Satan Is Real - Charlie Louvin & Benjamin Whitmer

 

Sadly, Charlie Louvin died a year before Satan Is Real, the Louvin Brothers biography he co-wrote with Benjamin Whitmer, was published in 2012. Charlie, though, is very alive within the pages of the book, because Satan Is Real employs a very conversational style to tell the Louvin Brothers story. One can easily imagine that the book was taken from recordings of Charlie just sitting back and telling stories one after the other as he recalled them. 

When they were growing up on a small farm in Sand Mountain, Alabama, Charlie and Ira Loudermilk could never have imagined that they would grow up to become world famous as Charlie and Ira Louvin, The Louvin Brothers. But the two immensely talented and driven boys would do exactly that, and in this frank and revealing biography Charlie recounts how it all happened. The boys grew up during The Depression, and they were expected to help their father put food on the table by working long hours in the fields and around the house. They did that, but it did not stop them from discovering a love of music that stayed with the brothers for the rest of their lives.

The tragedy of the Louvin Brothers, of course, is that Ira also discovered that he could cope with neither his out-of-control addiction to alcohol nor with his resentment towards his father about the way he was raised. Charlie had neither of these problems; instead, his problem was that he found it more and more difficult to cope with Ira's destructive habits and behavior. Hauntingly, the brothers were no longer singing as a duo when Ira and several people in his car were killed in a head-on collision in Kansas in 1965.

Along the way, the Louvin Brothers created some of the most beautiful vocal harmonies the world has ever heard while creating songs that are today considered true country music classics. The first songs they learned to sing together at the feet of their mother were those brought with them by some of America's earliest settlers. Like so many who came before and after them, they honed their skills in their small church, one in which everyone was encouraged to express their emotions in song. And then they hit the road, and they sang, even for free, anywhere that anyone would listen to them. It took a long time for the Louvin Brothers to achieve some measure of success and respect, but when that opportunity came, they were certainly ready.

Charlie Louvin uses some rather blunt, a time or two even bordering on lewd, language in Satan Is Real, but I found that this choice only added to the truth of what Louvin reveals about his and Ira's lives. As the back cover puts it, "Satan Is Real is...an epic tale of two brothers bound together by love, hate, alcohol, blood, and music." In my estimation, this is a solid four-star biography. 

Aside: This rather unusual book cover is actually a mashup using an a Lovin Brothers gospel music album cover and the elements of a book cover. Below, is that album cover:

In Which I Get Interviewed on The Big Show

 My life has been marked by two constants over the decades: a love of books and reading, and an appreciation for roots music. I define roots music as that made by the pioneers and first generation singers of a particular genre, be that country music, bluegrass music, the blues, rock and roll, etc. But because music genres can evolve so rapidly over the years - even to the point of becoming mere shadows of the original sound - I've always had a tendency to hold on to the old stuff when I find it. And after 60 years of collecting, that means I have a music library that includes 78s, 45s, LPs, 8-track tapes, cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs, and self-recorded video and audio performances along with thousands of digital recordings. 

That's the other side of my life that has occasionally bled over to my posts here at Book Chase. I try to keep that to a minimum, but sometimes I can't help myself. This is one of those times.

I recently sat down with Andy Gallo and Jim Sloan as a guest on their music-related podcast called "The Big Show" to talk about my lifetime love for music of this sort and my meager efforts to help keep the music alive over the years. We get into things like what sparked my regard for the music, the internet radio station I helped run for several years, and all the video recordings I still make and share on the internet.

I finally got the courage to listen to it myself, and I hope one or two of you might find it interesting since I've been neglecting Book Chase so badly. It explains where a lot of my energy is going these days.

Covid-19 Journal - Week 8 Begins

Well, another week is in the books. Good, bad, or indifferent, at least we have another one behind us. Whether or not that really means we are any closer to the end of this pandemic-induced shutdown is something that I doubt anyone really knows. In fact, I've read conflicting news articles all morning - often from the same source - and I'm more confused than ever. 

