I Know fifty interesting things about Tupelo, Mississippi. Elvis impersonators show up on the list around number thirty. Elvis himself debuts at number twelve. Steve Holland makes the list in the top ten. So does Jack Reed. I tend to evaluate these things differently.
It’s not that I have anything against Elvis. I do have ears. It’s just that, my entire life, the one thing people hold up as a reason why the good Lord shouldn’t wipe Mississippi off the face of the earth was Elvis Presley, and I just got tired of it. When it comes to things you should know about Mississippi, I place Elvis somewhere above hoop skirts and lynching but below Welty, Faulkner, Walker, Walter Payton, and hot tamales.
When it comes to musicians born in Mississippi, I probably listen to Bobby Gentry and Jimmy Buffett more than Elvis. It’s said that Gentry broke Elvis’s heart. When Donna Douglass was the star of Beverly Hillbillies, the top show on television, she made a movie with Elvis and got caught in his web. When it was over, all she wanted to do was leave, go back to Louisiana, and forget she’d ever been to Hollywood. Afraid of losing their goldmine, producers talked her mother into moving out West. They even built her a little home to resemble the one they had in Louisiana. That part of the story ended up in an episode where they moved Granny’s cabin to Beverly Hills to prevent her from moving home. Beverly Hillbillies was made in the years before anybody realized you could get rich off residuals. Donna Douglass spent the last years of her life wearing an Ellie Mae wig and testifying about how much she loved Jesus to pay the bills.
Once upon a time, a Jackson Lawyer and his wife decided Mississippi should have a float in the Rose Bowl Parade. He convinced some other guys to pay for it. The float featured a giant Elvis head with smaller heads of BB King and magnolia blossoms. The mirror sunglasses, reflecting the Mississippi River Bridge that Elvis wore on the float, now hang above the big room at Hal & Mals Restaurant.
Another boy I knew wrote a book about the biggest early hit by Elvis was a song made famous by Big Momma Thorton. A black woman singing about how her man wasn’t no good at all, just a hound dog, makes a lot more sense than Elvis singing to an actual dog.
The first time I was in the same room as Steve Holland was when he was a freshman in the Mississippi legislature and I was a sophomore at Millsaps. My father had given me a book with the names of everyone in both houses of the Mississippi legislature and told me to memorize them.
Eating lunch at CS’s, I was seated at my corner booth with a girl from the coast who had crystal blue eyes. I didn’t particularly have any designs on her, but I sure wanted a closer look. Steve Holland and Hob Bryan had a table close to the door where they were having an animated conversation. I wasn’t close enough to hear what they were saying, and I didn’t want to eavesdrop anyway, but you could tell they were taking opposite sides of some issue.
Bryan was pointing his finger. He had a reputation as something of a hothead. Holland was known as a “front porch” politician. He’d act like he was your best friend having iced tea on the front porch while he put the noose around your neck.
One night, Bryan got upset at something on the news and slammed his beer down on the table so hard that it all foamed out the top. I asked Inez to get him a new one and charge me for it. “Here go, baby,” she said, putting it on his table. I don’t think he asked any questions.
In those days, the Channel Three news team stopped for a beer after the Ten O’Clock News. As soon as Howard Ballou came in, Bryan started hotboxing him. I have no idea why. The legendary Doug Mann took to calling Howard Ballou Bob after the song Babalu by Desi Arnaz.
“Kings of Tupelo” opens with Steve Holland back home at his office in Tupelo. Steve finally retired after nearly forty years in the Mississippi House of Representatives. He gave dementia as his reason for retirement, but from what I saw on television last night, he still looks pretty sharp.
Holland ended up being one of the most powerful men in Mississippi. An artifact of what I call the Mississippi Camelot period, Holland came from a county that produced mostly pretty powerful Republicans, but he was a Democrat, an old-school Democrat. His career always fascinated me.
I didn’t know it, but that night at CS’s was close to the midpoint of the Mississippi Camelot Era. I thought it’d last another twenty-five years, but it only lasted another ten. It carried on some after the election of Kirk Fordice, but not as much as I wanted. I didn’t care for the way Fordice treated his wife, so I supported the very next Democratic gubernatorial candidate. Damn, if he didn’t do the same thing to his wife when he won. Starting with the night Cliff Finch’s wife shot him, we had a run of bad luck with Mississippi governors and marital bliss. Only one of them said he’d kick Burt Case’s ass over it, though.
After Holland's introduction, “Kings of Tupelo” cuts to Paul Kevin Curtis in an above-ground swimming pool from Walmart, outside of his manufactured home. “Here we go.” I thought, with a grimace.
