Confessions of a Southern Beauty Queen

by Julie Hines Mabus

In the late 1960s, Patsy Channing, a stunningly beautiful young woman, was suspended from the venerable Mississippi State College for Women for breach of conduct. The resulting scandal reached all the way to the Columbus courthouse, and the press ate it up.

But Patsy’s story starts long before that, living with a preoccupied and troubled mother in Memphis, Tennessee. As Patsy grows up, she buries the memories of her unspeakable childhood trauma and is determined to have a normal life. Music becomes her ticket out and a vehicle for the one thing she covets most―a chance to be crowned Miss America.

In Confessions of a Southern Beauty Queen , Julie Hines Mabus provides a peek into that world―a world struggling through the civil rights movement, reeling from the death of JFK, and cutting loose with the musical innovations from Memphis and Detroit. Patsy develops a close friendship with a guitarist at Stax Recording Studio, giving her firsthand exposure to the early Memphis Soul Sound created by such greats as Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, and Sam & Dave.

Confessions of a Southern Beauty Queen opens and closes with the end of Patsy’s time at Mississippi State College for Women on that fateful spring morning in 1968 when she entered the Columbus courthouse. Patsy’s story, marked with tragedy and triumph, mirrors that of a growing and evolving South, where change never comes easy.

256 pages, Hardcover

Published April 29, 2022

Reviews

[Celia Watson]

Loved reading bits and pieces about Memphis, Ole Miss, MS State, and Stax recording studios! Stories behind music artists and popular songs like Green Onions and Last Night were 10/10. And with familiar topics helped me appreciate the perspective, especially w new info

[Mary Thomas Watts]

I appreciate that the author wanted to tell her friend’s story, but authors, editors, and publishers of books marketed as nonfiction have a responsibility to readers to verify that the stories they put out into the world are true. It was not difficult to discover, through yearbooks and archived issues of The Spectator, the Mississippi State College for Women campus newspaper, that Pam Johnson (the student called "Patsy Channing" in the book) was not a runner-up in three Miss MSCW pageants, as the book claims. Also, the federal court case file of Ms. Johnson's lawsuit against the college, following her suspension for 1)spending the night out of the dormitory without permission and 2)misrepresentation of facts, flatly contradicts Mabus's scenes of the student being held against her will for nine days in the campus infirmary. "Confession" means a true account. And "beauty queen" means a pageant winner. Therefore, even the title of this book is fictitious. (A shout out here goes to four of my fellow MSCW Class of 1969 journalism classmates, two former MSCW faculty members, a number of library archivists, federal court staff, and my sister, who assisted in fact-checking the parts of "Confessions of a Southern Beauty Queen" that involved the college.)

[Cortland]

okay i finished the book because it was easy to read but honestly the plot made NO sense

there were such random details???? and random side stories that added nothing to what i think the true plot was supposed to be??? idk this had potential but did not live up to it

also TW: sexual abuse

[catherine]

Memories

Great book. True to the W in the 60's. A time of " change" for Mississippi. Thank you for reliving the past.