I bought this postcard at a souvenir shop on Beale St, Memphis in late July this year. I have it magnet-ed on my fridge. Mary Lou Williams, legendary jazz musician. I have a lot of her material, she started playing professionally at age 6 : one of those amazing creatures who were absorbing the rhythm from birth and went from there.

I just love this picture. I mean, Beale St is one of the few places on earth you will find a postcard of Mary Lou Williams so I love the fact I could get it anywhere. That discovery was special. But apart from that, it is just such a fun, carefree picture. Fun but with her virtuoso music career right there. The woman and her piano. She played with Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakely, Dizzy Gillespie and everyone else. She was a formidable arranger and composer. And her solo work is unique -- not that I'm claiming to be omniscient about jazz but Black Christ of the Andes has got to be a part of its own thing. There are fewer than a dozen solo releases in almost 40 years, I've read a lot of the stuff online but I'd like to read something more substantial about the religious reasons she had for going in and out of the business that way. Duke University has a Centre for Black Culture named after her. She is buried in Pittsburgh.

As quoted on Wikipedia:

""I did it, didn't I? Through muck and mud."

The Buddha did not say it better. What more can you ask of life?

According to the back of the postcard, this picture was taken by Chester Higgins Jr in 1975.

Here is an MP3 of a Mary Lou Williams interview from the "A Grand Night For Swinging." It's only the interview, not the music.

09 Interview With Mary Lou WIlliams.mp3

Mary Lou Williams on YouTube:

I don't really have many good non-family photos from Flagstaff but it's a cool place and deserves a post. It's Arizona, but it's north so not nearly as hot as, say, Phoenix and surrounds which was 100F plus when I was there. Flag was much more pleasant. And it is high, around 7000ft, around the same as Mt Kosciuszko (Australia's highest mountain.) The Grand Canyon is an hour away, but it snows too, and there are the forests, and the mesa, prairies, deserts and just about any other kind of terrain you care to name. I haven't been to the Pacific Northwest but it sort of reminded me of what I imagine parts of Oregon to be like (but with more nearby desert), with the cafes and the hippies and the Obama bumper stickers. A "college town." People carry guns, the Walmart has self-serve, you can buy grog at the supermarket, the cafes and bookshops let you bring dogs in, the mailboxes have those flags on them you see in movies (I never knew what they were for!), had my first "breakfast burrito" and went to my first proper country bar for 10c beers. There were lava tubes, also.

But yeah, I don't have any photos of all that. I do however have lots of my sister & bro'n'laws's animals, and the belongings of mine they ate.

As grand as the canyon is, for pure wow value, you know, I really have to say i thought Sedona was tops. My photos certainly, and no photos I've even found on the net, really do it justice. The red rocks loom up to and over the town and are coloured in a most astounding way.

It is also a world's best practice centre of woo being a locus of various vortices, UFO-fanciers, Kokopelli channelers and allied commercial enterprises. A hoot.

Arizona Yodeller, The DeZurik Sisters

I've already shown some sights of the almost unmatched musical heritage of Memphis -- and I should do a Beale St post too soon -- but of course its significance goes beyond that. One place I was keen to visit was the National Civil Rights Museum, which is housed in the Lorraine Motel site of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The facade is maintained so you'll recognise it from the famous pictures taken by a news photographer who happened to be there, seconds after the shots. It is exactly the same, and quite a spinetingling moment to stand there.

Inside, the museum is extremely impressive. Note if you plan to visit, budget a lot of time - it's very wordy. And I mean that in a good way. (No photos allowed inside but you'll get a good look form the website.) The main section is laid out in a timeline leading up to the modern civil rights movement, with special exhibits on the major events of the movement of the 50s and 60s leading up stairs until you are standing next to MLK's room 306 and looking out the large window shown in the first picture, above. A lot of the timeline has extensive text accompanying artifacts and pictures and if you want to read it all and study the pics like me, it takes a while. The audio tour is also worth the extra couple of bucks. It's not all text, there are very well done reconstructions, such as the "Rosa Parks bus" which has an audio component inside which lets you know how long you have to move when a white person wants to sit down before they call the police. Videos show news footage of the time, the dogs and hoses and National Guards. The whole effect is quite remarkable, even if you are familiar with it all.

Over the road is the site of the hotel where James Earl Ray stayed and fired the shots, also part of the museum and chronicles the crime itself, the hunt for the killer and the aftermath. The room where the shots were fired is reconstructed from police photographs. It's behind glass but the window next to it gives basically the same view of the balcony of the Lorraine -- another hard to explain moment, as you see the assassin's view. Downstairs in this building they also have temporary exhibitions of other social justice struggles, one on Chile ended just before I was there.

In the gift shop I bought -- lol -- a Barack Obama colo(u)ring book and first family paper dolls set, and a fridge magnet.

I also got a book, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign by Michael K. Honey. The strike was the reason King was in Memphis at that time. I'm half way through and it is a fascinating account of labour history, of the relationship between the white union movement and the civil rights movement and the peculiar "plantation mentality" that governed Memphis even at that time. I'm half way through and MLK hasn't figured much but the cast of local and national union organisers, good old boy politicians, civil rights leaders and the put upon sanitation workers is fascinating enough.

So if you have the chance, highly recommended. There's a lot of music connected with these themes obviously, but I'll just pick a YouTube of one of my favourite Nina Simone songs.

Visiting the Chess Records studio at 2120 S. Michigan Ave in Chicago.

One of the most storied addresses in popular music, 2120 South Michigan Ave is down on Chicago's south side, and is now run by the Willie Dixon Blues Heaven Foundation. Which is fitting because although Dixon is less well known than other Chess figures, he was a crucial part of the label as a songwriter and producer as well as musician. Here's Muddy Waters doing one of Willie Dixon's most famous songs "Hoochie Coochie Man" at Newport and Willie doing one of my fave songs "Built for Comfort." There are various gold records on the walls from the likes of Eric Clapton for albums which have W.Dixon compositions on them. Oh and this one is great (complete with audience of Don Draper impersonators.) And this! In the gift shop I bought his autobiography, I Am the Blues.

Next to the studio building is the Willie Dixon Blues Garden (locked when we were there) where they have free concerts now.

Willie, Muddy, Buddy! A picture taken right here in this room!

View from the old control room into the studio.

Willie Dixon Grammy.

An original inlay from the Chess period. I think it was in pretty bad condition when the Blues Foundation took over the building and its been extensively remodeled and reconstructed.

In the old sorting and shipping room there are various displays of memorabilia and also these casts of the faces of many great blues folk. Here is Phineas inspecting them, and I should also thank him for putting me up (and putting up with me) in Chicago and letting me drag him way across town to places like this.

Little Milton

On this X, Elvis stood to record "That's All Right" at Sun Studios.

Sun Studios tour guide demonstrates how Johnny Cash got the scratchy guitar sound on "I Walk the Line" by putting a dollar bill through the strings.

And, Graceland.

Getting reflective at the Wukoki pueblo, Wupatki National Monument near Flagstaff, Arizona.

I think, historically speaking, this was written about Los Angeles but whatever it's such a ripper performance ...