1920s and 30s: Shattering high notes.
The first Oxford resident to make his mark in American letters was the critic and novelist Stark Young, who after graduating Ole Miss headed first to Texas where he founded
Texas Review and then to New York City where he became a critic for the
New Republic. In 1930 he made his stand as one of the 12 Southern Agrarians, a seminal group that included the poet Robert Penn Warren. Young’s 1932 epic novel of the antebellum South,
So Red the Rose, was a national bestseller that set the stage for the adventures of Rhett and Scarlett later in the decade.
Yet even as Young was wading through high cotton and hoop skirts, his friend and fellow Oxford resident William Faulkner was busy dismantling forever the way novels would be read and written. Faulkner began his career in the 1920s in a small room in the upstairs corner of his parents’ home, using corn liquor as a sometime companion as he tackled the myths and legends of family, region and man. By the early ’30s he had married, bought a home, a dilapidated mansion he christened Rowan Oak, and had already published
Sartoris,
The Sound and the Fury,
As I Lay Dying and
Sanctuary, with even more to come.
The twenties and thirties saw other Hills artists achieve big breakthroughs. After traveling the country working at everything from busking to minstrel and medicine shows, DeSoto County guitar greats Joe Callicot, Garfield Akers, Frank Stokes and Elijah Avery finally began their Memphis recording careers in the 1920s, Stokes as part of the Beale Street Sheiks, Avery as part of Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers.
It wasn’t a traveling musician, but rather a traveling salesman who became the subject of Eudora Welty’s breakthrough: After attending Mississippi State College for Women (now the Mississippi University for Women) in the 20s, she published her first short story, “The Death of a Traveling Salesman” in 1936. That same year, Juilliard-trained singer Ruby Elzy made her concert debut with George Gershwin and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, having already wowed critics and audiences alike with her performance as Serena in the opera
Porgy and Bess. Born in Pontotoc and “discovered” while a student at Rust College, Elzy still found time to come back home to sing in church in between performances at the White House, in movies and on radio. She was about to make her debut as Aida when she died in 1943 at age 35.
Though he would, decades later, enjoy a movie debut, there would never be any formal training for Othar Turner. Yet in 1923 his gift was no less exciting when at the age of sixteen, he carved his first fife out of sugar cane, and began to play with fife and drum musicians at parties and picnics around the Holly Springs and Como areas. Turner’s propulsive style, sprung more from African rhythms than Colonial heritage, would influence later Hills musicians as they created their own style of blues.