 
Memphis-based bass fisherman Bill Dance has been catching Micropterus salmoides and Micropterus dolomieui — the large and small-mouth varieties of the species — on television for decades. The recipient of the prestigious Congressional National Water Safety Award, he’s on a first-name basis with a few U.S. presidents and he’s friends with country singer Travis Tritt. But if you meet this Southern celebrity face-to-face, you’ll find a humble albeit positive-minded man who still feels the thrill and awe his career has afforded him since his TV program, Bill Dance Outdoors, first aired in 1968. “Competing one-on-one with another living creature is an extraordinary thing,” Dance notes with monk-like devotion. A practitioner of catch-and-release for decades, he says, “There are days you win, and days they win. I don’t care how much you know about the sport or the habits of this particular species. When you contend against Mother Nature and her creatures, you’re not always gonna be successful. You can better your odds, but the fish has to open his mouth and bite down to complete the circle, and that just doesn’t happen every time.” Judy Peiser With its credo "To Preserve, Defend, and Promote the music, culture, arts, and rhythms of the South,” the Center for Southern Folklore has created a public platform for regional artists and musicians via its cultural archives, walking tours and family-oriented programs, and the free, annual Memphis Music and Heritage Festival, held downtown for the past twenty years. “When I started my documentary work in the seventies, I was trying to understand the rural parts of the South that were disappearing — African American and Anglo traditions like river baptisms and Saturday night juke houses — although I came from a tradition that was neither black nor white, but what I called ‘lox and grits,’” explains the center’s co-founder Judy Peiser, a second-generation Memphian of Russian and Polish descent. “Now, we celebrate not only blues, jazz, and rockabilly music, but a cultural gumbo that includes Cambodian dance traditions and Chinese foods. Everyone here has a story — we’re just doing our part to broaden the postage stamp of this region.” William Eggleston Exactly thirty years ago, photographer William Eggleston single-handedly transformed the world of color photography. He didn’t invent the art, but he legitimized it, starting his career off with a bang with a one-man show of dye-transfer prints at the Museum of Modern Art. His reputation has since been solidified through commissions by the likes of Paramount Pictures and the Coca-Cola Company, and accolades that range from a Guggenheim Fellowship and a pair of National Endowment of the Arts fellowships to the Hasselblad Award and the Getty Images Lifetime Achievement Award. Right now, however, Eggleston has focused his interest onto a nineteenth-century Chamelot Delvigne French army officer’s revolver, made in St. Etienne, France. “Some guns are terrifically ugly, but this one is a beautiful thing, a piece of sculpture,” Eggleston, an avid collector, murmurs with admiration. The same might be said of his own work, rendered, most often, by a Leica camera and his unfailing eye. In Eggleston’s photographs, ordinary items — a tricycle, a freezer interior, or a shower stall — are transformed into extraordinary, frequently ominous images. These something-from-nothing portraits speak volumes about his native South — born into a Mississippi Delta plantation family, Eggleston has resided in Memphis for much of his life — and even more about humankind. Their starkness is amplified by the stories collected from people who have congress with Bill in daily life, Memphians who have witnessed firsthand his proclivity for women, weapons, and barrelfuls of whiskey. “I love shotguns, too,” Eggleston says, as if professing his fervor for homemade banana pudding. “All of my family and relatives and friends were hunters, but I didn’t go out with them because the hunting season was so damp and cold.” |
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