Of Mules and Mud: The Story of Alabama Folk Potter Jerry Brown

By Jerry Brown and Joey Brackner

The life and times of Alabama folk potter Jerry Brown, as told in his own words
 
Born in 1942, Jerry Brown helped out in his father’s pottery shop as a young boy. There he learned the methods and techniques for making pottery in a family tradition dating back to the 1830s. His responsibilities included tending the mule that drove the mill that was used to mix clay (called “mud” by traditional potters). Business suffered as demand for stoneware churns, jugs, and chamber pots waned in the postwar years, and manufacture ceased following the deaths of Brown’s father and brother in the mid-1960s. Brown turned to logging for his livelihood, his skill with mules proving useful in working difficult and otherwise inaccessible terrain. In the early 1980s, he returned to the family trade and opened a new shop that relied on the same methods of production with which he had grown up, including a mule-powered mill for mixing clay and the use of a wood-fired rather than gas-fueled kiln.

Folklorist Joey Brackner met Brown in 1983, and the two quickly became close friends who collaborated together on a variety of documentary and educational projects in succeeding years—efforts that led to greater exposure, commercial success, and Brown’s recognition as a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts. For years, Brown spoke of the urge to write his life story, but he never set pen to paper. In 2015, Brackner took the initiative and interviewed Brown, recording his life story over the course of a weekend at Brown’s home. Of Mules and Mud is the result of that marathon interview session, conducted one year before Brown passed away.

Brackner has captured Jerry Brown’s life in his own words as recounted that weekend, lightly edited and elaborated. Of Mules and Mud is illustrated with photos from all phases of Brown’s life, including a color gallery of 28 photos of vessel forms made by Brown throughout his career that collectors of folk pottery will find invaluable.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Mar 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9780817394011

Book preview

Preface

Jerry Brown and I built a friendship that lasted thirty-three years, from our first meeting in 1983 until his death in 2016. He and his wife Sandra treated me like a family member. Jerry served as a mentor to me in my study of traditional pottery and my efforts to present folk art to the public as a folklorist with the Alabama State Council on the Arts. We became collaborators, working together on festivals, films, books, and museum exhibitions. During this time, Jerry expressed an interest in writing his life story and asked for my help, and that is how this book came to be.

Jerry Brown crafted wonderful stories. In preparing this manuscript, I kicked myself for not recording more of them, including the one that I considered the most poignant. In this story, Jerry and his older brother Jack conspired, in their youth, to have a chicken dinner, despite the rough financial times that often kept them hungry. One day, when their parents had gone to town, Jack and Jerry covered the nostrils of two of the family’s chickens, smothering the birds and leaving no evidence of foul play. The boys then placed the dead chickens next to the road for their parents to discover and hid where they could observe. When their parents arrived, they noted the good condition of the birds, and Mrs. Brown exclaimed, Well, I guess the boys will get their chicken dinner after all. Years later, Jerry confessed to his mother, and she allowed as how she had wondered if that was what happened.

Jerry’s favorite time to talk with guests was after he closed the pottery shop for the day and was relaxing. Through the years, I would often ride around with Jerry to various far-flung pastures while he checked on his cows. He enjoyed reminiscing during these times. I never seemed to have the presence of mind to record these truck conservations. Then, in the 1990s, I sent Jerry a cassette recorder that he might capture memories as they occurred to him. I think he felt too self-conscious to do this, so, after decades of procrastinating, we agreed that I should come up for a few days to conduct an extended interview that could become a biography or autobiography.

On September 8–9, 2015, my wife Eileen Knott and I visited Jerry and Sandra. During this two-day visit, we leisurely recorded six hours’ worth of Jerry’s storytelling. Answering my questions during this visit, Jerry told his story in his own words. The core of the main text comes from this interview, rearranged slightly for chronological order and narrative flow. To fill in gaps, I drew from another interview I had with Jerry on March 24, 2007, and from the transcript of Unbroken Tradition (1986), a documentary featuring Jerry and his pottery. While piecing these transcripts together into the present narrative, my goal was to employ a light and subtle editorial hand, preferring instead to allow Jerry’s words to stand on their own as much as possible. Of course when speaking to me, Jerry assumed a lot of pottery knowledge to be understood, and he also had a style of speaking that left the reference of some pronouns somewhat uncertain and to be determined by the listener. In these cases, I have intervened by replacing some pronouns with intended subjects, finishing a few thoughts, and otherwise providing explanations for the reader’s benefit through the use of bracketed text in the narrative and endnotes. The recordings and transcripts of my 2007 and 2015 interviews with Jerry are archived in the Alabama Department of Archives and History. The film Unbroken Tradition and its transcript are available online at www.folkstreams.net.

I appreciate the help of Jerry’s family and friends in the preparation of this manuscript and accompanying photographs. These include Deb Boykin, Jeff Brown, Tony Brown, Steve Foshee of Tombigbee Electric Cooperative, Teresa Hollingsworth, Eileen Knott, Betty Ann Lloyd, Ed and Marla Minter, Missy Miles, Les Walters, Tammy Wilburn Rawls, Jerry’s sister Wanda Brown Summerford, and Jeff Wilburn. I appreciate the critical eyes of leading pottery scholars John Burrison and Terry Zug who helped me shape this book. They are forever my mentors and heroes. Sydney Evans, Claire Lewis Evans, and Kelly Finefrock of the University of Alabama Press were incredibly supportive with great advice on some critical organizational and editorial decisions. The Northwest Alabama Arts Council and the Alabama State Council on the Arts are to be commended for securing money for this book. I deeply regret that Jeff Brown, Jerry’s son from his first marriage, died before publication. Though Jeff did not often work in his father’s shop, he inherited his father’s love of farming and skill in logging. Through Facebook messages, he responded to my questions about the technology of logging while I was making the transcription of the 2015 interview. Sandra Turberville Brown has always been an integral part of the success of Brown’s Pottery. I want to sincerely thank her and her children Jeff Wilburn and Tammy Wilburn Rawls, all of whom are principal workers at Brown’s Pottery and Sons, which is the name Sandra chose after Jerry’s death to reflect that the new incarnation of Jerry Brown’s pottery would depend on Jerry’s biological offspring and those of his stepchildren Jeff and Tammy. They are keeping Jerry’s legacy alive.

JOEY BRACKNER

Alabama Center for Traditional Culture

Alabama State Council on the Arts

Montgomery, Alabama, March 1, 2021

Introduction

The Rise of an American Folk Potter

Jerry Brown (1942–2016) was an important traditional potter who learned the trade from his father Horace V. Jug Brown (1889–1965) and from members of his mother’s family, most notably Gerald Stewart (1917–1993), who made pottery in Louisville, Mississippi. The Browns and Stewarts were among the families who developed and practiced a style of pottery making that evolved in the Deep South during the nineteenth century. The technology, forms, and glaze that came to define southern folk pottery were derived from a European ceramic process adapted to the available natural resources and the influences of a culturally diverse population that included enslaved Africans and African Americans. The resulting pottery tradition features the use of a tunnel-like, semisubterranean kiln called a groundhog kiln, a greenish glaze made of wood ashes, and a variety of forms, including the face jug for which the Brown family is known. Jerry’s midlife reentry into the pottery business in 1982 coincided with an increased appreciation of American folk art by the general public and the rise of research and documentation by public folklore programs at the state and national levels. Jerry Brown quickly became recognized as one of the most talented and traditional of southern folk potters. He successfully established Brown’s Pottery in Hamilton, Alabama, with his wife Sandra and worked there for over thirty years, developing a national and international clientele and training younger