Desultory Delta drive

It’s cloudy as I pull away from my hotel in Forrest City on this winter Saturday morning. I head north on Arkansas 1. Those really wanting to explore the Delta should take this highway from McGehee in the south to Jonesboro in the north. It offers a fascinating look at rural Arkansas.

There’s something soothing about a desultory Delta drive on a day when there’s no set schedule. My wife is out of state, and there’s no rush to get home to Little Rock. Armed with a cup of coffee from Holiday Inn Express, I make my way through Caldwell and then Colt, the community that gave us rockabilly performer Charlie Rich in December 1932. Rich’s parents were devout Missionary Baptists who sang in a church quartet.

Arkansas music historian Robert Cochran wrote that Rich was “immersed in the whole range of Southern music. Along with the church music, there was the country music on the radio and the blues he learned from a sharecropper named C.J., who taught him piano. Rich played in his high school band in Forrest City, where he was already known as Charlie Kenton for his love of jazz (especially the music of Stan Kenton, George Gershwin and Oscar Peterson).”

Rich met his future wife in high school. They had four children. Rich attended the University of Arkansas for one year, spent four years in the

Air Force (playing with a blues and jazz group called the Velvetones) and then moved to the West Memphis area to farm. He also performed in bars at night and wrote songs with his wife.

In 1957, Rich signed on with Sun Records at Memphis as a studio musician and songwriter. In 1960, he recorded “Lonely Weekends,” and it hit No. 22 on the pop charts. “Mohair Sam” made it to No. 3 on the pop charts in 1965.

Arkansas is a small state. I’ve learned that if you hang around here long enough, you have a connection with almost everyone. My connection to Rich came when he lived for a time in the late 1960s or early 1970s (I was a boy and don’t remember the exact year) in a house on Lake Norrell, the lake built to supply water to the city of Benton. My grandparents had a cabin next to his place, and we would sit on the dock at night and listen to Rich practice.

Those were the lean years when the money from “Mohair Sam” had run out and success proved elusive. Then came 1973. That was when “Behind Closed Doors” hit No. 1 on the country charts and “The Most Beautiful Girl” made it to No. 1 on both the pop and country charts. Rich won a Grammy and was named the Country Music Association’s Male Vocalist of the Year.

“Rich’s attitude toward this material was often ambivalent at best, but it brought him money and fame,” Cochran wrote. “He was the Silver Fox, a huge star of the lush ‘countrypolitan’ sound that took country to Las Vegas and other big-city outlets. He often handled this fame and fortune poorly, drinking heavily and misbehaving in high-visibility settings. When announcing the Entertainer of the Year at the 1975 Country Music Association awards show, he startled a national television audience and outraged industry moguls by opening the envelope and, seeing John Denver’s name, whipping out his lighter and setting the offending card ablaze.”

I remember my grandmother, who lived to age 98, saying the next time I visited with her: “I’m so mad at Charlie. I wish he still lived next door so I could shake some sense into him.”

Rich died in July 1995. I’m listening to his music as I leave St. Francis County and enter Cross County. Crowley’s Ridge is just to my east, and I’ll be back up on the ridge by the time I enter Wynne. I continue north on Arkansas 1 and see the sign for Vanndale, which like Colt produced a famous man. For Colt, it was a musician. For Vanndale, it was the man many consider to have been the foremost Southern historian, C. Vann Woodward.

Woodward was born there in 1908, the son of a school administrator. His father later moved the family to Arkadelphia and Morrilton. Woodward graduated from high school at Morrilton in 1926 and enrolled at what’s now Henderson State University at Arkadelphia. After two years at Henderson, Woodward transferred to Emory University in Atlanta. Though I never met Woodward, the “small-world Arkansas” connection here must be that I’m from Arkadelphia and that my son is in law school at Emory.

“Inspired by his uncle and namesake, Comer

Woodward, and a social philosophy honed during his undergraduate experience, Woodward emerged from college determined to combat racial and class injustice,” Brady Banta wrote for the Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “Woodward spent a year teaching English at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, then earned a master’s in political science at Columbia University in New York. Back in Atlanta in the fall of 1932, after a summer touring Europe and the Soviet Union, Woodward became embroiled in a campaign to fund the defense of Angelo Herndon, an African American communist arrested for publicly protesting the Scottsboro case, in which nine black men were arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to death in the rapes of two white women. The defendants were convicted on the basis of flimsy evidence and were given inadequate counsel during their trial. His support of Herndon earned Woodward notoriety as a social rebel.”

Blaming their actions on the bleak financial conditions caused by the Great Depression, administrators at Georgia Tech laid off Woodward and 29 other faculty members. Woodward moved to Oxford, Ga., where his father was the dean at a junior college. He later got a job with the federal Works Progress Administration conducting sociological surveys in rural Georgia.

“Disheartened by the conditions he witnessed, Woodward concentrated his talent on writing a history that might embolden the South to address its bedeviling issues: race and class,” Banta wrote. “Interested in the use of these issues by Southern demagogues, Woodward soon focused on Tom Watson of Georgia, a subject whose heirs granted access to their collections of personal papers. Having written four chapters of a Watson biography, Woodward obtained a research grant that enabled him, in 1934, to enroll at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and complete the project as a doctoral dissertation.

“By his own admission, Woodward’s sole focus at Chapel Hill was finishing the manuscript. Woodward later credited his dissertation supervisor, Howard K. Beale, with making him a better scholar and writer. At Beale’s urging, Woodward sent the manuscript to Macmillan Publishers, which accepted it, and Tom Watson: Agrarian

Rebel, published in 1938, launched his professional writing career.”

Woodward later taught at the University of Florida, Johns Hopkins and finally at Yale beginning in 1961. He retired at Yale in 1977 and died in 1999. Woodward turned a series of lectures given in 1954 at the University of Virginia into a book titled The Strange Career of Jim Crow. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described it as the bible of the civil rights movement.

Icontinue north up Arkansas 1 along Crowley’s Ridge, that distinctive region that separates the Delta into two parts. It ranges in width from one to 12 miles and extends from southeastern Missouri to Helena. I pass through Cherry Valley and then turn east onto Arkansas 14 at Harrisburg. Ahead on my Saturday journey lies Dyess, the federal relocation colony where Johnny Cash was raised during the Great Depression.

I come off the ridge just east of Harrisburg and am back in the Delta as thousands of geese fly over my car. I contemplate on this straight stretch how one small slice of one small Southern state could give us American originals as disparate as Rich, Woodward and Cash.