Fall 2022 Additional Events
Check back often for recently added events!
September 22, 7pm: Rickydoc’s Traveling Medicine Show (featuring Arthur Flowers)
Stax Museum of American Soul Music (926 E McLemore Ave, Memphis, TN 38126)
Rickydoc’s Traveling Medicine Show, featuring Arthur Flowers (practitioner of literary hoodoo, Syracuse University professor emeritus, Executive Director of various nonprofits, and a performance artist in the griotic school of African American literature). The High Hoodoo of Memphis, using a fusion of delta based oral traditions as in blueswork, storytelling, spokenword and Black Baptist oratory with musical accompaniment. Check your troubles at the door. Whatever ails you I will cure it for sure. Down at the Traveling Medicine Show. Come one, come all, to the county line. If I can’t cure you, I will ease your troubled mind.
Co-sponsored with the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and the Lynne and Henry Turley Memphis Center at Rhodes College.
October 12, 7pm: Emily Lordi, "Soul Spirits: Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Isaac
Hayes and the Art of Black Resilience"
Stax Museum of American Soul Music (926 E McLemore Ave, Memphis, TN 38126)
Focusing on soul greats Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and Isaac Hayes, this talk distills the argument of Lordi’s 2020 book The Meaning of Soul: that “soul” was not simply a genre of music but the art of Black resilience. Whether these artists were singing about politics or not, their commanding artistry and high style itself enacted Black innovation and endurance. By investigating some stunning performances by these very different artists, we will see how they all did not simply describe but enacted resilience to help fortify Black communities in crisis.
Emily Lordi is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, a writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and the author of three books about Black music, literature, and culture: Black Resonance, Donny Hathaway Live (33 1/3 series), and The Meaning of Soul. She is writing a biography of Whitney Houston called Holding Lightning, forthcoming in 2024.
Co-sponsored with the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and the Lynne and Henry Turley Memphis Center at Rhodes College.
Check out our Lectures this semester and WKNO's Spotlight on Lifelong Learning for a full listing of humanities events in Memphis.