This would be terrible enough if we were only dealing with a virus that has the potential to kill millions of us and change our daily lives far into the future - if not forever. But it's not that simple. Instead, we also have to survive the meddling of those, be they cheap politicians or be they cheap businessmen, who are more interested in personal gain than they are in solving the devastating problems the world faces right now. I am fast losing faith in the world leaders tasked with getting us through this truly historical moment in our lives. Most of them, I suspect, will be harshly judged by future historians. 

On a personal note, I'm still trying to deal with my father's hospitalization via telephone and email. It's impossible to judge his recovery progress this way, of course, as all I can do is rely on the professionals I speak with every day. One way or another, I have to place him in a new care facility within the next eight or nine days. The clock is ticking, virus or no virus.

Virus Stats from Johns Hopkins:

In the last week,

Worldwide cases increased from 2,995,456 to 3,534,367,
United States cases from 968,203 to 1,161,804, and
Texas cases went from 24,968 with 651 deaths to 31,998 with 878 deaths.  (So Texas appears to have just had its worst week since this all started, and today is the day that our governor has set to start opening things up again. I hope that I'm not reporting a huge increase in Texas infections and deaths two or three weeks from now.)

Outside:

Our early summer weather has a tight grip on the area. We are reaching temperatures in the high eighties every day, occasionally pushing past ninety, with very little rain in the forecast as a change of pace. The walkers, even the children playing in the neighborhood streets, seem to have almost disappeared in the last week or so. We are down now to that core group of regular walkers and bike riders I was used to seeing before the stay-at-home orders were issued. I find this a bit curious, but maybe it's because some people are going back to work now instead of working from home. 

Reading/Watching/Listening to:

I'm about 90 pages into I, John Kennedy Toole now and I'm still not sure what to think of it. The book is supposed to be published tomorrow, so I haven't seen any reviews of it yet and don't know how others are reacting to it. It's a novel written in third person about the author of A Confederacy of Dunces, a man who killed himself before that Pulitzer Prize novel was ever published. It reads more like a biography than a novel, at least so far, and I'm afraid it will fall somewhere between untrustworthy biography and poorly presented novel. I suppose I'm disappointed because I was expecting so much from this one.

I'm about halfway through the audiobook version of My Sister, the Serial Killer and I'm still not entirely sure where this one is headed. I am, though, impressed that it's a lot more than the "serial killer thriller" that its title implies. Instead, it's as much about sibling rivalry as anything else. One sister is tall and ordinary looking, the other (the killer) is short and so beautiful that men can't keep themselves from staring at her. How long will the less attractive sister be willing to help her sister hide the bodies - especially when it appears that her doctor/employer might be her beautiful sister's next victim?

Despite already having a high stack of books on hand for reading and reviewing (and being way behind), I added two new ones at the end of last week. One of them is Run with the Wind, the second novel from 84-year-old Jim Cole, a fellow Texan I "accidentally" met in a Kroger store a few months ago. The oddity of that meeting is that Jim lives down in Victoria, about 150 miles from the store, and I live about 6 miles from it and seldom shop there. I enjoyed his first book, Never Cry Again, and I'm looking forward to this new  one - even though it will probably be sometime in June before I can get to it. 

I also added In West Mills to my stack because the library unexpectedly made it available to me as an e-book. Just yesterday, they were predicting that I would have it in approximately 4 weeks, so this one catches me by surprise. I haven't downloaded it yet, but I can only postpone the download for three days or I will lose it. This is the first real crack in my May reading schedule - that sure didn't take long. I've heard great things about this 2019 novel, so I don't want to squander the opportunity to read it now despite of the weird timing.

Netflix provided us with some good stuff last week, especially two of its own productions, a film called Marriage Story and a limited series titled Waco. The two are very different, but both of them pack strong emotional punches. Marriage Story is about the end of an almost decade-long marriage that neither party (especially the husband) really wants to see end. But circumstances dictate otherwise, so the two agree that if their marriage is to end it will be as amicable an experience for them and their young son as possible. And then the wife gets a lawyer. And then the husband gets a lawyer. And then it's no longer in their hands. The movie stars Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, and Adam Alda. It's brilliantly done. 

