People From Memphis

"We now understand more clearly that these are not just “bad kids.” Most enter the system for reasons other than the delinquent act with which they are charged."

"Our basic job is to protect the hope of others,” she says. “We have to be hopeful they will get better or they won’t be."

"We’re going to focus on the children we believe can be diverted from the system, either through a referral from law enforcement at the point of contact in the community, a referral from a school resource officer, a self-referral from a family member or a community organization that works with children who recognize some of the signs of at-risk behavior in that child,"

"We need to get to a place where we can say, “It’s ok when you’re not ok.""

"We’ve got to be aware, we’ve got to educate ourselves, and we’ve got to let go of the stigma and the shame that adults feel about mental health that we then impose on our young adults so that they begin to feel bad about any challenge to their psychological well-being."

"Always let your man think an idea or a decision is his, but you know it was really yours (LOL)! Always make the man feel like he is the man. Some young women don’t understand the value of that. What I have come to realize is if you want something, plant a seed, pepper it with comments and let it grow. Then one day he’ll come to you with an idea that you knew was yours all along. Just say great idea! Where’d you get that from! If you’re smart, wise and mature you’ll understand. (LOL) That works in business too."

"I used to run so much stuff. When I was in corporate I ran a department. When I’m at church I tend to be a leader. What I recognize is that men have this thing called EGO and they need to feel that they are not only desirable but they’re needed. I think the extent to which women are strategic and smart and savvy in how we make him feel those things is really important. So many times we feel we have to tell men how things are going to be done. Well that might be fine if it’s not someone that you intend to build a life with because if you really love somebody then you understand and get into their head and give them what they need to keep them strong and to pump their ego and to make sure they feel valued. Everybody has a desire to feel valued."

"We had a very strong extended family to help us raise our children. I had a pretty intense corporate job and I was traveling all over the world when I worked for Holiday Inn. Howard’s job was anchored here. Plus, my mother and his mother lived here. In addition to that, when we had an opportunity to get together we took the kids with us and the grandmothers. We literally made it a family affair. It was a beautiful thing. Even for those who are married and don’t have strong extended family sometimes your friends don’t mind keeping the kids so you can have some me time."

"You can’t go too far in one direction without balancing it on the other side. I might work until 10 o’clock at night all week long but when it’s a holiday we relax or we may decide we want to take off and spend a week or a weekend somewhere. Just as hard as you work you must relax and play and take time for yourself and your family. We had to balance what we did at home with work, a very active spiritual life and a very involved community life. I was on several boards. In fact I chaired the board of directors of Girls, Inc. for about 10 years while my kids were growing up. I’ve been very active in my sorority, Delta Sigma Theta. Now, while my kids were really young I did take some time off. I embargoed work with the sorority because it can be so intense. You cannot be a bench-warmer if you are a good committed person because somehow people find you and want you to chair something (LOL)."

"For me, it meant as much to be with my kids when they were growing up as it does for me to be with Howard now that they’re grown. Every experience we had with our kids was a rare and rich learning experience. To me, the difference between success and failure for children has a lot to do with the extent of their exposure to things that are different, to things that they wouldn’t normally be accustomed to. So many children are limited by their environment and for us, it was worth it for us to invest in time away that allowed us to stay in hotels, that allowed us to go to the Smithsonian Institute and other places that provided teachable moments with our children. It was difficult when we had to get up in the mornings and get three little babies ready to go and take them to daycare and three different schools when they got older. We were clerk of the course on the swim team and then we had to go to the tennis matches. But you know what? It’s those exposures that made our childrens’ lives very rich and created moments they will never forget."

