SUSTAIN

YOU CAN STILL HEAR THEM

THERE ARE A FEW PHOTOS from thirty years ago of a person who shares my name and who has the same blue eyes holding what looks like a Gibson Les Paul with a lovely orange sunburst pattern. It wasn’t a real Les Paul, just a nameless copy, not even full-sized. But I thought it was beautiful and you could hit it pretty hard and it would barely go out of tune (I didn’t know how to tune).

It was only a moment in time in Starkville, but it’s still there, somewhere, if you know where to look, or how to listen. Because music does not die.

Corner of Church and Second, Indianola, Mississippi, Polaroid SX-70 (2023)

On Saturdays when Riley King was seventeen he would stand on a corner in his hometown and strum his guitar and sing, just a few feet from the crowded clubs. This is where he began to slow march towards mastery of his art form. In 1980 the town invited him back in honor of his recordings and great achievements throughout the world and he placed his hands in wet cement right where he used to stand and play as a boy. He wrote his chosen name in the rock: B.B., after what they called him when he spun records in Memphis, the Beale Street Blues Boy.

Best Male R&B Vocal Performance Grammy, 1970, awarded to B.B. King for “The Thrill Is Gone,” in trust of the Grammy Museum Mississippi, Cleveland, Polaroid SX-70 (2023)

One thing B.B. King could do that most people couldn’t: hold a note what for seemed like forever. When people say he could make a guitar sound like it was crying, that’s part of it—the note being held, the sound continuing, a carefully bent string, and then heartbreak.

When the note lasts like that, struck once but enduring, they call it sustain.

Regalia worn by Elvis Aron Presley of Memphis, Tennessee, onstage in Jackson, Mississippi, May 5, 1975 (being a benefit for victims of a tornado in Pike County), displayed at the Grammy Museum Mississippi, Cleveland, Polaroid SX-70 (2023)

I am trying to watch King Creole, but it’s hard to do. This is supposed to be the dramatic role, the one that shows what Elvis really could have done if they hadn’t cut his hair and put him on surfboards and in racecars and whatever other wholesome thing the Colonel and Hal Wallis dreamt up. But it’s like watching Walter Payton play football with some nine year olds. Even though he’s hesitant in some scenes, fumbling in others, you almost think the King is holding back just so the light doesn’t burn out the lens. Every now and then he smiles in that lopsided way and the props and sets and other actors fade to the background. It was only ever Ann-Marget could keep up with him anyway. I ended up turning it off.

Graceland, by the resting place of E.A.P. (in view of his grandmother Minnie Mae’s grave), Polaroid SX-70 (2015)

I often make photos of the little house where he was born and of his house in Memphis, which he called Graceland. But I don’t like to make photos of the piece of ground where he was buried. It doesn’t feel right somehow. Elvis didn’t die, I want to say, even though I know that’s not true in a physical sense. My Nana saw Elvis in Tuscaloosa, I want to say, like a mantra, and Ryan’s momma saw him and Priscilla both when she was a teenager. These things being true doesn’t mean he isn’t gone, but they seem to affirm he was indeed here.

Gibson Les Paul, ca. 1959, possessed and owned by Howard Duane Allman, and played on the albums Allman Brothers, Idlewild South, and Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, displayed at the Grammy Museum Mississippi, Cleveland, Polaroid SX-70 (2023)

One time I knelt in a cemetery in Georgia at the grave of your little brother. It was the Fourth of July. He had just passed and it was heaped with red clay and tokens folks had left, teddy bears, drumsticks, pennies, an AA chip, a bullet from a .38. You know they put up a fence around where you and Berry and Butch are, to keep people out. I tried to climb it, I guess I should admit, but it was high and the bars were freshly tended, and all I ended up with was black paint all over my hands.

I didn’t want to do anything bad, I just wanted to make a picture, buddy, I promise. I just wanted to say hello. I wanted to say thank you.

Rose Hill Cemetery, Macon, Georgia, Polaroid 600 (July 4, 2017)

For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle
were dissolved
we have a building of God
an house not made with hands
eternal in the heavens.

II Corinthians 5:1

Go listen to some music today, and remember who you are and where you came from.

“SUSTAIN” is a chapter of GORJUS, a dispatch devoted to art and life in the South, held fast with instant film.

If you liked what you saw and read, if you maybe felt a twang in your belly while you looked it over, then this is for you, and I reckon we would be friends. Consider sending this letter to a pal who is like us. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see an archive of Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.