EDITED UPDATE, 4 October 2011: London Telegraph headlines for Tuesday, 4 October, announce new "T Bone Burnett Interview". The London newssheet adds, "T Bone Burnett, the man behind the music of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, would love to have produced a Duke Ellington concert." Movie, set in 1937 Mississippi, has a radio station, WLZY, at Tishomingo. Station call sign is probably scriptwriter's "A to Z" change since WLAY is oldest station in the Pickwick Lake and Dam area of NW Alabama and NE Mississippi. T Bone was married to female singer Sam Phillips when O Brother movie released. The real Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records, Memphis, started his radio/music career at WLAY, Sheffield, under Joe Van Sandt. Van Sandt later founded WJOI, Florence, with financial backing from the Anderson bookstore family of Florence. He also ran a radio program network from WJOI to distribute the Blue Seal Pals, starring Dexter Johnson, Iuka, Mississippi; Quinton Claunch, Tishomingo, Mississippi; and Buddy Bain, Glen, Mississippi. Other Alabama group members were Edgar Clayton and Bill Cantrell. Sam Phillips purchased the WJOI facility that Van Sandt founded, and the Phillips family still owns and operates stations from Van Sandt's studio/tower location on Sam Phillip's Street. Sam's son Jerry, who runs the Alabama radio stations, lives at Eastport Slough on Pickwick Lake near Iuka. When Bryce and Jewell Broughton Kitchens owned and managed the Eastport Marina in 1954, Kemmons Wilson of Memphis built vacation cabins near the Marina and expanded other projects with Sun Records investments from Sam Phillips. Wilson is best known for founding the international Holiday Inn hotel/motel chain in 1952. According to the original London Telegraph article and an earlier Billboard story, the 2011 reissue of the expanded O Brother Where Art Thou? music includes extras that T Bone selected: Duke Ellington recordings of "Mood Indigo" & "Admiration" and T Bone's unreleased track by John Hartford: "Tishamingo County Blues".

EDITED UPDATE, 11 September 2010: Lila Frances Broughton Foote, retired teacher at Iuka High School and sister of Jewell Broughton Kitchens, remembers her son Eddie (Avon Edward Foote) having a teenage crush on Connie Hudson's double first cousin. Their Hudson fathers were twins. Connie would marry George Mead Walker, cousin of two Bush Presidents. On a Sunday afternoon in early 1955, Eddie drove the other Hudson cousin to the Tishomingo Theater in the Foote/Foot family car, that was the model preferred at the White House during Franklin Roosevelt's Presidency. The solid-black 1938 Cadillac limo had expansion jump seats and spare tires riding left and right, in the front fenders. The extra tires were topped elegantly with locking covers displaying ornaments of flying birds. After Eddie realized his profound inability to tell the young woman of his feelings while heading back toward Iuka, he returned his date in a veil of silence to her home and then took to his home-based, pirate radio airwaves to announce personal frustrations in romance. Eddie says he should have followed his airborne soliloquy with Garrison Keillor's theme song, "Tishomingo Blues", but the little station didn't include a turntable for records. Since Eddie would become Educational Broadcasting Review editor at Ohio State University and the University of Mississippi for the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, Washington, he regrets missing his chance to be associated with the history of Keillor's famous show on public radio. [Keillor's first theme was Hank Snow's "Hello Love" from the Grand Ole Opry, Nashville, but Keillor changed the opening music in 1987 for his Prairie Home Companion to the "Tishomingo Blues" score, substituting his own lyrics for the original 1917 lyrics.]

EDITED UPDATE, 29 January 2007: George Mead Walker, cousin of father/son Presidents George Herbert Walker Bush (41st) & George Walker Bush (43rd), remembers personal favors he received in 1980s in Iuka, Mississippi from James Bishop, Tishomingo County official. Bishop grew up in Burnsville and is longtime friend of Foote's family and student of Lila Frances Broughton Foote during her first teaching employment at Burnsville after attending college in Columbus, Mississippi. Walker also expresses fond recollections of his Aunt Dorothy Walker Bush, mother of President Bush (41st) and grandmother of President Bush (43rd). Walker met his Mississippi wife in the 1970s at the University of North Alabama while serving as US Army Recruiter. Bobby King, son-in-law of Lila Frances and well-known physician for the University of North Alabama Infirmary, remembers tennis games that he played against Walker at the Iuka Country Club in 1982 when his medical practice was in the town. But, Chotank can find no record of who won the face-off.

EDITED UPDATE, 16 February 2004: Neighborhood Gossip -- George Mead Walker, cousin of two Presidents, spent Thanksgiving 2003 on Shirley Drive just talking art with Florence, Alabama friends. He has invited the same Shirley Drive artist friends to Walker's Point, Maine for a breezy fall sketching and drawing confab. Do you suppose any other Georges will be there?

I am reading the new November/December issue of ATAVUS with great admiration for the work of the on-line editorial staff of Burke's Peerage and Gentry. But I must correct one error.

The first President George Bush (1989 to 1993) was George Herbert Walker Bush not George P. Bush (see "Editorial -- Dynasty" by Charles Mosley). When my wife and I moved to Florence, Alabama from Georgia in 1980, George Walker -- the President's first cousin -- lived on Shirley Drive. The next year he moved to Iuka, Mississippi where my father and mother -- Avon R. Foote and Lila Broughton Foote -- lived (still do). He joined the Iuka Country Club but was considered pretty ordinary by most all the local residents.

Iuka may take on new significance for the reader if it is remembered that the first Bush administration originally announced plans to put men on Mars. In the early 1990s, NASA designed facilities for massive Yellow Creek Nuclear Plant structures at Iuka to build a new Mars-mission, rocket booster. But, the Mars program was cancelled in 1997.

You will find a letter to George Walker from George Herbert Walker Bush on page 311 in All the Best, George Bush: My Life and Other Writings, the 1999 book of letters and diary entries that was published both in the US and UK by Scribners. The President writes his cousin in Iuka to comment on the attempted assassination of President Reagan while Bush was Vice President, and Bush adds some personal observations including a greeting to Connie Hudson Walker, his cousin's wife from Iuka.

George P. Bush is the President George W. Bush's nephew, son of his brother Jeb. George P. Bush is named for Prescott Sheldon Bush, his great-grandfather born 1895 in Columbus, Ohio.

Avon Edward Foote, chotank@aol.com
222 Shirley Drive, Florence, AL US 35633
Author of CHOTANKERS: A Family History (1982)
[Foote Family History in Windsor Public Library, Berkshire,
40 US Libraries and for purchase at www.chotank.com]
256-767-5159

Or jump to Burke's Peerage and Gentry -- Click here to
see list of USA articles by Avon Edward Foote, Charles Mosley, and others at Burke's

The original letter has been edited in November 2005 to document that
George Mead Walker, cousin of two Bush Presidents, has lived in
Florence, located northwest Alabama, and more recently at Iuka, in
northeast Mississippi.