Church Going Mule

Hope and love are brought to life by a trademark mule in a Southern painter’s sought-after artwork.

Written by Dawn Denham | Photos by Joe Worthem

It’s no wonder I felt as if I knew her before I met her.

First there’s the name, “Church Goin Mule,” which I heard whispered all around me at the One Night Stand art show last fall in Oxford. Then, those ladies making a beeline for Mule’s room down the row of bright red doors. They were seeking painter Marshall Page Blevins — now, DeLoach; she married Delta painter Gerald DeLoach last May in a tiny church across the street from their home in Alligator outside Clarksdale. Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, she claims the Mississippi Delta as her heart home since settling here in 2021. And she prefers to be called Church Goin Mule.

Then, there’s the work. Various sized mules always smiling, leaping or winged and flying across wood canvases against a backdrop of Delta images painted in bold and softened primary acrylic colors: A river. Cucumber blossoms. A blues man carrying a guitar. Stars, raindrops, clouds, wild sky. The moon. Crosses. A clothesline. In primitive printed letters crisscrossing her landscapes, Church Goin Mule offers sayings of hope such as “no backbiting,” and “You know it’d break my heart not to carry you with me no more!” inspired by the dialect and messages she first heard as a college student in Kentucky.

You may be thinking it’s folk art, but Church Goin Mule says her work is “Southern graphic,” a blend of regional identity, unique artistic traditions and contemporary graphic design practices. Her centerpiece is the American mule, a “tireless and strong animal” she began painting in college. She’d been drawing horses her whole life, rode and loved them.

“As kids, we played acted like them,” she said.

A confluence of events birthed her muse: professors who discouraged her from continuing to paint horses; the works of Southern writers who wrote about the mule, including Faulkner and Zora Neale Hurston; and seeing the photographs of Amish communities who anthropomorphized mules, setting them in “crazy scenes” such as sitting on a porch or in a truck bed. Mule was made a character, and she wondered what it could do differently.

“The American mule worked for everyone,” she said. “In the mines, the woods, sugar cane, pulling timber and carts, plowing fields, taking people to town. They work harder on less and live longer than horses can and do.”

The more she learned about this “interesting creature,” the more she believed it belongs to the South and is underestimated, misunderstood and taken for granted.

“You know, a mule won’t run into battle like a horse will; it knows its limitations. It’s not willing to kill itself for anybody.”

Her painted stories begin in the music she loves, the blues. Blues man Taj Mahal says, “The blues were born behind a mule” because of the plodding sound it makes; you hear it in Son House, Robert Johnson and Mississippi Fred McDowell.

“Faulkner, Hurston, the blues,” she said. “It was all right there, the mule.”

The name “Church Goin Mule” she now uses for her burgeoning business, her muse and even herself (she signs her blog “Mule”) comes from one grandfather who plowed with a mule and another who was a Methodist minister.

Never one to live in the past, she’ll tell you how much she can’t remember about what happened in all the places she’s lived or to the 2,500 paintings she’s completed.

“I feel fortunate that people are nice to me and overwhelmingly respond positively to my work,” she said.

Church Goin Mule knows blues music, and blues men also represent sadness and hard lives. She also knows her work has the potential to evoke the complexity of generational and familial violence and racism.

“But there is also joy,” she said. “I’ve been trying to think about being grateful for abundance, flip the narrative that we have too much, or it is too much.”

Exploring the mule reflects her thinking about belonging.

“That sense of trying to connect happened in Mississippi where I’ve learned so much. I’ve grown up here more than any other time of my life,” she said. “Because people were willing to teach me,” including her husband, DeLoach, who has lived in Alligator his entire life. “He knows how to do everything. Where I came from, people didn’t live like this.”

Her canvases are a proclamation of love, then, a prayer of gratitude for this land, its people, stories and lessons. Hearts appear all over her canvases.

“I grew up deeply loved,” she said. “The beautiful thing about the Delta is that you have to be patient. The big lesson is in loving people, which is easier to do when you’re curious about things instead of assuming that you know something.”

For Church Goin Mule, the act of making and giving art is the conduit for love.

“I can forgive; we can figure everything else out. Love is beautiful, forgiveness, and grace; and it’s free!”

She didn’t remember who said this, but it was Buster Moon in the movie “Sing”: “When you start singing, other people find their voices.”

Here’s hoping Church Goin Mule never stops singing.

Now Showing Locally

Church Goin Mule’s solo show, “Steadfast to the Land,” is open now through July 23 in the gallery at Rowan Oak (916 Old Taylor Rd., Oxford). The gallery is open 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays and 1-4 p.m. Sundays.

Admission to Rowan Oak is $5 (cash only) and free for children under 12, UM Museum members and University of Mississippi students, faculty and staff.

For more information on visiting Rowan Oak, call 662-234-3284 or follow the museum on Instagram @rowanoakofficial or Facebook @RowanOakUM.

Learn more about Church Goin Mule at churchgoinmule.com.