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Photographer finds solace in shooting the rural South

October 20, 2019 By Rebekah Ledbetter

Pearson Creek Farm in the rural South.
Sean enjoys shooting the rural South.

Photographer Sean Essex was born in Lapeer, Michigan, but grew up in the Phoenix, Arizona area. Essex loves to hike and camp which led him to begin to take photos of what he found interesting on his adventures. He also loves shooting the rural South, and one of his favorite places is Pearson Creek Farms.

Shooting nature in the rural South
Sean doesn’t use any digital editing programs.

Photographing Nature

He began to share them with friends and family, and the compliments he received inspired him to pursue photography further.

Sean is unique in the photography world, as he does not use any form of digital image editing. He believes that it is a sign of a truly talented photographer to be able to take an amazing photograph that does not need editing. That’s what he wants to achieve every time he picks up his camera.

Corn field in the rural South
Sean likes to show the rural South in its raw form.

Rural Living

Sean’s work can best be described as simple, warm and nostalgic. With a focus on rural-living and the surrounding landscapes, he strives to capture moments that reconnect us with our modest beginnings and evoke a sense of belonging.

“I resonate with the people and places and want to share their character and lifestyle through my photography,” Sean says.

Sean Essex Inspired Southerner
Sean strives to connect us with our modest beginnings.

Capturing the Image

Like any great photographer, he is always looking for a great photo. He looks for something intriguing, inspirational, or beautiful, then photographs it from various angles. He also likes to envision what the shot might look like at different times of day, and if he believes he can get that better shot, he returns.   

Photographing the rural South
Sean believes the rural South exudes character which makes it easier to take great photos.

Pearson Creek Farms

Although he is not from the South, he has family here and makes the trip to the South a few times a year. On these trips, he not only visits family but also comes to shoot. As he believes, the rural South exudes character, which makes it easier to take great photographs.

Photographing the rural South
Pearson Creek Farms is a working farm in Bells, Tennessee

One location he loves to shoot is Pearson Creek Farms, a working farm in Bells, Tennessee. The farm has been in the Pearson family for hundreds of years and Essex is humbled to be a part of their family. “I try to portray the hospitality, comfort and warmth that comes over me when on the farm.”

Dream Photoshoot

When asked what his dream shoot would be he answered rural Alaska. “I hear Kodiak Island is gorgeous and I imagine the landscapes and structures on the island would make fantastic photos.”

Filed Under: Family, Inspiration, Life, Outdoors, Travel, Uncategorized Tagged With: Photographer, photography, rural, South, Southern, Tennessee

Walk in footsteps of the Civil Rights Movement with new tourism website

January 20, 2018 By Kara Kennedy

Visitors to the South can now literally walk the sacred ground of the Civil Rights movement with new U.S. Civil Rights Trail website launched on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday.  Tourists will have the opportunity to tour areas pertinent to the Civil Rights Movement from the schools in Topeka, Kansas that were part of the 1954 desegregation case decided in Brown vs. Board of Education to the Lincoln Memorial, where the march for equality took place in 1963.

Civil Rights Trail Inspired Southerner
Civil Rights Memorial, Montgomery, AL photo courtesy of CivilRightsTrail.com

The trail allows visitors to experience places where blacks died at the hands of opponents to desegregation and which are scattered across the Deep South. The courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where in 1955, two white men accused of murdering 14-year-old Emmett Till walked free. This courthouse has been restored, as has the Jackson, Mississippi home where voting-rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated in 1963, just hours after President John Kennedy proposed major civil rights legislation. [Read more…] about Walk in footsteps of the Civil Rights Movement with new tourism website

Filed Under: Southern History Tagged With: Civil Rights, Civil Rights Trail, South, Southern, Tourism, Travel

The True Story of Hoppin’ John

December 30, 2017 By Jennifer Daniel

This New Year’s Day most southerners will be cooking black-eyed peas for good luck, and that includes recipes for Hoppin’ John. We’ll also be eating greens along with them, and don’t forget the hot cornbread, slathered in butter, ready for dunking.

Birmingham, Alabama, black-eyed peas

While some southern folk claim that eating black-eyed peas for good luck are a throwback to the Civil War, we’d all be remiss not to know the true origin of this comforting staple. While it’s true that black-eyed peas were one of the only food sources left after Sherman’s March, their tale of origin stretches much farther back.

