Celebrating Brownsville’s Blues Legacy at the Exit 56 Blues Festival
Jackson, Tennessee was the largest city in West Tennessee outside of Memphis, but it was the smaller city of Brownsville in Haywood County, twenty miles …
Haywood County TN
Comforting Food at Brownsville’s New Nostalgic Diner
Brownsville, the county seat of Haywood County in West Tennessee is in most respects a fairly typical Southern town. It has the typical town square …
The Lost Town of Mercer and the Bridges at The End of the Road
In December of 1979 or so, my parents had taken me to Jackson, Tennessee for my birthday. We had eaten at the Old English Steak …
Fife and Drum Returns to West Tennessee at the Sleepy John Estes Blues Jam
Although fife and drum bands once were common in West Tennessee, the phenomenon had largely died out by 1980. The Tennessee State Archives created a …
A Fife-and-Drum Workshop in Brownsville, Tennessee
Fife and drum music once flourished in West Tennessee, but similar to what happened in Georgia, disappeared rapidly in the 1970’s. The last evidence we …
Around the Tennessee Delta on Labor Day Weekend
After Bradley Hanson of the Tennessee State Archives sent me a link to recordings made of a fife and drum band in rural Fayette County …