"Some of the biggest discussions you have when you first get married and throughout your marriage is about money and inevitably somebody is a spender and somebody is a saver. When we first got married Howard was a musician, it was pretty easy for him to go out and buy a clarinet or a saxophone and I would be thinking with the money we were going to do something else with? Or he’d say, “I bought that big screen TV for the house.” We had to have a talk because he was not supposed make decisions like that independent of me. Both of our incomes contributed to the net of our household. So, if one of us wants to buy something that is a significant expenditure that is a discussion point. We also discussed something else. I said I did not want us to be absorbed in each other. We are two individuals, we work well together, but we don’t repeat each other. We both respect what each other is doing. We need time away from each other doing our own things and we need time together. We decided early on to take two trips a year. We took one family trip with the kids and one with just us. So much happens over the course of a year when you have three kids that are very close (in age) together. You spend your life running around getting them involved and engaging them, and it’s easy for you to get lost in them and not have any time for yourself. We made some very good decisions, and we put the issues on the table early so it was no surprise moving forward. It was plain, simple hard work and we did it together."

"You have to have someone who understands that both of you are working. If you are in an entrepreneurial business you are not working traditional business hours. You are working whatever hours the business dictates. Some people are married to individuals who want that hot meal on the table when they get home, the clothes ironed every morning and want you there just so they can look at you goo-goo eyed. That is not the life Howard and I live. We miss each other coming and going a lot of times. You have to have an individual or a partner who shares your perspective and understands the demands that are placed upon you."

"Howard is a good husband and father. Around Thanksgiving, I mentioned that we had never been to Paris and suggested we go for New Year’s Eve. I don’t think I was even all that serious, but Howard got to work planning the trip and that’s where we brought our New Year’s in together. That was done out of love and I know it. I’m very blessed."

"All relationships require compromise. Howard is a traditional male and he very much believes I need to cook and I need to do this and that. Well, I also believe that if you get home first you need to start dinner and you need to put the dishes in the dishwasher (LOL)! Sometimes women have to work on molding that. Household duties have to be a shared responsibility in a busy household, but I make sure our home is the way he likes it. Howard doesn’t ask for much. He’s pretty easy. He likes a clean, organized house. He likes for me to be available to do things with him when it’s important to him. He would like for me to spend less time working and more time relaxing but it’s really hard for me to do that in the middle of so much stuff that I have on my plate. He loves to travel, and I love to travel. Howard is spontaneous so sometimes I try to surprise him with spontaneity and that works for us. It’s all about how you view it and when you realize that the end result is respect, admiration, love, a long term commitment and affection and all of those things that are wonderful about relationships---you don’t mind the compromise."

"Howard and I have had issues where we disagreed but we never thought about one of us leaving. We’ve never even talked about that. I’m in this for life."

"I was often gone, but Howard never gave me any reason to doubt his loyalty and his commitment to me. I guess I would have been a little more scrutinizing and less secure in my position if he had. The foundation of any strong relationship, especially a marriage, is trust. The moment that trust is shaken by an indiscretion it would be very difficult to rebuild that trust again. I don’t have time to run a man down and try to figure out who he’s talking to. I’ve got too much to do."

"For those of a certain age and spanning older generations, Dunn might be most recognizable for his appearance in the beloved comedy The Blues Brothers. However, Dunn's contributions as a bass player and to the music industry are much more expansive and celebrated. Dunn was long considered one of the great session musicians of all time. From his days at Stax Records until his death in 2012 at 70, Dunn was one of the most sought-after bassists around the globe."

"You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too... I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I've never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something."

"Eggleston was a man of his time, the 1960s. In the 1960s, street photography was at its zenith, and Pop Art dominated painting and sculpture. Eggleston fused elements of both street photography and Pop Art into his oeuvre. Like Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, and Stephen Shore, Eggleston shot from the hip, blending the new apolitical snapshot aesthetic with the older and more traditional stylings of Cartier-Bresson."

"William Eggleston, the pioneer of colour photography shocked the art world in 1976 with his exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and his accompanying book, William Eggleston's Guide. The exhibition validated colour photography as a legitimate artistic medium. Alongside his friends and Gary Winogrand, Eggleston is regarded as one of the most inventive and radical photographers of modern times. His reputation continued to grow with the publication of The Democratic Forest in 1989, an epic drawn from, over ten thousand prints, with, an introduction by Eudora Welty. It was described by The New York Times as the first masterpiece of colour photography. Eggleston has always lived in Mississippi and Memphis. His work is deeply rooted in the South, but he transcends the label of Southern artist. His range is international. This book, published to coincide with an exhibition originating at Barbican Art Gallery in London, is the first time work from his whole career has been gathered to form a coherent sequence. It follows a course of ancient and modern from Mississippi to Louisiana and into Elvis Presley's mansion Graceland, through the oil rigs in Tennessee and the orchards of the Transvaal, to the slopes of Mount Kenya and down the Nile, with the collection ending on the lyrical imagery of the English rose. The cumulative effect of Eggleston's startling work reinforces his reputation as a major American artist, whose significance extends beyond the world of photography."

