Columbus is throwing its Tennessee Williams Tribute a milestone birthday party this weekend, marking 25 years of honoring the city's most famous literary native with porch plays, a poetry slam and a tribute to the woman who started it all. The festivities kick off Friday for a weekend of events celebrating Williams' life in Columbus and his legacy as a playwright, with this year's lineup leaning into the lighter, lesser-known sides of his personality and artistry.
The tribute traces back to 2001, when Brenda Caradine and a group of volunteers created the event, according to The Dispatch. Thomas Lanier Williams, later known to the world as Tennessee Williams, was born in Columbus in 1911 and spent his first few years growing up in the church rectory at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, where he lived with his mother and grandfather, per the same report. His grandfather, Walter Dakin, served as the minister there, and young Williams was baptized in the church before his family moved away from Columbus by the time he was 3.
That rectory's survival is itself part of the local lore. The Victorian home, built in 1875, was moved on February 2, 1995, to 300 Main Street, according to a Mississippi Tour Guide post, and it now serves as a welcome center and museum. The building originally stood next to the church on College Street before its move downtown. A Mississippi Department of Archives and History property record dated Jul 12, 1996, identifies the house as Tennessee Williams' childhood home and lists its original location as 318 College Street.
A Weekend Built Around Porches and Poetry
This year's tribute focuses on Williams' early years in Columbus with his family, and organizers say it will highlight sides of the playwright not always emphasized in his famous dramas. The Glass Menagerie of Words opens the weekend Friday at 6 p.m. at Munson and Brothers Trading Post, featuring a poetry slam with live blues and jazz music alongside Williams' own poetry and new original work — a nod to how much music shaped his life, and to the sense of humor those who study him say he carried.
Also Friday, from noon to 1:30 p.m. at the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library's upstairs meeting room, the sixth annual 10:4 TENN National Playwright Competition Reading takes place. The contest, hosted jointly by the tribute and Mississippi University for Women, invites 10-minute play submissions from writers across the country. The W, as the university is known locally, was chartered in Columbus in 1884 as the first public college for women in the United States, according to Visit Mississippi, and also counts author Eudora Welty among its alumni.
Saturday's Rectory Vignettes and a Night in New Orleans
Saturday morning, from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m., the Tennessee Williams Home Museum and Welcome Center hosts coffee, pastries and an original vignette set in the summer of 1913, featuring local actors portraying Williams' mother, Edwina, and the Rev. Walter Dakin. Three stagings of A Little Pitcher With Big Ears follow at 9 a.m., 9:45 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., part of a full slate of porch plays and vignettes running throughout the weekend, including The Glass Marsupial, The Case of the Crushed Petunias, and a special tribute honoring Brenda Caradine's work building the tribute over the past quarter-century.
Saturday evening at 5:30 p.m., A Night in New Orleans takes over Ridge House at 571 Ridge Road with New Orleans cuisine, live music and an antique auction featuring Williams memorabilia. One of the more unusual items tied to that memorabilia tradition is a funeral laurel wreath that once rested on Williams' casket at his 1983 funeral — Caradine brought it back to Columbus in November 2009 as a gift from the playwright's close friend John Uecker, according to the Commercial Dispatch. The brittle wreath still sits on display inside the birthplace home museum.
Closing With a Sermon in the Sanctuary Where He Was Baptized
The weekend closes Sunday from 9 to 11:30 a.m. at St. Paul's Episcopal Church with a service that includes a sermon delivered in the same sanctuary where Williams was baptized, followed by a traditional Southern breakfast in the parish hall.
Longtime supporters say the tribute's growth has been meaningful to watch. Marthalie Porter said seeing the tribute grow over the years has been wonderful, per the Dispatch's report, while Keith Gaskin said Williams' legacy has been impactful and argued the event should continue growing and work toward holding events throughout the year — reflecting efforts the tribute has already started toward year-round programming rather than a single festival weekend. The tribute has also been associated with later grant guidelines.
A Legacy That Stretches Beyond One Weekend
The tribute has also had to adapt logistically over the years, folding its once-standalone Stella Shouting Contest into the Catfish in the Alley Festival, held each April along the historic 4th Street South corridor that was an important commercial and social area in Columbus, according to the Commercial Dispatch. The corridor earned its name from the smell of catfish frying in local cafes for workers and riverboat crews coming off the Tombigbee River.
The festival's tourism context is part of a broader economic picture. According to Visit Mississippi's Tourism Economic Contribution Report FY20, tourism generated $362.2 million for Mississippi's General Fund, about $1 for every $15 spent.
Williams, an internationally renowned playwright, won two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama during his career — the first in 1948 for A Streetcar Named Desire and the second in 1955 for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, according to Wikipedia's entry on the playwright. Though born in Columbus, he spent much of his childhood in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where his grandfather led St. George's Episcopal Church for 16 years while his father worked as a traveling shoe salesman, as reported by American Theatre. Clarksdale hosts its own Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival, founded in 1993, which similarly uses historic residential porches for intimate play performances — a format Columbus's tribute shares.
Williams' influence also lives on financially. Upon his death in 1983, he bequeathed his play copyrights and royalties to the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, creating a creative writing trust that received roughly $7 million after his sister Rose's death in 1996, according to Sewanee. Williams directed the bequest there to honor his grandfather, who had attended the university's School of Theology in 1895 — the same grandfather whose rectory life in Columbus shaped the playwright's earliest years, and whose legacy the tribute continues to celebrate a quarter-century after Caradine and her volunteers first gathered to honor him.
