The Myth of Yazoo Blues

Newsouth Books

Author John Pritchard will join Mississippi Arts Commission Executive Director Malcolm White Sunday, July 5 for “Mississippi Arts Hour” on MPB.

by Byron Wilkes
July 1, 2009

John Pritchard is a Mississippi native whose newly released novel, “The Yazoo Blues,” chronicles the adventures of a Delta man named Junior Ray Loveblood. The novel is a sequel of sorts to Pritchard’s first book, “Junior Ray,” although the two tales do not intertwine. In both stories, the frank ex-deputy recalls various misadventures and personal undertakings with a foul but telling tongue. The experiences of Junior Ray and his acquaintances often resemble Pritchard’s own, and Junior Ray’s profane way of opining on the world borders on blindly existential, remaining raunchy but notably comical throughout.

In “The Yazoo Blues,” Junior Ray becomes a kind of historian about Ulysses S. Grant’s failed Yazoo Pass expedition. What is he trying to discover?
Junior Ray, in his old age there, decides that, by God, he’s a historian. ... He’s not interested in any other part of history in the world. Junior Ray likes to think he’s very smart, very capable even though he knows he doesn’t have an education, which he sort of scorns anyway ... so he tells that story. A lot of it is absolutely factual and, of course, a lot of it is fabrication.

Where do you find inspiration for that fabrication? Obviously, you have a lot of real-life history you can refer to.
Actually it goes back to my childhood, I think. There’s a lot that’s real mysterious about that part of the country. ... As a boy growing up, that whole area was filled with all kinds of wonderful adventures and possibilities, and that feeling has never left me. Plus, you know, the history of that area ... it’s part myth and part fact. ... You can’t tell a lot of times where myth and fact separate. ... It’s very anecdotal.

In the book, Junior recalls his friend Mad Owens, who has affection for a stripper out of Memphis named Money Scatters. How does this play into “The Yazoo Blues?”
These stories are high satire, and they are sort of semi-allegorical in that the people have place names. Money’s name is from Money, Miss., where Emmett Till was killed and a place called the Tallahatchie Scatters where people go duck hunting. ... Mad Owens is James Madison Owens … one of my maternal great-grandfathers’ names, so “Mad” Owens because he is very eccentric. The thing about Mad is that Mad doesn’t, like most people, want to find love and to be loved; Mad wants to love. He wants to be able to love. ... That’s his passion in a way. He wants to love Money Scatters, but he finds it impossible after a while because of Money’s job.

How do the two tales of the Union soldier and Mad Owens’ affinity for Ms. Scatters correlate?
The Yazoo “blues” were the blue-coated Union soldiers, and then there is ... the emotional Yazoo blues, the broken love affair between Money Scatters ... and Mad Owens. Junior Ray says, “No matter who you are ... you can look up one day, and everybody’s gonna have the Yazoo blues.” So it’s the three things there, the idea of the song, the place (the Yazoo Delta) and of course ... the blue-coated Union soldier, who had a terrible time, and a great many of them died of disease just hanging around in those transports.

What are some of the more serious themes that Junior Ray touches on?
Junior Ray says a lot of things and doesn’t realize it. Junior Ray gets into the whole problem of evil that all theology schools ... have to deal with, and that is, if God is good, how can there be anything that’s not good? So, you know, Junior Ray says, in fact, God invented cussing, so then how can it be bad? He doesn’t really understand that’s what theologians do, but he’s doing it.

John Pritchard will be on Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s “The Mississippi Arts Hour” Sunday, July 5, at 3 p.m. Signed copies of “The Yazoo Blues” are available at Lemuria. Call 601-366-7619.

Pritchard wasn’t always an acclaimed author and professor. Here are a few of his previous jobs.
• Copy boy at New York Times in 1960
• News clerk at New York Times from 1963 to 1965
• Metropolitan deputy sheriff of Nashville and Davidson County from 1975 to 1981
• Co-wrote Captain and Tennille’s “Can’t Stop Dancing” in 1977 with Ray Stevens