Waco is a six-part miniseries about Branch Davidian leader David Koresh and his followers who died in that tragic fire near Waco back in 1993 during an FBI siege of their Mount Carmel compound. 78 of the faithful still in the compound, along with Koresh, died in the devastating fire although a few did escape the flames. Almost 30 of the victims were children, and more than a dozen of those were fathered by Koresh. The series is based on two books about the event, one written by a Koresh follower who jumped through a closed window to escape the flames, and the other written by an FBI hostage negotiator who worked so hard for two months to get Koresh to surrender everyone to authorities. From what I can tell, it's historically accurate to the event.



Listening To:

I've been listening to the pioneers of bluegrass music this week, those first generation artists who helped create a brand new genre of music that is still alive and well some seventy or eighty years later (depending on where you start counting). Hazel and Alice were two of those people, working class feminists who took on the bluegrass establishment by joining together to make their own music. Theirs was one of the very first bluegrass band to be led by women instead of men. Their voices blended beautifully together, and what they left behind is simply wonderful. 

In the Kitchen:

No improvements on the grocery or shopping front, I'm afraid. In fact, parts of the state are now seeing limits on the amount of beef or chicken that shoppers can purchase on any one trip to the grocery. Meat packing plants in other parts of the country are faced with high numbers of covid-19-infected workers, and that's starting to have an impact even on a beef-producing state like Texas. I haven't personally run into that yet, but my brother in Austin tells me that his grocery store limits a customer to two packages of beef or chicken, no matter the cut. 

The Outside World:

Texas is officially open. Well, it's open if businesses can figure out how to keep everyone "socially distanced" and limit customers to 25% of their pre-virus capacity. That sounds difficult, but I'm not expecting a real rush of customers to test that capacity limit right away anyhow, so maybe it's doable. Personally, I'm going to give this gradual opening thing at least a couple of weeks to see what kind of spike in virus infections comes of it before I venture out. I'm of the opinion that it's too early to do this, so I'll leave it to all the volunteers to get out there and see what happens to them and, ultimately, to our hospitals. 

Covid-19 Journal - Week 6 Begins

I'm kind of in shock this morning as I watch the price of crude oil rapidly fall to near zero. It actually hit one penny per barrel a few seconds ago, and at this moment the price is around twenty-five cents a barrel. That is a disaster for the world economy that is going to have some longterm effects that most people don't think about. It's a great feeling to get gasoline for under a buck a gallon, I agree. But it's a killer for a country that had finally reached energy independence because now many domestic oil producers are going to disappear forever - and we will be dependent on the Saudis once again for our energy. 

(Before I finished this post, the price of oil had gone negative for the day. That, in effect, means that some producers are willing to pay you roughly $35 a barrel just to haul the stuff away.)

Virus Stats from Johns Hopkins:

In the last week,

Worldwide cases increased from 1,846,963 to 2,440,876,
United States cases increased from 555,398 to 766,212, and
Texas cases went from 13,741 with 286 deaths to 19,512 with 504 deaths.

Outside:

We were on the very edge of the storms that clobbered the Southeast yesterday, so we really didn't get any of the high winds or much of the heavy rain. It did rain pretty much all day long, but it really only came down very hard three or four times all day. And today is one of the most beautiful days of the year with bright sunshine, cool temps, and very little wind. 

Reading/Watching/Listening to:

This is the only recently published e-book I was able to get from my library last week, and I'm about 75% of the way through it this morning. The Other Wes Moore was written when its author learned there was another man by the same name in his city who is living a life 180 degrees from the one the author has known. The author is a Rhodes Scholar, a veteran, a businessman, and a White House Fellow. The other Wes Moore is serving a life sentence in prison for his part in a jewelry store robbery during which a policeman/security guard was shot and killed.  Both men are black. 

