The summer of love lingered in Tennessee, got started in late
September 1967, and didn’t completely heat up until around the winter holidays
for two compassionate Tennessee Tech history majors.
Before 1967, Nelia Tripp of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee did not
seem that different from many of her ambitious female peers. The former
high-school cheerleader was a beautiful young brunette decked out in matching
Bobbie Brooks outfits with roles in student government and an underground
sorority to her credit. She already had a boyfriend, who would that November
purchase a diamond ring for a proposal that would never take place.
But in the months preceding her intense encounters with the
tall, skinny guitar-and-banjo player from Nashville named Calvin Kimbrough,
Nelia had been undergoing the first serious phase of a radical transformation
that would continue to shape her for the rest of her life, what she described
as a “complete 180-degree turn,” including international travel and a change of
majors from Accounting to American History.
For one, her mother suffered from a bipolar disorder, even
though this mental illness remained undiagnosed then, that revealed itself in
intense manic fits that were difficult for Nelia, who recalls, “I had gone home
at Christmas of my junior year, and she was just absolutely berserk.” In early
1967, Nelia continued her one-on-one counseling with Bob Lewis, the campus
minister for Tennessee Tech’s Wesley foundation. She reflects, “When I came
back from Christmas break, I had a session with Bob and I said, ‘I’m never
going back to Lawrenceburg again. I’m
not going home this summer; I’m going as far away from my mom as I can.’” Not
only impressed with the young woman’s enigmatic beauty and keen intellect,
Lewis also helped her develop a plan for freedom.
When I met Bob Lewis for lunch and coffee at the Thistle Stop
Café in West Nashville in January 2015, he had an enthusiastic sparkle that
made him seem much younger than his years, a sparkle that lit up whenever he
spoke of his initial meeting with Nelia. At their next meeting, not only did
Bob Lewis provide a scheme for Nelia’s coming summer, this plot provided
several hours of college credit.
Come summer, this expedition brought culture shock not just to
Nelia—who had just turned 21 and therefore felt bold enough to take this journey—but
to her whole family. She remembers the dread and defiance of her departure: “So
I had never been on an airplane. My parents drove me to Nashville and were
horrified. My whole family was horrified that I was going to the Soviet Union
because they thought that was the place of Satan, and the Cold War, and how
could I embarrass my family that way, with what was I doing.” But brave Nelia
went and learned lots from people she had never met before.
After extensive work in the Soviet Union, going to Czechoslovakia
conjured quite the contrast. “And from there, we came out into Prague,” Nelia
explains. “We were there right before the spring invasion, and Prague was
alive—all the artists and writers and poets! It was just so amazing to come
there after being in the Soviet Union.” In Prague, this former high-school
cheerleader from the former confederacy inhaled the air of the international
youth revolution that defined the 1960s for some and defiled it for others.
When the students returned to Cookeville for classes that fall
of 1967, Nelia and Calvin rubbed shoulders at a mixer, because they were both
student leaders. While the culture shock of returning to the United States was
hard enough for Nelia on its own, she had also been sick, and to make matters
worse, most people did not seem to care how her world had been turned upside
down or how what little was left of a conventional worldview was being upended.
People didn’t really want to hear about her experience of the Soviet Union,
much less the deeper kinds of questions this journey kindled.
But Calvin was different. He didn’t just like Nelia but wanted
to learn from her. “Calvin, however, was intrigued at that [student leaders]
retreat, and he started asking me questions. And questions led to dates, and
dates led to passion, and then we got together.” By the Christmas holidays,
they were most definitely a thing. A couple. The spirit of their relationship
also reflected the spirit of the times. They both grew out their hair and
started adopting the more comfortable, colorful, and unconventional clothes
embraced by the more restless youthful spirits of the period.
Just as Nelia was utterly transformed by her excursion to
eastern Europe, Calvin, too, would have his own mind-blowing, life-changing
experiences. At the end of 1967, after they were clearly together as a couple
and had been to the respective homes to meet the respective families, Calvin
embarked to a conference in Cleveland, Ohio, simply called “The Cleveland
Week,” a culminating event of “Process ’67,” sponsored by the University
Christian Movement.
The conference brochure—which Calvin has kept in one of his
numerous, well-organized scrapbooks—boasts that attendees would engage in “a
style of education which is dialogical, nonauthoritarian, issue- or
problem-centered, and future-oriented.” The leaders for the conference were
dubbed DEGs or Depth Education Groups and were steeped in topics such as
“liturgy, public opinion, psychedelics, theology, the military draft,
technology, the church and its relation to the university.”
With thousands of
attendees from “Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox member groups,” the week
looked towards “social change through the reformulation of the university.” From
art workshops to film festivals to jazz bands, all broadcast to every
conference hotel room on closed circuit TV, according to the Cleveland Plain
Dealer article of the time and to this 21st-century observer, Cleveland Week
appears more like a hippy happening than what most people might think of as a
mainline church event.
By comparison to the distinctly conservative evangelical vibe
found at today’s praise conferences, it’s difficult to describe the extent to
which the gatherings and ecumenical activism of college Christians comingled
with the larger changes heralded by the militant New Left and secular
counterculture. As vividly and meticulously documented by the Methodist Student
Movement’s visionary motive magazine, an activist and artistic revolution was
already taking place on the Christian left years before the carefully branded
“Jesus People” would co-opt the religious counterculture to much more
conservative ends.
Calvin clearly had his mind blown by the experience in
Cleveland. A love-letter sent to Nelia in a Sheraton Hotel envelope is scrawled
in bold-black marker on pink tissue paper. The joyful author of the love note
admits to wishing he had brought boots and love beads. Calvin describes meeting
the colorful collection of all the other Christian activists, “It was the first
time I had ever encountered blacks with afros in overalls, and men with long
hair and beards, and of course I didn’t have long hair and a beard, but it was
wonderful being there.”
As the older Calvin recalls that event, it’s as if he is once
again caught up in the energy of the time, and by sharing the story, we can
feel the power of the revolution, too. Just as Calvin had his mind opened at
the close of 1967, our minds might adjust our vision to just what was going on
for this young couple and probably many others in the religiously-rooted youth
movements of the era.
We wouldn’t have this love story if it were not for the sacred
intuition of a mentor like Bob Lewis, but this personal love story
includes, yet transcends, our
biographical subjects and intersects both culturally and spiritually with the
larger love story of the late 1960s. It’s an incredible witness to an
irresistible form of refreshing rebellion that the youth revolution of the ‘60s
would have its own outposts in a conservative town like Cookeville, Tennessee
and at a campus like Tennessee Tech and in a fellowship like the one that grew
up around the Wesley Foundation. It’s a loving, radical, youth revolution that,
for these folks, was deeply rooted in the body of Christ.
If you would like a copy of the complete Banjo & Bread as
an Adobe PDF, please send a message to Andrew Smith at:
preacherandrewsmith [at] gmail.com with 'Banjo & Bread' in
the subject line.
I went to this place in first time with my husband on Tuesday night after work. The inside of these Chicago event venues was quite big and had enough seats to sit and nice bar area. We had a few things, along with drinks and it was all good!
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