FOLK ART GALA IN ATLANTA

FOLK FEST THIS WEEKEND

By Doc Lawrence

ATLANTA-“Always remember,” the frail old man with twinkling indigo eyes told me, “that God loves you and will never abandon you no matter what.” Anyone else who said that to me while I was reading a newspaper in a storage room next to a loading dock would have been met with a little skepticism. But this was the Reverend Howard Finster, the world’s most famous folk artist, who told everyone he was a man of God, adding that he was “not of this world.” The encounter was at Folk Fest many years ago, and each year as I return for stories and to buy some art, I remember those words from the man who became a friend.



PAINTING BY MISSIONARY MARY PROCTOR



 The 20,000 or so people flocking to this year’s edition of Folk Fest, the world’s largest folk art exhibition, won’t see Finster, who died in 2001, but many of his amazing works are here along with collectibles by Ab the Flagman, Missionary Mary Proctor, Lorenzo Scott, Eric Legee and a few hundred more self-taught painters, sculptors, potters and wood carvers.

There is no family-friendly event anywhere that remotely approaches the excellence of this three-day art celebration just outside Atlanta. Good-will permeates everything. Laughter dominates. You see a painting that foretells Armageddon juxtaposed with a flying alligator made of tin, or a scene depicting a creek baptism. The artists and galleries embody multiculturalism at its best. Different people from vastly different places and backgrounds show off their works to total strangers. A painting of a sunrise over a rural church brightens the wall of a gloomy office. A painted face jug becomes a conversation piece in a faraway kitchen.

"For a long time this art has been kept out of the mainstream art community," says Folk Fest Show co-founder, Steve Slotin. "Self-taught art is the most important visual culture America has ever produced. Because many of the world’s most important folk artists are from the South, and the phenomenal success of Folk Fest, Atlanta is now recognized as the hub of folk art.”

Folk Fest’s acclaimed success has propelled the annual exhibition to a higher level ordinarily reserved for museums. As Steve Slotin has said, self-taught artists do not seek out the art world, the art world “passionately seeks them out.” Folk art comes from untrained people like Rev. Howard Finster who draw on their culture and experiences in an isolated world; and is made with a true, untutored, creative passion.

Like most of the authentic South, folk art’s existence is threatened by urbanization and homogenizing popular culture.  Folk Fest celebrates these artists and their works by showcasing unbridled creativity and majestic vision that may soon disappear.

Directions to Folk Fest:

http://slotinfolkart.com/folk_fest/folk_fest.html

The Year of Alabama Food:

http://mycookingmagazine.com/gourmet-highway-alabama-celebrates-its-food/

TAILGAING DOWN SOUTH 2012

 

    THE FOOTBALL FEAST RETURNS

By Doc Lawrence

TUSCALOOSA-Soon the grills will be set up outside college football stadiums and the pre-game tailgating tradition will begin all the way into next year. The tailgating feast, born in the Civil War, is pure Americana and showcases some of the best late summer and fall food and beverages.

 I’m searching for the best of the best for my annual series of tailgating stories: Favorite recipes. Beverages with names that reflect a school’s mascot or nickname. Especially photos that capture the tailgating spirit. Cocktails with names like Seminole Sangria, Bulldog Big Bite, 'Bama Bloody Mary, Clemson Cooler, Auburn Eye-Opener, Miami Martini, Gator Snapper, Carolina Cooler or Tennessee Stud and what’s in these and the others we don’t know about yet but would want to drink and enjoy?

Recipes including casseroles, grilled shrimp wrapped in bacon, fried chicken, catfish, homemade and artisan sausage, desserts, and all things delicious will be featured with credits given to the originator. Plus potent punch creations, different Sangria recipes, appropriate wines, craft beers, new cocktails and anything that helps tell the tailgating story. Priority will be given to originality and imagination. These stories and recipes plus colorful photos will appear in my regular food, wine and spirits columns, broadcasts and television shows, now through the end of this year.

Photos of enthusiastic fans feasting in stadium parking lots are always welcome! Send them to me: editors@docsnews.com.

                 May your team go undefeated!

Just published. The Year of Alabama Food:

http://mycookingmagazine.com/gourmet-highway-alabama-celebrates-its-food/

East Tennessee Vacation:

http://global-writes.com/2012/07/navigating-tennessees-thunder-road.html

Wines Down South

http://winesdownsouth.blogspot.com/

FOLK FEST 2012-FAMILY FUN IN ATLANTA

HERALDED FOLK ART SHOW THIS WEEKEND

By Doc Lawrence





PATRIOTIC WORK BY AB THE FLAGMAN

ATLANTA-“Always remember,” the frail old man with twinkling indigo eyes told me, “that God loves you and will never abandon you no matter what.” Anyone else who said that to me while I was reading a newspaper in a storage room next to a loading dock would have been met with a little skepticism. But this was the Reverend Howard Finster, the world’s most famous folk artist, who told everyone he was a man of God, adding that he was “not of this world.” The encounter was at Folk Fest many years ago, and each year as I return for stories and to buy some art, I remember those words from the man who became a friend.

