The third issue of BEALE is now in the archive. Vol. 1, No. 3 from February 1969 was supposed to come out in December 1968, but Curt Holloway's press broke in November — a gear split, the feed mechanism jammed, and the part he needed was in St. Louis. It cost sixty-five dollars. Curt had forty. Loretta had twenty. Bobby had five. The press ran again on Christmas Eve. Loretta brought gumbo to the office. That's how the third issue of BEALE came into the world: two months late, paid for with pooled pocket money, and accompanied by a pot of gumbo.
The lead piece is "The Year Memphis Burned" by C.H. Holloway — a year-end retrospective of 1968 in Memphis that is, by a good margin, the best thing BEALE has published. It covers April 4th, the sanitation strike, the riots, the curfew, the National Guard tanks on Beale Street, and what came after. But it doesn't read like a textbook or a newspaper recap. It reads like a man sitting on the front stoop of his mother's house on Looney Avenue in North Memphis, watching it happen. The detail that stays with you: Curt's mother was making cornbread when the news came through on WDIA. She came to the screen door. She did not come outside. She went back to the cornbread. She finished it. She set it on the counter. She sat down at the kitchen table and did not get up for three hours.
The second feature is "Isaac" by Reverend Bobby, and this is the one that makes you want to shake the 1969 reader and say you don't know what's coming. Isaac Hayes is a session musician and songwriter at Stax in early 1969 — he co-wrote "Soul Man" and "Hold On, I'm Coming" with David Porter, but his own solo debut barely sold. Bobby has been in the studio with him late at night, after hours, and what he's hearing is something nobody else has heard yet: twelve-minute songs, orchestral introductions, a version of "Walk On By" that doesn't start singing until four minutes in. Bobby asks Isaac what he's making. Isaac says: "the kind where you drive at night with the windows down and the radio on and nobody talks." Hot Buttered Soul drops four months later. Bobby called it.
The cover girl is Delphine "Del" Watkins, 27, the receptionist at Stax Records who controls the switchboard, the fan mail, and who gets through the front door. Curt spent six weeks trying to get into the building to shoot and discovered that the woman at the front desk was the shoot. They got Studio A on a Sunday evening when the building was empty, and Del sat in the chair where Isaac Hayes sits at the piano and looked at the camera like she was deciding whether to put Curt's call through.
Mae Frances Pryor is the second girl — 30, from North Memphis, two blocks from the house where Curt grew up on Looney Avenue. She's worked the mangle press at King Cotton Laundry on Chelsea Avenue for eleven years. Curt didn't think of her for the magazine until Bobby pointed out that the most beautiful woman in North Memphis was the one Curt had been walking past his whole life. The shoot was on her front stoop on a cold January morning.
Geneva Boone is the third girl — 25, from Tunica, Mississippi, the poorest county in the poorest state in America. She drove two hours to the Vance Avenue office to volunteer in person because her telephone didn't work and she didn't trust a letter to say what she wanted to say. Her family has been sharecropping forty acres on Old Highway 61 since her grandfather came back from the First World War. The shoot was in the cotton field behind her family's house. "I come from dirt," she says in her blurb. "I do not mean that as a metaphor."
The Front Stoop has six letters this issue. Earlene Calloway — the pool-table cover girl from Issue 1 who has become the magazine's unofficial recurring character — writes in to report that she did in fact run the table on Slim Tatum, just as she promised. Bobby was there. He saw it. Loretta Holloway publishes her own letter to her brother's magazine, addressing a woman in Whitehaven who wanted to know if women were allowed to subscribe. (They are.) And a reader named Robert Hutchins complains about the print quality on pages 14 and 15, which he says look like they were "printed in a coal mine." He's not wrong.
This copy shows the typical heavy newsprint browning. The cover has a small fold crease from being stored in a stack. Interior pages show ink rub-off on the denser classifieds and the Stax/Volt ad. The humor page cartoon is intact and clear. Overall comparable to Issues 1 and 2 in the archive condition.
Scanned on a consumer flatbed at approximately 150 DPI equivalent. Browning preserved.