June 29th – Overton Park Stories

For more information on the project, please visit www.overtonpark.org/stories.

 

Our Summer Fellows

It’s summertime in the Memphis Room, which means our Archival Fellows are hard at work!  Regan Adolph and Lanier Flanders are burning through a lot of projects (which we’ll tell you much more about soon), but for now here are some candid images of our wonderful scholars working in the Memphis Room.

     

Full-Text Finding Aids

 

Thanks to the hard work of staff and volunteers, we now have the full texts of the finding aids for our manuscript collections available online in our Collection of Collections!  (Well, most of them, anyway.  The last handful will be added ASAP.)  Remember, if you would like to view a manuscript collection, you will need to visit us in the Memphis Room.

Talking Leaves

Sometime around 1981, the library’s TV station produced a series of interviews with regional writers from around Tennessee entitled Talking Leaves: A Regional Focus.  Somehow, our copies of the program did not survive, but thanks to the good folks of the Paul Meek Library at the University of Tennessee at Martin, we now have digital copies of all eight episodes of the series:

1. Episode 1 – George Scarbrough
2. Episode 2 – Robert Drake
3. Episode 3 – Christine Noble Govan
4. Episode 4 – Jeff Daniel Marion
5. Episode 5 – John Egerton
6. Episode 6 – Will Davis Campbell
7. Episode 7 – Etheridge Knight
8. Episode 8 – Analysis and Discussion with Dr. Ramsey Fowler (Memphis State) and Dan Gann.

If you’re not sold yet, perhaps I could throw in classic early 80′s fashion and a catchy theme song?  Happy viewing!

Audio Files

We’ve just added our first audio recordings to Dig Memphis!

Judge Robert Lanier donated these five recordings to us, and we are thrilled to share them with you.  The first four are interviews with legendary members of the Memphis legal community: Lucius Burch, Jr., Leo Bearman, Sr., A. Longstreet Heiskell, and Albert Riley.  These interviews were conducted in 1980 for a Memphis Bar history project, with the interviewees sharing their memories of practicing law in the early part of the 20th century.

If legal history isn’t your thing, you might like the fifth recording.  In 1991, NPR’s Weekend Edition dedicated a show to Memphis.  Herenton had just been elected, the “pagan” Pyramid was just about to open, and Graceland was… well, Graceland.

Happy listening!

Sid Selvidge, 1943 – 2013

 

Obituary from the Commercial Appeal

Maxine Smith, 1929 – 2013

View other images, read about her portrait in the Memphis Room, or learn more about the Maxine A. Smith NAACP Collection.

Commercial Appeal article.