Under Construction
This Film won:
Best Documentary
and
Best Film
at the
2004 Biloxi Film Festival :
The year prior to Katrina
Shakerag Preview:
Blue Suede Shoes Documents the historical African-American community in Tupelo called Shakerag and its influence on Elvis Presley. Original Music and interviews with Presley’s childhood African-American friend. They will hear from Elvis' African-American childhood friends and neighbors who have never been interviewed. Blue Suede Shoes in the Hood will destroy some long held myths and expose some unknown truths about this unique southern community.
This a sample of one of the clips from the film...
This is the featured song "ShakeRag" I wrote in 2007
Under contruction More on it's way!!!!!
Notes from:
“Blue Suede Shoes in the Hood”
By Charles “Wsir” Johnson, Film Producer, Cultural Historian
"A Long Journey, but worth the ride"
History sometimes can be right under our noses, for all to see and sometimes history can be for some, better left alone. Out of sight and out of mind if you will. "Blue Suede Shoes in the Hood" is such a story. A story of a township called "ShakeRag", a name which may have English origins, but has all the flavor of Nora Zale Hurston discovery of oral folklore. ShakeRag is an ancient burial ground of a unique African-American community which help service Tupelo, Mississippi early economic life. Though buried in memories, the legacy in a very odd way, survives because of what the Southern Culture Encyclopedia describe a little boy name Elvis Presley as the most famous southerner in the world. For a little while he came and bathed his musical curiosity and inner soul in the area. ShakeRag had to live because even the great tornado of 1936 spared this culturally rich southern community while many others areas of Tupelo was devastated.
But Elvis did not make ShakeRag, ShakeRag was already alive with folks as early as 1871, along the railroad tracks only Main and Front street. Unlike the books or oral memory that describe this area as, the Black slum or Niggertown, ShakeRag or as many townsfolk call it today "Cross the Track", is known to many around the world as the place where the young Presley found solidarity among others who where trying to exist in a changing world.
Many have a fun memory of ShakeRag, others was glad it vanished as Mississippi first urban renewal program. Some have past on to the spirit world before the completion of this documentary but not before exiting this world without giving us a little insight for the world to share. To them we at ShakeRag Films is forever indebted to them. They not only gave us history but enriched our own lives as why this film was important. For the folks who still bless their presence with us, you added a new chapter in the book of forgotten history, and allowed us to hear our story in the oral tradition.
This is by far not the end but only a beginning of a community who has been marginalized in the history books of Lee County. As we share our common history, maybe we can keep building a shared future.
Charles "Wsir" Johnson