When musician, writer, and visual artist Diane Green — best known for playing in history-making Memphis bands like the Odd Jobs and the Hellcats, now based in Chicago — set out to pay her respects to the final resting place of bluesman Walter “Furry” Lewis last summer, she expected to see some signage or other indication of Hollywood Cemetery’s presence at 2012 Hernando Road, the South Memphis address she’d found in her research. But she and her partner, Robert Buchholz, were stumped at first. “The only reason we found the place was, someone had created a found art cross-type of thing and attached it to a telephone pole. It was made from car parts, and Bob is a found object sculptor so he started to take pictures, and that’s how we found it.”
Once she drove into the cemetery, Green was shocked. As she wrote in her Substack account, Bella Meow, the area’s trails and roads “were gutted streambeds and valleys now,” and the acreage “was uber-muddy … The whole place was so overgrown you could barely see the tops of a few tall gravestones. Other gravestones were toppled over or about to fall. Others were completely crashed and broken.”
Green at graveside in Hollywood Cemetery
Lewis’ headstone was leaning precariously and surrounded by poison ivy and other brush. For Green, this was all very wrong. She had sought out this place precisely because the music of Furry Lewis meant the world to her. “I had been a fan of Furry’s unique country blues songs since I was in my mid-teen years,” she wrote. “Going to Peanuts Pub in midtown Memphis in the 1970s with my crew of blues enthusiasts, I would see Furry Lewis playing onstage backed by Lee Baker every Tuesday night. Sometimes Furry would sing one of his earliest songs, ‘Kassie Jones,’ all the way through … sometimes maybe halfway. But I loved that song so much I named my son after it.” Now, she wrote, she was seeing his final resting place “desecrated.”
The irony was overwhelming, given that Green had such vivid memories of Lewis singing the old Blind Lemon Jefferson chestnut, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” aka “One Kind Favor.” Remembering those words echoing through Peanuts Pub many years ago, Green resolved to do something.
Green recording ‘One Kind Favor’
Since then, she’s picked up some like-minded allies along the way, and her nonprofit, the Museum for Universal Self Expression (MUSE), is leading a group of volunteers (and calling for more) to clean up Hollywood Cemetery on April 11th and 12th from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. For those who can’t be there, she’s also set up a GoFundMe campaign under the name “The Art of Restoring Hollywood Cemetery in Memphis.” And the contributions are already having an effect: only days ago, Green posted photos of the worst piles of tires and rubbish and announced that “Donations have helped us get A&J Junk & Demolition Removal Services in Memphis to haul all this away.”
Others are helping her make things happen, including two board members from the similarly-motivated Mt. Zion Memorial Fund, Cynthia Burse-Wesson, the granddaughter of blues player Charlie Burse, and Margaret Hangan, an archaeologist from Arizona, not to mention Brooklyn-based filmmaker Augusta Palmer, whose film The Blues Society features performances by Lewis. They’ve now expanded their vision to include the similarly decrepit Rose Hill Cemetery.
As it turns out, many have taken note of the disrepair that’s befallen historically Black cemeteries and, like Green, have made moves to remedy the years of neglect they’ve suffered. Since 1989, the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund, named after the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church outside Morgan City, Mississippi, then redubbed the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund for Blues, Music, and Justice in 2021, has pioneered such efforts. They’re no strangers to Hollywood Cemetery, having installed a monument for bluesman Frank Stokes there in 2016. Yet in the past 10 years, Hollywood has deteriorated. As Green’s GoFundMe site states, “The nonprofit Mt. Carmel Ally has done amazing work to clean up and maintain Mt. Carmel Cemetery, but Hollywood Cemetery has not been well maintained for many years.”
Green wrote in her Substack that Hollywood, founded in 1909, “is the second known Blacks-only cemetery in Memphis. It is also the final resting place for many who bravely broke racial barriers in the U.S. military and Tennessee’s colleges and universities, as well as sanitation workers who participated in the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike.” Now she’s putting out a special call to anyone with relatives interred there. Meanwhile, Hangan notes in a press release, “I am working to register these cemeteries as historic, as part of Mt. Zion’s mission to prevent the erasure of cultural resources in African American communities.”
As Palmer observes, their efforts go way beyond paying tribute to great musicians. While making The Blues Society, she says, “I just realized how important these cemeteries are as repositories of American history. Because there may be a blues artist there that brings a little bit of tourism, but then there are all these other people, like Diane’s finding in Hollywood. So it’s just so important that these cemeteries get preserved.”
In his article, “Stiffed,” Preston Lauterbach, writing for the Memphis Flyer in 2007, described the neglect Hollywood was suffering even then, noting that although the state dissolved the Hollywood Cemetery Company in 2005 after the company failed to file its annual report, the company was “still responsible for upkeep at Mt. Carmel and Hollywood cemeteries” under state law.
Green and her allies are currently delving deeper into the legal niceties, but in the meantime, they’re taking action — and Green is even making music about it. “Last week, I recorded ‘One Kind Favor,’” she says, “and I will be putting out a single, the sales of which will go toward continuing restoration of the graveyard. And MUSE is taking over the upkeep while we can. But we’re not in it for making money. We’re in it for keeping it clean for families of loved ones. Including myself — my loved one is Furry Lewis.”