1940’s: The cats begin to play.

By the forties, as Faulkner toiled and drank his way through more stints at the Hollywood studios, writing for movies like To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, another writer from the Mississippi Hills found his name in lights and his position assured in the pantheon of the New York stage, with the premier in 1948 of his Pulitzer-prize winning A Streetcar Named Desire. Another Pulitzer would follow for former Columbus resident Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams, and more hits like Glass Menagerie and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Back home in the hard-scrabble Hills, Othar Turner continued his own distinctive and distinctly un-star-studded path. Unlike the acclaim that accompanied other Hills artists—or even Delta blues musicians, many of whom were finding their way to Chicago clubs and recording studios—Turner’s fame was local and yet intense; his fife and drum music became a prominent influence on other area bluesmen like Mississippi Fred McDowell whose driving style would become known as “country blues.”

In the late 1940s, there were other Hills writers and musicians coming of age who would go on to find worldwide fame. A young black serviceman just out of World War II was finding his voice—or rather his howl—even as a young white boy from Tupelo prowled Beale Street for insight into his own musical identity.