The South Wing

When we first stepped up to the plywood building off an unfamiliar highway somewhere between Starkville and Montpelier, I was psyched to be going to a real Mississippi roadhouse.

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The guy at the door squinted suspiciously—“You 21?”—and then waved us in without bothering with IDs. First off I was impressed by the Budweiser paraphernalia—race-car placards on the wall, a Clydesdale chandelier over the bar, the life-size Bud-girl comically peeking over the bass player’s shoulder, all peaches-n-cream legs and cardboard midriff. Through the haze of smoke, I could make out pool tables in the back, augmented by more of those green glass Bud lamps. I’d come out of general curiosity, yes, but also because the band was supposed to be amazing.

Fronted by a wiry, ink-covered guitar god hailing from Florida and dwelling in Nashville, The Kenneth Brian Band is an eclectic recipe: three parts twang, one part deep-friend monster-fuzz, with a garnish of spooky, bluesy rifts. The songs are Brian’s—he writes them and he owns ?????? ????? ???? them—marking technicalities effortless and execution bloody. He takes it in all the right places—gut, chest, hips—demanding and supplicating, his motions loose and fierce as he tenderly manhandles his guitar, so that soon, everyone in the joint is taking it, too.

Brian’s the star, but the whole band is great, each of them engaging the music and the audience in a specific way. Wes Davis alternates between an upright and electric bass, exuding self-possession that sometimes gives way to boyish bashfulness, as he breaks his concentration to grin at Brian or glance at his parents seated at the bar. Dickey Pryor has an almost jazzy drumming style—more swing, less swagger—and Travis Stephens, on rhythm and acoustic guitar, is fluid and easy with both his instrument and his attention, casually playing rapport off of both band and the audience.

I wasn’t sure what they were doing at AJ’s. Davis is from Columbus, but the others live in Music City, USA, and Brian has a songwriting deal with Sony. He’s worked hard and promoted himself well—he doesn’t need to play backwoods dives in Podunk, Mississippi. But for whatever reason, he plays AJ’s every few weeks, and I’m sure I’m not the only who’s grateful. Couples danced unselfconsciously, one guy sporting army fatigues and a table over, there were birthday balloons and a huge bottle of Crown Royal, some of which a woman dumped in cup of coke, sloppy and unmixed, and passed my way. It was Mississippi people being Mississippi people—everything I romanticize, everything I clamber to claim as roots when bouncing around, urban-nomad style, telling people, “I’m from Mississippi.”

And then something happened—something that felt like a sucker-punch, although technically, I should just consider it a reality check.

“I love the great state of Mississippi,” Brian announced, and of course, people cheered—“and now, I’m going to play our national anthem.”

He stepped forward and played alone, plucking out a gorgeous melody, separating chords note by note on his electric guitar. Each phrase hung in the air, full-bodied and sharp. I think he was singing, but I can’t be sure. I know that melody so well, I know the words—we all do—so maybe my mind was substituting his voice. But I’m sure that everyone else was singing, all the people moving forward en mass, crowding the band and raising their beer: “I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten…” ?????? ????? ????

Something that had been nagging all night hit me full force. Often I have “authentic” Mississippi adventures with my friend Thabi Moyo. I’ve spent whisky soaked nights dancing with Moyo at Clarksdale blues lounges such as Red’s and Messenger’s, but even though AJ’s is a similar sort of diamond-in-the-rough, I could never bring Moyo into this place. I suspected it when I walked in, I knew it now. I was born and raised in Mississippi, but “Dixieland” isn’t my national anthem, and when Brian finished playing, I told him so.

To his credit, he engaged me in conversation. A former punk-rocker, he claims to love the song for its anarchist implications (can you really compare Southern secession to Henry David Thoreau and San Francisco’s Diggers?) and yes, because of his southern pride—which doesn’t extend to the south’s racial history, he says. I want to believe him now, and I really wanted to believe him then, because he had just given so much of himself to me, to everyone who had witnessed that organic, explosive musical display. But regardless of his personal conviction—regardless of the fact that most people don’t realize that “Dixieland” was first performed in the blackface role of a slave, mourning his freedom and longing for the days of the plantation—almost everyone has a strong, visceral reaction to that song. Brian knew that, that’s why he played it last. And terming “Dixieland” a “national anthem” only reinforces that vague “tradition” that communities reference but can’t explain when asked to defend their segregated high school proms and all-white country clubs. Southerners often misinterpret their personal despair as the result of something taken from their ancestors nearly two centuries ago, when, if they could see beyond that dumbfounding nostalgia, they would realize that we never lost anything we really had.

As long as there’s still the Council of Conservative Citizens and as long as our state senators pander to their votes, that song is dangerous. And when Brian played it, I realized that actually, AJ’s is no roadhouse. AJ’s is a honky-tonk—and racially, Mississippi still has plenty of work to do. ?????? ????? ????

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