Tennessee man takes up his grandfather’s craft and finds folk art

• Eddy Jack Martin took up broom making in the mid-1980s.
• His brooms have been used by the governor and first lady and on the Broadway stage.
• It takes him about 45 minutes to make each broom, and he makes between six and 10 per day.

MCNAIRY COUNTY, Tenn. — Inside the broom maker’s little workshop where hickory dust floats in the fading light, somehow time has been swept away.

It could be 1925. Or 1952. Or 2004. Or yesterday. Broomcorn grows out back in a holler full of hickory, cedar, oak and ash. The smell of your grandparents’ fireplace wafts through the trees.

They call this spot “The Bottom.” It’s a little stretch of farmland in a 100-year floodplain outside the tiny West Tennessee town of Selmer. It has only flooded once, and only because, as the legend goes, Papaw Hockaday killed two snakes in the corncrib and hung their carcasses over the back fence belly-up. 

Everybody from around here knows it floods when dead snakes are hung belly-up.