in the market and naturally bought himself a large plastic container. This kind of honey is a varietal produced from the flowers of the Tupelo tree common enough in the south-eastern states. Ulee’s Gold was said to be made from it. Turns out that indeed it’s good or Mister Chu considers it so having got some to put in his tea, but he didn’t really choose it based on his understanding of its quality (having never tasted it before today).
In the middle of 1971, and while Elvis and Priscilla’s marriage was failing, Van Morrison wrote and recorded the album Tupelo Honey. Tupelo (Mississippi) was where Elvis was born from in January of 1935 (same day “Slim Gray” Gibson, the American bank robber and Depression-era outlaw, was shot dead by the FBI in Chicago some six hundred miles away).
Mister Chu, a man from Incheon Metropolitan City in South Korea, became aware of this place (Tupelo) after he heard the song by Mister Morrison at some point in the middle of the nineteen seventies (and even then was considered quite modern by his friends in Incheon). Subsequently Mister Chu came to America and selected this product in 2011 (in Maine) as a result of these things in some unknown combination.
None of which occurred to Mister Chu at the moment of his point of purchase, but, on reflection, half way through a second cup, evening fallen down, song found and playing, he realized that he had simply, probably, bought the brand.
Not Spokane honey or Shreveport honey. Not honey from Metuchen (once ranked 332nd the Best Place to live in New Jersey) or even Pueblo (Colorado) which would have a nice sound to it if someone there was looking to start up a business.
This record has nothing at all to do with another record made much later by the English band Radiohead (Pablo Honey) or the alternative country band Uncle Tupelo either.
The album Tupelo Honey is very loving indeed and Mister Chu would like to find a friend of the girl type he might sing the title track to with a clear heart. It even features a picture of Mister Morrison’s wife Janet on the cover (and a horse also).
The couple were divorced within two years and Mister Presley died not much later in terms of how the time goes by so quickly. According to Kurt Vonnegut, Kilgore Trout’s last poem has the lines: “When the tupelo/ Goes poop-a-lo / I’ll come back to youp-a-lo”. Perhaps this will yet come true.