Thrilled by the book review posted on amazon by Gene Harlan Powell, a native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, who attended my book signing at Ricks Memorial Library in Yazoo City on April 17th. Harlan is an author himself, having written a book entitled Fisher of Men: The Motorcycle Ministry of Herb Shreve, co-published by Ketch Publishing and Unlimited Publishing, LLS. Thanks, Harlan! I learned of this new book from a Facebook friend while doing some back and forth about my own book, FISHER OF MEN, The Motorcycle Ministry of Herb Shreve. Herb was a small town preacher who started a ministry to hardcore bikers that became global. This new book by Janice Tracy, a fellow Mississippian and a distant cousin of her subject, is about a small town bootlegger (Tillman Branch) who became The Juke Joint King of the Mississippi Hills. Back in 1952, when I was a college freshman, I had a brief encounter with Tillman Branch and, quite naturally, my interest in the book was immediately perked. I had enrolled at Holmes Community College in the small town of Goodman, MS. My roommate and I walked off campus one Friday night to get a beer, but the few stores on the main drag had closed. The man at the service station told us there was a night club south of the campus and off the road to the right. As my roommate and I walked down the darkened road, Highway 51,we could hear loud music playing from a distant building with dimly lit windows. We knew right away, from the volume and the rollicking, across-the-tracks wailing of Delta Blues, it was a typical cotton-belt juke joint. When we got there and entered, we saw a white man with a stern and stoic face sitting by the counter. All the patrons scattered at the tables were black. We walked over and struck up a conversation with the white man, Mr. Tillman Branch, and ordered a beer. On about our second beer, a middle-aged farm hand came over and joined in the conversation. Immediately, I noticed Mr. Branch looking up from the corner of his eye. When the farm hand, obviously a regular customer at the joint, said to us, I like good white folks, but some white folks... He didnt get to finish that sentence. Mr. Branch stood up, with a small pistol in the palm of his hand, and hit the man squarely on the side of his head. Two club employees came over and quietly dragged the unconscious patron across the floor and into a back room. The loud music on the jukebox kept blaring, along with the rowdy laughter and conversation, and Mr. Branch sat back down without saying a word about anything. My friend and I ducked out of the place and made our way back to the college campus. That was our only meeting with Mr. Tillman Branch, certainly brief, but we would know unmistakably how the big man did business and ran his juke joint. One morning, ten years later, I read in the newspaper that Tillman Branch had been murdered in his nightclub on the outskirts of Goodman. I had forgot all about the man, until Janice Branch Tracy (a Branch family descendant) wrote her book. In the writing of it, Janice covered the life of Tillman Branch from birth, to a stretch at the Parchman prison, through the building of his moonshine-making, juke joint empire, to his death at the hands of a club patron on a Saturday night. From the first chapter on, I was captivated by the story, by the authors ability to get Tillman Branchs story down on paper---for the ages. This is a great story, and I believe well be hearing more about it.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 20:23:55 +0000
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