For the first time ever, I have enjoyed watching a community
grow over the past five years. I have
lived all over the South. My hometown
was destroyed by a tornado and is now a shadow of what it once was (and it was
never much to begin with). I lived in
antediluvian New Orleans (and honestly, would probably kill to live there
now). I summered in St. Louis during the
flood of 1993 and lived in Dublin, Ireland, before the Celtic Tiger was
declawed.
But my time in Durham has shown me that not all cities go
directly to the toilet. When I first
moved here in February of 2007, our downtown consisted of little more than
boarded-up businesses, one-way thoroughfares leading to nowhere and street
corners manned by drug dealers. The
Carolina Theater had yet to reopen its doors and the only place to eat was Rue
Cler, an oasis in a desert of despair.
Then I stopped to think about what I needed from Chapel
Hill. I came up with two answers: Local
506, and they stand between me and Carrboro.
I admit, sometimes Franklin St., despite being frozen in the 1990s, is
fun to drive down on my way to the Cat's Cradle or the ArtsCenter, but as far
as the rest of it goes, I don't need it.
For the rest of my days, if I have to meet someone in Chapel Hill, I
will be packing a lunch or carrying a flask, because I will not spend one
dollar there.
And if I do go, I'm rounding up my biggest, baddest,
pipe-hittingest criminals, so hide yo kids, hide yo wife, Chapel Hill. And to pump ourselves up for the ride, we
will be slipping into the tape deck:
TOP TEN SONGS ABOUT
DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA
While it's a bit of a stretch, this song is actually about
Western Kentucky tobacco farmers and their battle with JB Duke's American
Tobacco Company during the Black Patch Tobacco War during the early 1900s. You see, before Duke was a basketball
powerhouse, it was a tobacco monopoly, and the farmers in Western Kentucky
feared their prices were being set too low for them to earn a decent
living. So they banded together, donned
hoods, and rode through the countryside, terrorizing farmers who cooperated
with Duke. Not only did these events
inspire the lyrics of Col. JD Wilkes and his Legendary Shack Shakers, but also
Robert Penn Warren's first novel, Night
Riders.
Imagine Rigsbee Street in its heyday, back in the 20s-30s,
the air rich and sweet with the smell of Brightleaf tobacco... Come auction time, a man was sometimes
holding his entire year's pay right there on the "troubled" streets
of Durham. Farmers, auctioneers,
warehouse managers... they weren't the only ones manning the streets. Come auction time, those streets would also
be teeming with people who aimed to separate those folks from their money. I can only imagine the scene as fun and
rowdy, especially when you add the blues musicians to the mix. Blind Boy Fuller is one of the Piedmont
bluesmen who made their living playing in tobacco warehouses and along Rigsbee
Street back then, alongside folk such as Sonny Terry and the Reverend Gary
Davis. And much in the tradition of
great bluesmen of that era, his grave in Durham is unmarked.
I can't stand rap music, but in the wake of the Daily Tar Heel article, I am perfectly
fine with them building speakers and playing this song on a continuous loop
right there at the I-40 border between