"The myth makes it bigger but when you go in there, you know where you are. I've been in many places bigger than that and it ain't the same."

"It wasn’t even nothing personal. I left the group when I was 21. They were my manager, my producers, my label. Also, I was just young. I was on a spiritual journey. At the time, I thought it was religion."

"cI been watching them girls for the past couple of years and I was like, ‘What the f**k?’ It made me feel good, they represented Memphis right. It’s only been me and [La] Chat that came out of Memphis,” she said. “A year later, GloRilla got signed. I got distracted because I was thinking of her glow-up. I think she was 19, remember when [I] was that age?"

"I don't ask tabloids to chase me around every week. But at the same time, I would never take back any part of who I am or where I came from. I would never want to be part of anything else. I'm honored and proud of my family and my dad."

"Presley joined Oprah Winfrey and her Angel Network and was active in the relief efforts after hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and surrounding areas. Presley gave a helping hand in Memphis, Tennessee. "I'm here," she said, "because I definitely needed to do something, and it just so happens this is where I'm from. I'm going to do everything I can. People need help—this is a huge catastrophe and everyone needs to stand up." Her first stop was a food bank, where, with the help of FedEx and Kroger, Lisa Marie loaded a truck with groceries. Then it was time for a pit stop at Target for toiletries and clothes. "I thought I was going to grab a couple things at the store," Presley said, "and I ended up filling up a truck. I went a little crazy." Presley's final destination was the Grand Casino Convention Center in Mississippi to distribute the supplies to people who had lost everything. One evacuee said, "I really appreciate everything Ms. Presley is doing for us. We have nothing, so we're very grateful for everything she's doing"."

"This is where finding others who have experienced a similar loss can be the only way to go. Support groups that have your specific kind of loss in common. I go to them, and I hold them for other bereaved parents at my home. Nothing, absolutely NOTHING takes away the pain, but finding support can sometimes help you feel a little bit less alone."

"Death is part of life whether we like it or not — and so is grieving. There is so much to learn and understand on the subject, but here's what I know so far: One is that grief does not stop or go away in any sense, a year, or years after the loss. Grief is something you will have to carry with you for the rest of your life, in spite of what certain people or our culture wants us to believe. You do not "get over it," you do not "move on," period."

"In 2002, Around the time [when "Chickenhead" was out], I had got locked up on a gun charge, so really, the time that all that was going on—I got out on bond from the feds, stayed out like six months, and then when the album dropped, I was doing a lot of shows. What ended up happening was I got locked up so I couldn’t do anything. I probably would have [performed in New York], but I’ve never done a solo show. I’ve done shows in New York back in the day with Three 6 [Mafia] but I’ve never done a solo show by myself."

"Sexual preference bias is one step away from bias based on the color of one's skin."

"We have to make sure that we always recognize that we don't own the sacraments, the sacraments are the work of Christ. It is he who comes to us ... and it's his grace that takes precedence over everything else. Therefore we should see in each of those encounters with Christ in the sacraments a sacred experience even beyond our comprehension. And the one, of course, that's the supreme of everything is the Eucharist, because that's when Christ sacrificed on Calvary. We're fed with the same food that the disciples were fed at the Last Supper, and the same blood of the covenant from the cross is given to us. So again, it's Christ who is there, Christ offering the sacrifice. We are with him but it is he who does it all, it is he who feeds us."