Inspired Southerner Hoppin John

Black-eyed peas (or cow peas) were a major crop in Africa, brought to North America via slave ships. Check out the book “In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World,” by UCLA professor of Geography Judith Carney. In it she outlines the origins and trajectories of each of Africa’s major native crops that were brought over to the U.S. on slave ships.

Vintage postcard via Hoppin’ John’s (blog)

The legumes were used as food on slave ships and, later, they were used to feed livestock in U.S. (hence, cowpea). The black-eyed pea first found its way to America on rice plantations (think South Carolina). The technique that combines cooking rice and beans together is also of African descent. So, there you have an origin story for Hoppin’ John, too.

Birmingham, Alabama, JH Daniel, Hoppin John
Photo by JH Daniel

There are so many incarnations of Hoppin’ John! As long as you’re cooking peas and rice with pork, you’re on the right track to a proper southern New Year’s Day meal.

Birmingham, Alabama, JH Daniel, Hoppin John
Photo by JH Daniel

Before you put your own spin on rice and beans, here’s a recipe for cooking dried black-eyed peas from scratch. Keep reading to find a bacon-filled version of Hoppin’ John, too. Both recipes serve two to four and are below:

Basic Black-Eyed Peas

Ingredients

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 medium onion, chopped

3 sprigs thyme

4 garlic cloves, smashed

1 Bay leaf

½ teaspoon crushed red pepper

2 cups black-eyed peas, soaked overnight, drained

Kosher salt, freshly ground pepper

Preparation

Heat the olive oil in a dutch oven over medium. Add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, about 5 minutes. The onions should have some color to them. Add the thyme sprigs, garlic, bay leaf, red pepper, black-eyed peas and 8 cups cold water and bring to a simmer over medium-high. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer gently. Skim any foam from  the surface, until the beans are tender, about 45 minutes. Discard the bay leaf and the thyme. Season with salt and black pepper.

Hoppin’ John 2 Ways

The first version of Hoppin’ John keeps your beans and rice separate, although this is a bit untraditional. Don’t worry, you can always combine it all together at the end, if you like.

Ingredients

6 slices of apple-smoked bacon, cooked and chopped

2 cups of rice (We used Basmati)

1 teaspoon of bacon grease, rendered from the bacon

3 ⅓ cups of water

Pinch of salt

Preparation

Hoppin’ John 1

After you’ve cooked your peas, rinse the rice: Using a strainer, rinse the rice under cold, running water. Cook off the bacon and set aside. Add one teaspoon of bacon grease to a 4-quart pot with a lid. Heat up the grease and add the uncooked rice, cooking for two minutes on medium heat. You want to toast the rice a bit without burning it. Add the water and bring to a boil, stirring to incorporate.

Stir in water and salt and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat to low and cook, covered, until the rice is tender and all the liquid is absorbed, about 20 minutes. Remove the pot from heat the heat and let stand, covered, for about five minutes. Transfer the rice to serving bowls and spoon the peas over the rice. Top each bowl with bacon.

For Hoppin’ John Number 2, combine the peas and rice in a large bowl, reserving pea broth in a different bowl. Heat up a large cast-iron skillet with one tablespoon of olive oil or bacon grease. In batches, add the rice and pea mixture and cook it on medium heat, for a few minutes, stirring (use a wooden spoon) the whole time. As the rice sticks to the bottom of the pan, scrape it up with the wooden spoon and ladle pea broth into the skillet while continuing to stir. You can use as much or as little as you like. Add the chopped bacon and serve family style. This version is a bit thicker and stickier, but both ways offer a true taste of southern cuisine.

Filed Under: Food, Holidays, Inspiration, Life, Uncategorized Tagged With: Black-eyed peas, good luck, history, luck, New Year, South, Southern

“Made South”

June 4, 2017 By Kara Kennedy

Fauxest Gump

Birmingham residents had an opportunity to have the Made South experience this weekend at the Hoover Met. I have been following the Made South and Southern Makers phenomena for a couple of years now on Instagram, so I jumped at a chance to go to the show when a friend told me about it coming to Birmingham.   It was a perfect show to meet the entrepreneurs I have been following on social media.   I also got the chance to support some of them with purchases of Southern-made goods.

