with roles in Dinner For Schmucks, The Soloist, Seven Pounds, Bad Santa, Spiderman, Big Momma’s House, and Being John Malkovich. On the small screen, Spencer became a familiar, apple-cheeked face, starring in the series “Halfway Home,” and appearing in “The Big Bang Theory,” “E.R.,” “CSI,” “Raising The Bar,” and “Medium,” along with a memorable five-episode arc as a lusty INS agent-turned-stalker in “Ugly Betty.”

Meanwhile, Stockett almost had given up after 60 agents had rejected her novel. Tate, who had directed several indie projects, begged for the film rights before it was even published and went to work on a screenplay. In 2009, the year The Help came out to such fanfare, Entertainment Weekly named Spencer one of the “25 Funniest Actresses in Hollywood,” and then DreamWorks got behind the movie project.

“We all had run around together, and since Kathryn modeled some of Minny’s traits after Octavia, we felt no one else could play her but Octavia,” says Tate, who made authenticity his mission (read: refreshingly believable drawls), shooting the film in Greenwood, Mississippi. “When I was looking for actors, I was looking at how they talked, the way they moved. I didn’t want to do a Hollywoodized version of the South. The South is an oppressive, complicated, beautiful, tragic, loving place all in one bundle.”

Ironically, Spencer had drilled away her accent. “I partially paid my way through Auburn with public speaking scholarships,” she says, “so I had to put that lilt back in my voice!” she says. Ultimately, she so embraced the dialect that she read for the audiobook version of The Help, and won the “Earphone Award,” and Spencer accompanied the author on a book tour in which she delivered the African-American voices in the text during readings.  “Some people suggested I might be underplaying Minny,” Spencer says. “You can read her rebellious thoughts in the book, but realize that to talk back to a white employer during that era was dangerous. She couldn’t publicly express her feelings. So I tried to play it down rather than overacting and overplaying her fiery spirit.”

It comes through, though, in every knowing, sidewise glance. Spencer, as Stockett noted, can’t help “telling it like it is,” just like her alterego, Minny, who muses: “Truth. It feels cool, like water washing over my sticky-hot body. Cooling a heat that’s been burning me up all my life.”