The 20,000 or so people flocking to this year’s edition of Folk Fest, the world’s largest folk art exhibition, won’t see Finster, who died in 2001, but many of his amazing works are here along with collectibles by Ab the Flagman, Missionary Mary Proctor, Lorenzo Scott, Eric Legee and a few hundred more self-taught painters, sculptors, potters and wood carvers.

There is no family-friendly event anywhere that remotely approaches the excellence of this three-day art celebration just outside Atlanta. Good-will permeates everything. Laughter dominates. You see a painting that foretells Armageddon juxtaposed with a flying alligator made of tin, or a scene depicting a creek baptism. The artists and galleries embody multiculturalism at its best. Different people from vastly different places and backgrounds show off their works to total strangers. A painting of a sunrise over a rural church brightens the wall of a gloomy office. A painted face jug becomes a conversation piece in a faraway kitchen.

"For a long time this art has been kept out of the mainstream art community," says Folk Fest Show co-founder, Steve Slotin. "Self-taught art is the most important visual culture America has ever produced. Because many of the world’s most important folk artists are from the South, and the phenomenal success of Folk Fest, Atlanta is now recognized as the hub of folk art.”

Folk Fest’s acclaimed success has propelled the annual exhibition to a higher level ordinarily reserved for museums. As Steve Slotin has said, self-taught artists do not seek out the art world, the art world “passionately seeks them out.” Folk art comes from untrained people like Rev. Howard Finster who draw on their culture and experiences in an isolated world; and is made with a true, untutored, creative passion.

Like most of the authentic South, folk art’s existence is threatened by urbanization and homogenizing popular culture.  Folk Fest celebrates these artists and their works by showcasing unbridled creativity and majestic vision that may soon disappear.

For directions to Folk Fest:

http://slotinfolkart.com/folk_fest/folk_fest.html

TAILGATING DOWN SOUTH 2012

  

THE GREAT SPORTS FEAST RETURNS

By Doc Lawrence

ATLANTA-Soon the grills will be set up outside college football stadiums and the pre-game tailgating tradition will begin all the way into next year. The tailgating feast, born in the Civil War, is pure Americana and showcases some of the best late summer and fall food and beverages.

 I’m searching for the best of the best for my annual series of tailgating stories: Favorite recipes. Beverages with names that reflect a school’s mascot or nickname. Especially photos that capture the tailgating spirit. Cocktails with names like Seminole Sangria, Bulldog Big Bite, 'Bama Bloody Mary, Clemson Cooler, Auburn Eye-Opener, Miami Martini, Gator Snapper, Carolina Cooler or Tennessee Stud and what’s in these and the others we don’t know about yet but would want to drink and enjoy?

Recipes including casseroles, grilled shrimp wrapped in bacon, fried chicken, catfish, homemade and artisan sausage, desserts, and all things delicious will be featured with credits given to the originator. Plus potent punch creations, different Sangria recipes, appropriate wines, craft beers, new cocktails and anything that helps tell the tailgating story. Priority will be given to originality and imagination. These stories and recipes plus colorful photos will appear in my regular food, wine and spirits columns, broadcasts and television shows, now through the end of this year.

Photos of enthusiastic fans feasting in stadium parking lots are always welcome! Send them to me: editors@docsnews.com.

                  May your team go undefeated!

Just published. The Year of Alabama Food:

http://mycookingmagazine.com/gourmet-highway-alabama-celebrates-its-food/

East Tennessee Vacation:

http://global-writes.com/2012/07/navigating-tennessees-thunder-road.html

JOHNNY CASH-GOD'S MESSENGER

Man In Black’s Gospel Recordings

Like a bird on the wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.

             By Leonard Cohen, as recorded by Johnny Cash

By Doc Lawrence

NASHVILLE. In life and death, Johnny Cash remains almost impossible to categorize. Complex, paradoxical, contradictory and often controversial are, regarding his career and music, hollow adjectives. Country? Yes. Rockabilly? One of the founding fathers right along with Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis and Sam Phillips. He hobnobbed with preachers, Hollywood stars, rock and roll greats and bounced, according to his own pain-filled words, between sin and salvation. Few who knew him or saw a live performance could doubt his truthfulness.

His flaws defined his everlasting greatness.

 Johnny’s gospel recordings are featured on a just released CD: “Johnny Cash- The Greatest Gospel Songs.” Nothing unheard before, but for the uninitiated, it’s worth a listen. I believe that Johnny would have been a wonderful college lecturer at a great university like Vanderbilt, teaching a course about understanding the South (and the South understanding itself.) The mix of gospel with other popular music forms from white and black cultures would likely have been presented as naturally by this farm kid from Arkansas as eating catfish with fried green tomatoes. The great journalist Marshall Frady described the South as “America’s Ireland” and that’s just about a bull’s-eye.

I met Johnny several times and interviewed him. He was engaging and friendly. His voice was what I imagined as like the voice of God. He was remarkably empathetic and from what I gather quite generous. The live concerts included his singing to prisoners in Georgia during the early 70’s, and along with my mother, watching him sing as an introduction for Rev. Billy Graham at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. I saw a BBC television interview in London with David Frost where Johnny was crusading for AIDS research

He was, without any effort, dominant, overshadowing all celebrities. I think his power-so terrifically magnetic—war rooted in his simplicity. The all black clothing, dark hair and eyes, songs with uncomplicated lyrics but loaded with power and irony, and an unyielding respect for truth.