"Something you see in the book is my tendency to self-bully. It started when I was a gay black kid growing up in the suburbs. I wasn’t bullied by individuals; kids weren’t shoving me into lockers or calling me slurs to my face. Shame—electrified by racism and homophobia—was enforced by the broader culture though, and in response, I started bullying myself. I started saying cruel things about myself to myself. While I’ve generally grown out of self-hate, an ease with being tough and candid about myself to myself is an integral aspect of my writing…"

"If you look at the poems in Prelude, you can identify the later material by identifying the poems with more white space and unexpected line breaks. Grief did that to me and my writing. It exploded my expectations and introduced these blank pockets of deep feeling. My prose writing became more fluid and lyrical…"

"I’m obsessed with manhood as a brutal and artful performance. My mind always finds its way back to the crossroad where sex, race, and power collide. Journeys, transformation, as well as dashed attempts to transform, fascinate me as well."

"Being gay isn't a choice, just like being black isn't a choice…I don't stop. I do not give up. I do not take America's 'no' to my identity for an answer."

"It's an updated version of what's being talked about or danced to today but still with my classic grit to it. Good part about it is the 1990s are back so this was da best time to do it. A lot of artist samplin' Three 6 now, our music was before its time."

"I haven’t had any down time, my last album just came out the end of last year so that wasn’t even 6 months ago the album that I did with Yelawolf, the Yots (Year Of The Six) Pt. 2 album. I didn’t go straight into this project I went straight into producing projects for some other people. Stuff for Riff Raff, stuff for Jon Connor, Dr. Dre’s new artist, some stuff for my new artist Weirdo Westwood King and a lot of other people, then I just decided to go into my project. Actually, some fans decided it for me, I wasn’t even going to make a rap project this year, I had been writing EDM songs for a lot of kids. I got about four of those that’s coming out, one of them already came out with this guy named Kennedy Jones, it’s called “Never Not.” So I had been writing these EDM songs for these kids and I was just going to stick to that because that’s fun and easier, but all the fans were like “Ahh man you should bring out that straight underground shit man a Volume 17 for Summer 17. They kind of talked me into doing it. So I was like well yeah it’s time to bring it back at least before I take a break on it and go straight to producing other folks for a minute, in 1/2 year or a year I should at least hit them with some straight underground joints to hold them off for a minute. My last album wasn’t straight underground joints it had all kind of stuff on it because it came out through me and Yelawolf."

"Man, I really ain’t have no downtime since the fucking 90’s but I don’t really work fast but I don’t really work slow. So I have been around a lot of producers, some of the top producers in the business and I’ve seen producers go in, I’m talking about producers that have hit songs right now on the radio. I’ve seen some of these producers get up and make 100 beats a week, and out of these 100 beats they make a week, you know 400 a month, maybe one of them will end up on their own artists project. That was never the case with me. If I went into the studio and made 5 beats week all five of those at least four of those would be on the album and three of them would be singles. I just work different, when I go in I hit hard, I strike right on the nose right off the top and I don’t have to live in the studio like you see some artists doing even though I live in the studio but I just be doing other stuff."

"I'm just producing and writing for all my new artists I signed, Weirdo King and my nephews The Seed of 6ix. Also been writing a lot of EDM for kids. Doing more cooking videos and TV."

"Basically, the whole thing of the project is to take it back to my old sound, the old DJ Paul sound. Before Three 6 Mafia when I was just DJ Paul and it was just me and my brother Lord Infamous. It was like a mix of songs and it was either me or members of my crew and some of it would be my signature “Crunkstrumentals” which would be instrumentals with crunk chants and sampled hooks and this and that on it. I brought those back a little bit on my last album Yots (Year Of The Six) Pt. 2 that dropped last quarter of last year, 2016. So, there will be more of those on there, like I said it’s just the original OG Paul sound that’s what the fans been asking for and I see that what a lot of people are back into these days, there using that old three six sounds and a lot of people are sampling it and clear samples from me. They sampled the creator it takes the king to bring it back himself. I never left it alone, to be honest with you, but I just didn’t do full albums of it. It would just be a track on my albums or mixtapes, not a single but this whole Volume 17 mixtape is going to be like that."

