Ms. Girlee’s regular Carrie Yancy. Photo: Gately Williams.

By John T. Edge, Garden & Gun

“We’re church people,” Aaron Leach says when I ask how his family came to run a soul café on the edge of the North Memphis neighborhood known as Smokey City, once thick with factories and working-class families. “When I got called to the church, my mother started cooking.” One of six children born to Jimmie and Baxter Leach, who moved from Schlater, Mississippi, to Memphis in the late 1950s, Aaron smiles wide as he calculates the fare for my plate of braised oxtails, brothy pinto beans, stumpy okra pods, and crunchy-rimmed cornbread muffins.

The matter is settled, says that enveloping grin. But the story of Ms. Girlee’s, a celadon-walled café with a mint-and-white checkerboard floor, set on a pilgrimage-worthy superblock of three soul food standouts and a hot-tamale truck, isn’t that simple. To understand how a storefront restaurant in a strip dominated by a barber college and two beauty salons became a Memphis institution requires fluency in labor history and knowledge of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s late-career push for economic justice.

To read entire article, click HERE.

Larry Norman. Kristy Douglas/Courtesy of the Larry Norman Estate

By Sarah McCammon

Upon the release of his first album Upon This Rock in 1969, Larry Norman unwittingly created the billion-dollar industry of Christian rock. Author Gregory Alan Thornbury is sure that if Norman were alive today, the musician would have despaired at the state of the genre and evangelicalism.

Thornbury’s latest book Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?: Larry Norman and the Perils of Christian Rock, out now, chronicles the life of the evangelical singer and his divergence from the audience he sought to reach.

Norman’s name is cemented among other famous evangelicals of the 1970s like Billy Graham and President Jimmy Carter. Even Vice President Mike Penceremembers “[giving] his life to Jesus Christ” at the 1978 Ichthus Music Festival in Wilmore, Kentucky, which Norman headlined.

“Over the years I’ve been listening to it, I’ve come to see Larry Norman’s voice as a machine for killing complacency in religious people, and it is my sincere hope that this book does the same,” writes Thornbury in the biography.

To read entire article, click HERE.

By Maggie Hendricks

“OK, this is it, girls.”

With 41 seconds left in Loyola-Chicago’s Sweet 16 game with Nevada, Sister Mary Fran McLaughlin points out just how close the game is — just like Loyola’s two previous games in this unexpected NCAA Tournament run.

She and two other retired Sisters of the Charity of Blessed Virgin Mary are focused on the flat screen television in their apartment on the northwest side of Chicago, about nine miles from the campus that has become the center of the city’s attention — as much for a charismatic, feisty nun as the basketball team.

“There’s our girl!” said Sister Peggy Geraghty as the camera pans to a friend they’ve known for 50 years.

Sister Jean Dolores-Schmidt, a fellow BVM and the chaplain for Loyola’s men’s basketball team, is greeting well-wishers at the game in Atlanta. Jean Dolores as they call her, has become the runaway star of the Ramblers’ run, which thanks to a 69-68 win over Nevada has extended to the Elite Eight, and Saturday to the Final Four after their victory over Kansas State.

Read entire story HERE.

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it,” observed the late great Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She was truly one of our most spectacular American writers and the patron saint of Southern Gothic writing with the craziest assortment of grotesque and odd characters. Today would have been her birthday. She blew me away with “Parker’s Back,” a short story about O.E. Parker’s search for love and acceptance of a woman by getting a full back tattoo of the face of Christ. It didn’t turn out as he had planned. She was a skillful and soulful storyteller. When asked by the New York Times a few years ago what “one book that made you who you are today,” Bruce Springsteen responded: “One would be difficult, but the short stories of Flannery O’Connor landed hard on me. You could feel within them the unknowability of God, the intangible mysteries of life that confounded her characters, and which I find by my side every day. They contained the dark Gothicness of my childhood and yet made me feel fortunate to sit at the center of this swirling black puzzle, stars reeling overhead, the earth barely beneath us.” Sadly, she died at the age of 39 of lupus. Grateful for her gift. Happy Birthday, Flannery.

Happy Birthday to Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973). The holy rolling, guitar swinging, hymn singer who arguably gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll was buried in an unmarked grave for more than 35 years. Today, the high-octane godmother of rock is finally getting the recognition and respect she deserves. For fans of Sister Rosetta – my rockabilly buddies exposed me to her back in the mid-1980s – the posthumous crown and throne of adulation is bittersweet. She will finally be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 14. Her innovative guitar playing – finger picking solos and windmill strumming – was pioneering. Her fans included Elvis, Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bob Dylan. In 1942, Billboard Magazine called her music “rock-and-roll spiritual singing” – a decade before the phrase was commonplace. Today, her tombstone properly declares: “She would sing until you cried and then she would sing until you danced for joy. She helped to keep the church alive and the saints rejoicing.” Happy Birthday, Sister Rosetta! Thanks for bring the sound.