When it comes to things associated with Mississippi, manufactured homes (trailers) and above-ground swimming pools from Walmart are right up there with Elvis Presley.
I made an ill-advised commitment to a girl who lived in a trailer once. It was on a three-acre lot owned by her mother’s parents in Rankin County. People who lived in one trailer on a three-acre lot looked down on the people who lived on a one-acre lot with ten trailers.
I grew up in a neighborhood called “Eastover.” I’m fully aware that there are an awful lot more people from Mississippi who grew up in trailers than there are people who grew up in Eastover, and I knew they looked down on us. One year, a local DJ wrote a song called “Christmas in Eastover,” making fun of the people in my neighborhood. Its popularity drove home the point that the people who listened to it were the real Mississippi, not people like me.
I always worked to not look down on people who grew up in trailers. There were a lot more of them than there were of me. When people started talking about how the “Southern Gothic” form of literature was being replaced by the “Trailerpark Southern Gothic,” I began to secretly resent that this was what we’d be known for. Mississippi is poor, sometimes desperately poor, but there’s more going on here than that.
The Curtis affair and the assassination attempt on Barack Obama happened during the years when I was in full retreat from Mississippi. I rarely went out, and I rarely spoke to anyone. Mississippi Camelot was over, and whatever I had to contribute to the world, I figured I’d made it. The story about the Elvis Impersonator who tried to kill the black president was all over the news, and it embarrassed me.
“Kings of Tupelo” makes Tupelo look much smaller and less incorporated than it really is. There was a time when the furniture business in Tupelo was such a big deal that it threatened to lift the economic fortunes of the entire state of Mississippi.
Jack Reed was from Tupelo. It was becoming clear that there would soon be a Republican Governor of Mississippi. Reed was on my short list of candidates. Gil Carmichael almost beat Cliff Finch. How he didn’t beat Finch always confused me. Among other things, Reed led Tupelo away from the siren song of the Mississippi Citizens Council and the false promises of a segregation academy. Like Carmichael, Reed got kind of screwed around by his own party and never got his chance. Maybe one day I’ll tell that story.
For his part, Elvis fucked off from Mississippi as soon as he could and moved to Memphis. I always figured Memphis, by rights, should be part of Mississippi. It was created to take advantage of the economic activity created by the fecundity of the Mississippi Delta. An awful lot of money made in Mississippi soil ended up in Memphis banks, and an awful lot of new Sunday frocks were bought in Memphis with money made in the Mississippi Delta. One of the most famous events in Memphis was the Cotton Carnival, in a city that never grew an ounce of cotton.
I watch stories about mental illness with a bit of caution because there was pretty pronounced mental illness in my family. Despite how things worked out for him, it’s pretty clear that Paul Kevin Curtis suffers from pretty severe mental illness. He’s diagnosed with Bipolar disorder, but there’s some pretty serious paranoid schizophrenia going on there, even though he doesn’t hear voices.
You hear people say we don’t hide our mentally ill in Mississippi. We put them on the front porch for the world to see. That was a subject of some tension in Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury as Benjy Compson’s brother constantly threatens to “send him to Jackson” before anything bad happens. The state hospital for the mentally insane was in Jackson, where the University of Mississippi Medical Center sits now. That’s a whole other story.
“Kings of Tupelo” is brilliantly crafted, and it is a genuinely interesting story, but I worry it might contribute to a generally negative opinion of Mississippi. It seems we can’t ever escape the evaluation that we’re either stupid, crazy, or evil. I’d rather have the first two than the last, I suppose.
I got the feeling that of all the things Steve Holland did in and for Mississippi, he knew this would be his swan song. “Kings of Tupelo” would be his legacy. They say he has dementia, but he still seems pretty sharp. His humor comes through pretty clearly in the documentary, as does his dedication to Mississippi. You’re left with the impression that he was a lawmaker of some conscious and capability and a wicked sense of humor and Christian Civility.
Roger Wicker spends the entire three episodes sounding like he’d rather be anywhere else. I don’t think Wicker did anything wrong; he just didn’t want to be associated with this.
“Kings of Tupelo” is a true story. It all happened here. It’s not the story about Mississippi I would want to put on Netflix, but they don’t ask me about these things. I got to see some guys I have a lot of respect for. That’s always a good way to spend the night. When your friends, who are not from Mississippi, ask you about “Kings of Tupelo,” try to tell them there’s more going on here than what you see on your television. It won’t do any good, but you should still try.