Johnny Cash did not talk down to anyone. His best works are songs about his own failures, his sins, his duplicity, his ongoing fight with the devil where the devil often won, and from time to time a warning that he had the capacity to inflict pain. I held on to every single word. Johnny, to quote Carl Sandburg, was “all men, every man.”

There are wonderful songs on the new release including Rev. Thomas Dorsey’s masterpiece, “Peace in the Valley.” Johnny was not bound to music forms and recorded what he liked with whom he admired. Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and of course, his beloved June. U2’s Bono, another friend of Johnny’s said  that “not since John The Baptist has there been a voice like that crying in the wilderness”

Johnny Cash sings some terrific gospel on the new recording and stays true to how he described himself:

“Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything's OK,
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
'Till things are brighter, I'm the Man In Black.”

SCARLETT AND RHETT ATTRACT TOURISTS

GONE WITH THE WIND TRAIL DEBUTS

 By Doc Lawrence

ATLANTA - The first and only Gone With the Wind Trail is up and running in and around Atlanta with prominent stops along the way allowing visitors from the four corners to explore the home and literary setting of the classic book and beloved movie. The importance of the heralded trail to those searching for signs of Rhett, Scarlett, Melanie and Ashley is underscored by access to well-curated museums, acclaimed collections and exhibitions and highly popular parks all connected by history and colorful folklore.

Several stops encourage research not available in other Southern cities. And in between destinations, visitors will find some of the best shopping and finest restaurants in the country.

The sights and sounds of Atlanta during the Civil War and Reconstruction are “told” through the eyes of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler at Scarlett on the Square in the lovely city of Marietta just north of Atlanta. The Margaret Mitchell House facing Atlanta’s Peachtree Street is where Ms. Mitchell, a Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote her novel containing the much-quoted phrase, "Tomorrow is another day". Margaret Mitchell, who died as a result of injuries suffered when struck by a taxi on her beloved Peachtree Street, is buried in hauntingly beautiful Oakland Cemetery, a stone’s throw from the Atlanta Cyclorama depicting the July 1864.Battle of Atlanta.

The Road to Tara Museum in Jonesboro south of Atlanta is an important destination on the trail and is near the site of Tara, Scarlett’s plantation home.

The Trail directs visitors to The Atlanta Fulton County Public Library housing one of the most extensive collections of Margaret Mitchell's photographs, books and personal items, along with her Remington typewriter.

The Atlanta History Center located in fashionable Buckhead is near top-rated restaurants and easily fills a day for visitors eager to learn more about Margaret Mitchell, the romantic characters she created and the tumultuous events during and after the Civil War. Other nearby attractions on or near the trail include the Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, Decatur’s Mary Gay House (Ms. Gay’s book, Life in Dixie During the War, was a guidepost for Ms. Mitchell’s historical references) and Stone Mountain Park, a spectacular family friendly facility with a museum, campgrounds, hiking trails and other outdoor recreation, historic mansions and the carving of Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

For more information: www.gwtwtrail.com

After a few exciting days in Atlanta, consider a drive along East Tennessee’s Moonshine Trail. Vacation details at http://www.winesdownsouth.com/dine_with_doc/Dining_W_Davy_Crockett/Dining_in_TN.pdf

   

GONZO'S BIRTHDAY

 HUNTER S. THOMPSON AT 75

By Doc Lawrence

He was born in Louisville Kentucky on this day in 1937. I still miss the guy years after he “checked out” at his Colorado compound.  I have the memorial edition of the Rolling Stanes tribute edition framed, prominently displayed on a wall near the keyboard as a daily kick in the pants reminder of what a journalist can and should do in today’s world where nitwits discuss government, the economy, lifestyles and sports. Thompson would have these bottom feeders with his morning Wheaties.  The pioneer of  "gonzo journalism," where, according to Garrison Keillor, the journalist “usually ends up being part of the story he's researching, and the story is told through his eyes. There's usually profanity, sarcasm, and exaggeration so that the line between journalism and fiction becomes blurred.”  Thompson, in a Rolling Stone interview admitted as much: "If I'd written the truth I knew for the past 10 years, about 600 people — including me — would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism."

Hunter S. Thompson was irreverent, ferociously independent, outrageous, insightful, hilarious and disarmingly honest. His defects were front and center in all I’ve ever read by him. He remains supremely quotable: “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.” In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , Thompson quotes Samuel Johnson: "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

Two books on my shelf are treasures, particularly when I find my little world invaded by mindless talking heads doing weather, exposes or covering presidential elections. TheProud Highway: Saga of a Desparate Southern Gentleman, edited by Douglas Brinkley, and Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odessy of an Outlaw Journalist, edited by Dougla Brinkley and David Halbestram. Read a few of these letters when you’ve had enough. Laughter rejuvenates the troubled soul