I was pleasantly surprised that I was able also to snag an e-book loan from my library of Louise Penny's 2010 Armand Gamache novella The Hangman. It appears to be 100 pages long, and I'm wondering how it chronologically fits into the Gamache timeline, or if that even matters. Penny also published Bury Your Dead, the sixth novel in the Gamache series, that year, so I wonder if the novella started life as an intended-novel that she quit early on, or if it was always planned as a novella. I'll read this one as soon as I finish The Other Wes Moore because the due-date clock is ticking on it. 

I enjoyed several good movies and documentaries last week, but  honestly, with such an abundance of choice these days it would probably be more surprising if I hadn't. First Man (2018) is a biopic of Neil Armstrong that focuses on America's quest to beat the Russians to the moon. I had not realized that Armstrong had some emotional problems that he had to battle throughout his life, problems serious enough that they sometimes had the NASA decision-makers wondering if he was the best choice for various missions. The movie stars Ryan Gosling.

The Tomorrow Man (2019), starring John Lithgow and Blythe Danner, is a strange little movie about a "survivalist" who is preparing for apocalyptic times by storing food and gear in a secret room of his house. Because he is divorced and lonely, when he spots the Blythe Danner character he thinks he's found his soulmate after he observes her buying in large quantities just the way he does. Little does he know that she is just a hoarder. The last minute of this one is especially strange - never saw The Tomorrow Man going where it ended up.

Watching Drunks (1996) is a lot like sitting in on one of the AA meetings that take place all over the world every day. It is one heck of a reality check, but not nearly as depressing a movie as you might think it would be. The best part of this one for me was watching the actors, most of whom got so deeply into their roles that it was easy to forget they weren't a bunch of actual alcoholics and addicts. As you can see from the attached image, the cast of this one is pretty remarkable.

Listening To:

I got part of my music-fix last week from watching a couple of documentaries that were truly wonderful. First, I finished up Ken Burns's eight-part documentary series called Country Music. Burns had the good sense to end the documentary in the late 1980s because, sometime in the early nineties, real country music was destroyed by the likes of Shania Twain and Garth Brooks, and it never really recovered from their influence. I also watched Ron Howard's documentary on The Beatles called The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years. Even to this day, I listen to The Beatles more than to anyone else, so this one was a real treat for me last night. Ron Howard did a great job of putting all the material together. 

I also broke out a few of my older compilation albums, the kind where a dozen or so different artists contribute a song each based on a unifying theme or one core singer they all duet with. I had forgotten how good some of those albums are. But what I enjoyed most from my collection last week was rediscovering the amazing voice of Patty Loveless (a cousin of Loretta Lynn, by the way). Patty can sing just about any kind of music but I am particularly fond of her two or three bluegrass/mountain music albums. If you are a grasser, I very much recommend the album pictured.

In the Kitchen:

Life goes on. We are still finding pretty much what we need from the grocery stores every week, but it requires me to go to two or three of them every Friday morning to make that happen. I'm a little surprised that there are still large gaps on the shelves of the three grocery stores I shop in my north Houston suburb - and how the outages are so different from store to store. What one chain has been out of for weeks, another has in semi-abundance, and vice versa. I would definitely prefer not having to make three stops every week, tripling my exposure, but I don't expect that to change soon. 

The Outside World:

Texas is starting to open up just a little bit this week. The barriers to all the State Parks have been lifted, and the parks are open to those who wear masks and maintain the required spacing from each other. I doubt that will have much of an impact on the economy, however, since access to state parks is, I think, free. Maybe some folks will at least burn a little gasoline getting to the parks.

The governor has also said it's now OK for small businesses of all types to offer curbside service, something that might help the economy a bit, maybe even saving a few jobs that were on the brink of being lost in the next few days.

I wonder, though, even when things are more generally opened for leisure, shopping, exercise, etc. how soon people like me are going to feel comfortable going out in crowds of any size again. When will I feel comfortable  shopping without a mask, maybe even gloves? Will I return to major sporting events at all this year, or even next year? 

Will the "old normal" ever be normal again?

