The Drive
Written By: Free Feral with Annette Hollowell
It’s mid afternoon on a Friday, back in August 2019, the first week of school, and Annette and I bust the kids out early to take a trip. There are questions, games, and mild disagreements, and after an extended period of what Annette calls “crunkness,” during which time Selah, six, and Ida, four, run around quarter clothed and negotiate for sweets somewhat successfully, we pile back into the car and inch our way through typical New Orleans midday traffic. We pass the cemetery at the top of Canal with its bone white mausoleums, the billboards boasting “barely legal” ladies, gun shows, and Geico, the airport and the airport hotels. We watch the pink and white blur of crepe myrtle blooms give way to fields of water with balding cypress, then vast expanses of grass. We sing Old Town Road, and Lion King.
By the time we pass the paranormal glow of refinery flares in the deep distance, the girls are sleeping. Not like they’re missing anything - they’ve done this drive dozens of times already. It’s ritual by now. They have places they stop, food they consistently refuse. Annette performs her duty as driver as though the route is a groove etched into the road. She can do it with her eyes closed. The first time we made this drive together, I awoke from a cat nap to find her amongst a sea of papers she was studying for an upcoming meeting. Annette is an attorney by training, though she has put most of her professional effort into consulting, peace work and community building as as a facilitator and as a mediator. That time, it was only the two of us, no kids. Gettin it in where she be fittin it in is a skill Annette has cultivated all her life but refined in motherhood.
We are headed to Foxfire Ranch for a packed weekend. There will be a festival, a family funeral, and a blues show in between. Annette’s family, the Hollowells, are Blues people. None of them is willing to call themselves a musician but it’s been the blood in the arteries of Foxfire Ranch for over a decade. Over the years, Bill and Annie, Annette’s parents, have opened up their North Mississippi estate to the community, hosting weddings and family reunions, and at least twice a month throughout the warmer parts of the year, they host Blues shows. The artists they host cover the full range of blues taxonomy, but Hill Country the music that is endemic to this region, has a special home here. Like this one time me and Annette got to talking about Junior Kimbrough. “I don’t have to understand the exact words that are being articulated in his moan,” she said, “there’s something about it that is just so soulful and that just speaks to the memory of my body, you know?”
Every region of Mississippi has its own unique blues. If you hear “the blues” and have a single sound in mind, chances are that sound is Robert Johnson or John Lee Hooker, Delta Blues - finger pickin and slide guitar oozed over by some rusted moans. Hill Country Blues is the Delta’s rhapsodic cousin; shamanic, manic, in a trance. It has a little spring in its step, each guitar line a hypnotic trotting mantra urging the listener along in support of the message in the moan. This is the music that resonates the clay in the hills, the hollow of the trees. It is a current coursing through the whole Hollowell family “I see it in my children, and how they come to it on their own accord,” says Annette. “They don’t like everything I like. But, they hear a Hill Country song come on, and it makes them move.
“I remember we were out there for a concert,” she recalls, “... Selah was in the middle of the dance floor by herself... At first I was like, ‘oh, she’s being real goofy. She’s about to bust her head and fall over - let me stop her and get her to calm down.’ But then, I just stopped and watched. I recorded her for four songs and she was GETTING! HER! LIFE! ... My baby’s feeling the spirit, is feeling the ancestors… Like I can’t deny it, she can’t deny it… Our culture and how we experience that together, how we share that, and how we express that is deeply spiritual work... that’s deep and Black... so powerful and irresistible.”
