Figuring out Elma: key perspective from Ed Payne

From an email received from Ed Payne on September 15, 2009:

"But what struck me after we parted yesterday was what my aunt has emphasizing to me. When I asked about who had the (black) Chatmon family band play at their houses, she pushed me to understand the generational divide in the 1920s. The generation born ca 1865 ~ 1895 clung to more strict codes of conduct. Yes, there might be frolics on Saturday night, but generally life was hard and grim and people stoic in the face of it. There was a huge change after WWI. The war supercharged the economy and there was a sense of breaking off old chains. Automobiles, illicit booze, and jazz were to that generation what birth control pills, illicit drugs, and rock and roll were to mine. Think of how many parents in the 1960s with conventional values gave birth to children who dealt drugs (= moonshining) and otherwise turned respectability on its head. And, yes, both the impact of the jazz generation and the rock generation filtered down even into Mississippi. The jazz generation the impact may have even more direct for the McLemore children because New Orleans, epicenter of jazz and easy morals, was close by and the Piney Woods had not entirely shed its rough and tumble timber boom rawness."