THE PROFILE
SHERYL CROW: 100 Miles from Memphis, but Finally Home
by Will Jordan She’s a nine-time Grammy Award winner and has sold more than 30 million albums worldwide, but Sheryl Crow is still a small town girl at heart.
Her latest album, “100 Miles from Memphis,” harkens to her rural Kennett, Mo. roots and is a “statement of purpose, both musical and emotional,” according to the singer. It also marks a long-awaited return to the sounds that drew the superstar to making music in the first place.
“The drive to Memphis is all farmland, and everyone is community-oriented, God-fearing people, connected to the earth,” Crow says. “The music that came out of that part of the world is a part of who I am, and it’s the biggest inspiration for what I do and why I do it.”
Crow resides in a small community in Williamson County and enjoys living the “country life,” along with writing songs about it. She moved to the Franklin area five years ago when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“I wanted to be closer to family, and they all live within three hours from here,” she says. “It’s a very embracing place.”
Crow admits she also enjoys the “slower pace here” and the fact that she can go to local restaurants, the Farmer’s Market and other places with her children, without being mobbed by the paparazzi.
“It’s a lot less celebrity driven and I hope – knock on wood – that it sustains its anonymity,” she says.
The Family Dinner
When she heads out on the road, she is still “always excited and a little bit nervous, because it requires a lot of acclimating.” But when she returns from touring, she sheds her superstar status and steps back into her role as a single mother of two. Crow has two adopted boys – Wyatt (4) and Levi (2).
“It’s important to me that we sit down and have dinner together as a family every night,” she says. “This is a very important family experience for me.”
Crow says her mother was always an adventurous cook.
“In the ’60s [in Missouri] we had very little ethnic food in my hometown…we had two or three Jewish restaurants and no Latin or Italian places,” she says. “Mom was always reading cookbooks and even bought a wok, making recipes with peanuts. We also had a taco night. It was a big deal back then and I ate everything that was put in front of me.”
Crow says her family would always sit down and eat dinner together and that’s something she wants to instill in her boys.
“It’s all about the family experience,” she says.
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SPECIAL FEATURE
LIVING HISTORY: As time marks the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, Franklin continues to emerge as an increasingly important preserve of our nation’s history
by Jay Sheridan One hundred fifty years ago. On June 8, 1861, the people of Tennessee voted to secede from the United States of America and become the last of 11 states to join the Confederacy. Public sentiment had been split across the grand divisions, with East Tennessee firmly against secession, West Tennessee strongly in favor, and Middle Tennessee going from near deadlock earlier in the year to close to 90 percent in favor upon the news of the attack on Fort Sumter.
Over the next four years, Tennessee would see more Civil War combat than any other state, save Virginia. Here in Franklin, the cost was so great, the aftermath so devastating, that people simply wished to forget in the years following. And so it would be for another century and beyond – even the epic Ken Burns series and the many anthologies of important battles barely rate the Battle of Franklin and its 10,000 casualties in five hours worthy of a mention.
Perhaps more than any other, one person made it her life’s work to ensure that the dead would not be totally forgotten, that even the more than 550 who died without a name would at least be honored with a marker.
And it was her story – that of Carnton Plantation matriarch Carrie McGavock – which inspired the New York Times bestseller The Widow of the South by local author Robert Hicks. That was 2005. The rest, as they say, is history.
A Charge to Keep
In what would be fortuitous timing, 110 acres immediately adjacent to Carnton Plantation and the McGavock Confederate Cemetery became available around the same time. The company that owned the golf course occupying the land wished to sell, and Hicks and Franklin attorney and preservationist Julian Bibb III rallied organizations, local government officials, and influential citizens to raise $5 million to purchase it through a new coalition known as Franklin’s Charge. The Eastern Flank acquisition was, and still remains, the largest reclamation of Civil War battlefield ever, anywhere.
A piece in National Geographic kicked off heavy, sustained national media coverage. The Civil War Preservation Trust (now known as the Civil War Trust) was firmly engaged in fundraising to support the sudden momentum in Franklin, and the city capitalized with the purchase of a Pizza Hut. That building – across the street from the Carter House and signifying “ground zero” of the battle – was razed and now joins the Eastern Flank as a public park. The Civil War Trust’s CEO, Jim Lighthizer, called it at the time “the largest public-private cooperative effort in the history of Civil War preservation.”
To be fair, the work of people like Bibb, Hicks and Mary Pearce of the Heritage Foundation of Franklin and Williamson County had years earlier secured some small pieces that have become an important piece of the puzzle – places like Roper’s Knob and the property where the Carter Cotton Gin once stood, most notably. Groups including Save the Franklin Battlefield and the Sons of Confederate Veterans contributed key locations – the Collins Farm on Lewisburg Pike and Winstead Hill on Columbia Pike.
But only recently has the vision of the few begun to clarify for the many, and it’s reaching a crescendo around the peak of interest in the root of what caused brothers to fight one another to the death right here on American soil.
With the support of the Civil War Trust, Franklin’s Charge has set its sights on a seven-acre parcel that saw the most savage of the fighting, where 11 medals of honor were won and six Confederate generals were killed. The bulk of the property has already been acquired, and the group is in discussions with the owner of a strip mall anchored by a Domino’s Pizza to once again reclaim core battlefield from underneath commercial development.
Down the street, at the Lotz House, owner J.T. Thompson tells his story as an illustration of how fleeting the opportunities to secure these critical elements can be. Before Thompson bought the house 10 years ago, it had served as a private residence, an attorney’s office, a sub shop, a bakery and a haunted house at Halloween, among other things. Despite the fact that it had been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1976, it was slated to become a taco restaurant when Thompson made a better offer.
And it is the stories of the people – the McGavocks, the Carters and, now, the Lotzes – that bring the experience to life for the visitors coming in droves. On a recent Tuesday, Thompson reported that he had conducted tours for groups that day for residents of Alabama, California, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Washington, Wisconsin, Texas and Sweden. He says, anecdotally, that 60 percent of those are here specifically to see Civil War sites, and that 70 percent have read The Widow of the South. The sidewalks along Columbia Avenue, courtesy of the city’s Streetscape program, allow tourists to walk from downtown to the Lotz House, the Carter House, past the Cotton Gin property that Franklin’s Charge is working on, and to the battlefield park where the Pizza Hut used to stand. See how this is all starting to fit together?
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