With touring an impossibility during lockdown, Jeni brimmed with songs. "A Body is A Delicate House" is her studio album from the lockdown period – first released as a hand-pressed CD in fall of 2021. After a successful limited pressing, she had the album remastered by Martin Stansbury of Cacophony Cottage Studios and factory pressed in 2022.
In this release and in her other lockdown release "I Fell Into the Fire," she returns to Jewell Ridge for stories as well as finding inspiration in the life of her late music mentor, Norman Cross.
The physical CD comes with a 46-page booklet complete with essays, liner notes, lyrics, and collages made by Jeni by hand.
From the conclusion to Jeni's liner notes:
"Every little thing I’ve done in my terrestrial life has pointed me toward this calling – to watch and note, to report back, to listen for broadcasts from the spirit and from those who have crossed to the other side. My delicate house has an antenna which is always switched on for particular messages. This has always been my way. It’s just how I was made in the same way that I always woosh into a chair without calculating the risk, in the same way that I have one squinty eye like Dad, like Grandaddy, the newspaper men, the reporters.
These songs are my reading and translation of what I’ve heard in the recent worldwide news from the firmament and the spirit. Bless those who whisper these messages and the celestial currents that carry them.
There’ll be loaves, there’ll be fishes
– the answer in your hands.
And you’ll tell it all to me
when you reach the promise land.
Amen, Dad. Amen."
Includes unlimited streaming of A Body is a Delicate House
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I wrote this song in the days following the death of my Great-Aunt Edith Geneva Smith Mullins on July 24, 2020.
Aunt Edith once went to visit the house of her little girlfriend up on Smith Ridge and they saw the prickly horse chestnuts lying on the ground. The horse chestnuts reminded them of lady’s hair curlers, so both girls wound their flossy blonde hair onto to the sticky prickly balls and ran in to show their mothers how beautiful their hair was going to be. The girls spent several painful hours while their mothers picked the chestnuts out of their hair.
Aunt Edith left school after eighth grade because she didn’t have much truck with school and felt she’d had as much of it as she needed. The butcher at the Company Store up on Jewell Ridge had offered her a job. She was beautiful and personable and had a good head for figures. She loved working at the Company Store and waiting on the customers. She had money of her own to buy ready-made clothes and she danced at the Green Fly Cafe downstairs from the butcher shop. All the fellas thought she was a wonder.
She met a handsome fella at a hamburger joint in Richlands. His family, though local to Southwest Virginia, were establishing a timber business in Florida. She got married and went all the way to Florida. Eventually, she had three children and a swimming pool. When we were kids, we all thought she was romantic and famous because she lived in Florida and had a swimming pool. And she was romantic and famous with the piercing eyes of Bette Davis and the figure of Marilyn Monroe.
Like all of the Smith girls, she came from the coalfields, but she had a certain glamour about her. She and her husband, Doug, visited friends out in Idaho and bought a ranch there as a second home and business. Her family called her Katie because her husband, Doug, said she was like Maureen O’Hara in a movie where she was called Katie. There was a bunk house, there were cowboys. There was an airstrip. Doug learned to fly and one night their plane crashed. He died and she didn’t. They wrote a message in their own blood to their children. Her children saw their Dad buried while she recovered in the hospital out west. She lived with a scar down the center of her face. She never remarried.
Her husband left behind a heavy equipment empire and she ran it. She went to the office each day and rented cranes, diggers, and trucks to construction firms all over Florida. She helped to build Miami, Orlando, Daytona, and Fort Lauderdale. She joined groups, sewed and cooked for charity, and decorated her house to the nines for every season and holiday.
Her son, who worked with her in the business, died suddenly of cancer. She kept on at the helm with her office cat. Her daughters and grandchildren, and great-grandchild looked to her for her humor, for her straight-talking, and for the alligator on her back porch. She lived through hurricanes and floods. She raised the biggest Staghorn ferns you’ve ever seen. She fed them banana peels.
Over the years, I showed Aunt Edith black and white pictures of our family and she told me stories of preachers, miners, shootings, and illegitimate children. I still have many songs to write from the stories she gave to me. She told me about the time she and her little friend thought horse chestnuts would make wonderful curlers for their hair. Her daughters said I was like a little Edith because I looked so much like her.
She was our movie star, the glamorous and tough-as-nails woman who walked across our screens and will be walking through our hearts and our stories forever.
lyrics
Goodnight, Tazewell Beauty Queen
Goodnight, Tazewell Beauty Queen,
we pray you won’t go far.
You won’t need a diamond tiara
to shine among the stars.
Say you’ll trade your Chevy
for a glittering comet’s tail.
Ride the celestial rodeo
with meteors in your hair.
All the boys are lining up in Heaven
beside the photo booth
to have their picture taken
with the girl in the red shoes.
Come on, give us a smile
before we turn the page
of you dressed like Cleopatra
just before she left the stage.
Goodnight, Tazewell Beauty Queen.
Say you’ll tell us a story
about your one true love –
how you wrote you names that time
in your sweat and blood.
How you survived it all, girl,
no matter what life threw at you
you just kept on riding
like you were taught to do.
Goodnight, Tazewell Beauty Queen,
you dealt us the perfect hand.
We’ll keep the ace you left behind
until we meet again.
Forever adored.
Forever our star.
We always look to you
to tell us who we are.
credits
from A Body is a Delicate House,
released December 13, 2022
Written by Jeni Hankins, Lulu Wall Music, BMI.
Jeni Hankins – Vocal and Guitar
Alfred John Hickling – Harmony Vocal and all other instruments
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Jeni Hankins grew up in the coalfields of Appalachian in Southwest Virginia among a family of miners, moonshiners, and
journalists. Her writing pulls the grit, gumption, and keen sense of observation out of that heritage like drawing water from her grandmother’s well.
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