Articles tagged with "barry-hannah"

About music he was rarely wrong, our old master, Barry Hannah, Mississippi boy who sometimes flew too close to the sun. He made me a mixtape, one time when I was faltering in life. Technically, it's not a true mixtape, the kind someone labors long over, casting repeatedly to haul in your soul like a hooked fish. It's just an average, old, scuffed Memorex, with "Songs That Got Us Through World War II—for Cynthia," scribbled on the spine in his stork-legged scrawl, a straight rip of the Rhino remaster of 1992, with some extra Harry James tacked on.

A few years before Barry Hannah's death, he and John Oliver Hodges took a drive around Tuscaloosa talking love, motorcycles, and writing. "Barry read 'Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa,' at the Bama Theatre," recalls Hodges. "While in town we tooled around a bit, and I made this video, even though I could barely press the gas pedal due to a mysterious and sudden arthritic condition. On the drive back to Oxford we had planned to empty the guns into the Black Warrior River. That never happened, but 'Dr. Hannah' did give me one of his neuropathy pills, which of itself was quite the remarkable experience." 

phStyle">Barry Hannah in the World

Barry would ring me up and I’d haul ass over to his house, sometimes on my bicycle, sometimes driving, and help him get the TV to work right, play a little music with him, or search for his keys that he swore had to be within twelve feet of his person—oh, look here, the key is in the front pocket of your vest, right over where your heart is. That particular key started his silver Kawasaki Eliminator, a 125 that looked to me like a shrunken Harley. He bought it after plowing his Vulcan Classic into a street sign at ninety miles per hour one drizzling afternoon. Due to a malfunction, the throttle opened up full bore and stuck. Barry and his bike took off like bats out of hell, no doubt about it. He and his portable oxygen unit flew high and wide and he was battered in the fall, but the black eye and the scrapes were just “war scars, baby.” The 1500 was totaled. I drove the new bike home from the motorcycle store. Barry followed in his Jeep Grand Cherokee, and we parked the thing behind my house on Jackson Avenue, where it stayed for about a month until his wife found out.

From the first issue of The Oxford American, a short story by Barry Hannah.

Editor Marc Smirnoff remembers Barry Hannah.

In honor of Barry Hannah, whose writing appeared in the first issue of The Oxford American and in many subsequent issues of the magazine, we reprint this interview conducted with him just after the publication of his novel Yonder Stands Your Orphan in 2001.