There were several vendors and products that caught my eye. I loved to seeing two Alabama distillers participating in the show: Redmont Distilling and John Emerald Distilling Company.   I sampled the Redmont Vodka again I had sampled it at Birmingham’s Sloss Fest last year. It didn’t disappoint.   I have been following the progress of Emerald Distilling on social media and I really was looking forward to trying their products. I am not particularly fond of whiskey, but their Alabama Single Malt Whiskey is smooth! I highly recommend it!

Other vendors I found interesting at the show were:

The vendor Red Land Cotton sells sheets, pillow covers and other Alabama cotton items from cotton grown on a farm located in Moulton, Alabama near the foot of the Bankhead National Forest.

Statesboro, Georgia’s H.L. Franklin’s Healthy Honey is to die for! I’d never heard of Creamed Honey until today. It was so good and unfortunately it had sold out. I did, however, buy their Crystallized Cotton Honey, my second favorite.

I tried the tasty Delta Blues Rice grits from Mississippi. I learn something new every day, and found out that rice was grown in northern Mississippi.

Marc Nelson’s custom-made denim out of Knoxville, Tennessee had samples of hand-made jeans and denim items.

Of course, I sipped on sweet tea from the Alabama Sweet Company and Honest coffee.

One of the highlights of the show for me was meeting an Instagram friend, Here A Chick There a Chick, a company owned by Kerry Leasure. She is an artist who makes jewelry out of vintage items and with each piece also comes a story about vintage piece that makes up the jewelry.

And what southern maker show would be completed without a Forrest Gump impersonator, none of course!

When you get a chance, you should go to a Made South show.

Filed Under: Food, Inspiration, Life Tagged With: Alabama, Birmingham, Made South, South, Southern, Southern life

Trick or Treat Anyone?

October 28, 2016 By Kara Kennedy

Halloween with nieces and sister

Halloween signifies the beginning of the holiday season, which I consider a fun and festive time that carries us through to the end of the year. My love for Halloween stems from my childhood memories. Mother would take my sister and me to the fabric store weeks before Halloween so we could pick out a pattern for a costume that she would make. As far back as I can remember, she always made our costumes. In fact, she still sews costumes for my younger nieces when she can. When Halloween arrived we would rush home from school, do our homework and after dinner we would put on our costumes for Trick Or Treating. Family dinner on Halloween night usually was chili or some other quick meal. My sister and I would eat quickly so that we could dash out of the house for the night’s big event. My dad would take us to every house in the neighborhood and our Halloween buckets would be filled with good candy. When we got home with our treats we weren’t allowed to eat any of it until my parents went through it to “make sure it all was wrapped and ok to eat.” I believe that was just a ploy so that my dad could pick out his favorite candy from our stash. He’d never ever admit that though.

When I was in 7th or 8th grade it was no longer cool to Trick or Treat or dress up. Instead we went with a group of friends to a haunted house in Auburn which a fraternity hosted in order to raise money. I remember thinking that it was not a big deal and there was no way I was going to show I was scared. The fraternity on the other hand had something totally different in mind. They wanted it to be as frightening an experience as it could be. It was a terrifying experience. I didn’t cry, but some of the girls in our group did. I was scared and when one of the monsters followed me out of the house I was really frightened.  To this day I have a love/hate relationship with haunted houses.

My grandmother Kennedy also helped make me love the holiday because she would decorate her house for Halloween and it was complete with a pumpkin that she carved. She would put a candle inside it to make it extra spooky. Her decorations were not that elaborate but they were fun and festive.

As I have gotten older and just like my grandmother did, I now like to decorate my home for Halloween. It gives me a sense of nostalgia to do so. I have even been known to dress up my dogs up in costumes, which they hate.

On Halloween night, I love to see what costumes my sister has come up with for my young nieces. Modern trick or treating involves fall festivals with tricks and trunks. It is sort of sad that traditional trick or treating has gone away.

As for me, I have been known to dress up on occasion to celebrate Halloween. I don’t always dress in a full costume, but most people get that I am celebrating the holiday.   As for the day, it marks 60 days until Christmas. As I child I would ask my mom why Halloween couldn’t be Christmas and she would get frustrated and say that “it will be here soon enough.” Now as an adult I understand why she was so frustrated with my asking that question because it’s only 60 days until Christmas.

Happy Halloween y’all!

Filed Under: Family, Holidays, Life Tagged With: Halloween, hoildays, South, Southern

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We tell real stories about the south. ~Kara Kennedy, Publisher

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