"I never left Three 6. I’ve always been a part of Three 6. I did some time and that was holding the group back and I don’t wanna hold my brother back — you know Paul’s my half-brother. They just went on doing they thing, and it’s like a breach of contract when you go to jail so it fucked up things with Sony. They had just released a double platinum album and the Oscar single for the Hustle & Flow soundtrack and stuff, so I just had to wait. But I’m about to join back up with ’em though. Me and my brother at least are gonna do some more of that underground stuff that we did in the first place, you know, the ‘Come With Me To Hell’ type stuff, and maybe there may be a surprise Three 6 thing in the future, but we still discussing that."

"She put up with all our noise in the bedroom, because we started off with a little studio in our bedroom. And our room was right next to her and pops’ bedroom, so they couldn’t stand the noise because we made a lot of racket and we had other rappers coming in all the time, and they put up with that. And plus, she listened to a lot of soul music when we was growing up so that influenced us. And in church. She tried to make us go to church but we just didn’t tend to stick with it."

"Yeah. I just wanna say RIP to Juanita Beauregard; that’s our mother and she just passed February 2nd and I want the world to know about her. She was a good woman."

"Of course, of course. Even though if it wasn’t for what happened previously, all the success we had previously, it’s not like you can come straight from an underground record to Oscar status and be recognised by the people at the Academy. Me and Paul had a conversation about this actually when I got out of jail. I congratulated him because I came out like the day before it came on and I was like: ‘I’m proud of you’. And he told me: ‘Well don’t be proud of me because we couldn’t have did it without all the stuff you did’."

"DJ Paul is a dog, one you do not trust. You leave your green around me? Nigga, your green gonna get lit up! You leave your drink around me? Believe that your drink is going to get drunk up!"

"I always adapt to everything that’s going on. If a new iPhone 8 is coming out, I gotta get it. If a new computer is coming out, I gotta get. Everything that’s new. I don’t live in the past. I just don’t. I still have my sound. I still have my flow. Everything sounds like the stuff that I created from back in the ‘90s. All the flows, I created all of that. I created everything. Everything you hear on the radio, it’s the Three 6 sound so I keep that sound but I still stay relevant. I don’t dwell in the past. My mind is not in the ‘90s, even though I’m a bigger star in the ‘90s -- I’m not in the ‘90s. Some people be stuck back in time, in their prime, in their moment, but I always move forward. A lot of people ask me that. I just move forward."

"I’m executive producing Suicideboys. I’m executive producing their new album. I’m doing a lot of that. Me and A$AP Rocky got a lot of great records we got coming out. I just stay busy, man. I just adapt with times. That’s just who I am. I move forward. Even working in the studio, the equipment changes. The mixing boards -- people used to make their beats on MPCs and W30s and SP100s. Now, people are making beats on computers."

"And I got some other producers I’m working with right now. I got YK 808, I got Deedotwill, I got other up-and-coming artists. I stay working with different people. I like overlapping and vibing with different producers, and that’s just how I’ve always been, man. Even when I was with Three 6 Mafia. I used to always just search for new talent and work with new talented people. I just think that’s what it is. I love making music. I don’t like to stay in the same place -- I’m not that type of person. But I still keep my roots. I still keep my sound."

"Man, I love music. I looked up to producers like Barry White and Isaac Hayes. You know, I was about those guys. Dr. Dre, Michael Jackson, looking at those guys, how they came up, looking at all those guys I feel like I’m one of those guys. I’m one of those legendary guys just like them. I’ll never go anywhere. I love music. I love making music and working with different producers and getting the rappers and stuff like that. I signed TM88 to my company, you know? It’s been successful. He produced "XO Tour Llif3," which sold over four million copies."

"Man, I just followed the same formula. I feel like if something ain’t broke, you don’t fix it. I’m gonna give the fans what they want, so I’m giving them what they want. I have a couple of different flows on there. But it’s gonna be the same Rubba Band Business that people love, that was banging in the clubs and stuff like that."

"Now now 6 got my hands on my first my mill, eyes sold 7 damn near and a quarter bill."