The man they call Joe Hall is one of the eight children of the late Bartlett blues musician Columbus “Lum” Guffin, who was the descendant of a most amazing Black family in our community’s history. The Guffin brothers seem to have come to Bartlett from Anderson County, South Carolina, at some point shortly after the Civil War. At least one of them was literate, as an ad ran in the Memphis Appeal in 1872, advertising a “competent colored bookkeeper” and suggesting that all interested “Apply: Guffin, Bartlett, Tennessee.” Butler Guffin founded the United Sons and Daughters of Zion Chapter 9 in the 1890s at Prosperity Missionary Baptist Church on what is now Old Brownsville Road, in whose cemetery Lum Guffin is buried. . Butler had a son named Columbus, who married a Chickasaw woman named Tennessee, and they in turn had a son named Columbus, the blues musician and fife and drum band leader who recorded one obscure album, Walking Victrola, for Bengt Olsson, a Swedish blues enthusiast who arranged for its release on the British Flyright label in the late 1970s. It has since been reissued with slightly different song order by both Sutro Park Records and Mississippi Records.
Lum’s house still stands in a heavily wooded reserve inside what is otherwise an upscale Bartlett subdivision. And once a year, Joe Hall throws a car show that is a must-do event in Bartlett’s Black community. Not only are there food trucks and beautiful cars, and a DJ and horseshoes, but I inevitably run into people I knew at Bartlett High School. Coming toward the end of September, the weather is usually perfect for the event, although this year, it was unusually hot. with weather more like August than September. Still it was, as always, a good time and a lot of fun.