Covid-19 Journal - Week 5 Begins

Thanks to what Diane is doing over on Bibliophile by the Sea, I've come to realize that our blogs are a useful tool to keep track of how we coped with this period of isolation, something that we can look back on a few years down the road for a reminder or two of what it was like. So, using Diane's basic format, I plan to start off each new week with a summary of what life is like for me in my Houston suburb. 

Virus Stats from Johns Hopkins:

In the last week,

Worldwide cases increased from 1,272,115 to 1,846,963,
United States cases increased from 337,274 to 555,398, and
Texas cases went from 7,231 with 138 deaths to 13,741 with 286 deaths.

Outside:

I was surprised this morning to find that a mini cold front came through the area sometime during the night. It's almost noon as I write this, and the temperature is only 57 degrees. That's a huge drop from the 90 degrees we reached on Saturday. According to the weather app, we got down to 51 early this morning and the high will be 66. I see that we can expect lows of around 48 degrees the next two mornings - and that just seems weird.

The painters showed up early this morning to prepare the outside of the house for a fresh coat of paint, and it was a bit of a jolt to walk out into this sunny and windy surprise of a morning. It most certainly woke me up. 

Reading/Watching/Listening to:

I'm reading about 60% of the number of pages per day that I was reading before all this started, and part of the reason for the drop is that I'm watching more movies and listening to a whole lot more music than I was before. I've even gone back to just reading one book at a time, something I haven't done for years.

I'm about 25% of the way through Simon the Fiddler by Paulette Jiles, a really good piece of historical fiction set in Texas just after the conclusion of the Civil War. Jiles is a wonderful writer and I'm counting on her to help me break my reading slump. Next up for me is The Case of the Negligent Nymph, a throwback read, something I probably read decades ago when I was really into Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason books. It will be interesting to see if the Gardner books pass the test of time. The Jiles book is to be released tomorrow (April 14), and the Gardner book is from 1950.

I've been searching for "literary" movies a lot lately, and I managed to find a few good ones last week with the help of Epix (we are getting a free preview right now that ends on 4/16), Kanopy, Showtime (recorded from a free preview weekend), and Netflix. A Brilliant Young Mind is a British movie about an autistic child who proves to be a mathematical genius but is suffering emotional problems because of the tragic loss of his father in an automobile accident.

The other three movies are all based on books, two of which I read a few years ago.  Sarah's Key was a huge book for Tatiana de Rosnay back in 2007, and it was followed by a movie version in 2010 that does a good job of representing the novel. The concentration camp scenes are sometimes difficult to watch, but in a way, this is a beautiful movie. The Virgin Suicides is based on the 1993 debut novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, an author who writes some really unusual books. The 1999 movie version seems a little dated but that's not a huge

problem because the movie is set in the 1970s. The Best of Enemies is based on Osha Gray Davidson's 2006 book about a racial confrontation in Durham, North Carolina, over school segregation. Hard as this one may be to believe, it is based on a true story - with video of the actual people involved shown as part of the closing credits to prove it. 

Listening To:

I've listened to the occasional bookish podcast during all of this, but it's also been great fun to revisit some of the music I haven't listened to in way too long. I've been spending time with lots of country classics, including music from George Jones, George Strait, Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam, and Johnny Cash. Roots music. And for me, just about perfect for the times.

In the Kitchen:

Life goes on. The biggest difference in our lives regarding meals is that I'm cooking more of them outside on the grill than before. Part of that is a function of the better weather we've been having, but we're also finding the grilled meals to be a nice change from the kitchen-cooked ones. It's still hit and miss at the local groceries, but I'm finding about 90% of what we're out of when I make my weekly scavenger hunt to refill the pantry and freezers. It's slowly getting better, however, even though I'm still finding it difficult to find our preferred brands of peanut butter, flour, corn meal, etc. - and some cuts of meat seem to have completely disappeared. 

The Outside World:

No matter that we are all trying to keep our heads down right now in hopes that we are helping the situation, the outside world keeps intruding. We discovered a plumbing problem late Friday night that had to be taken care of on Saturday morning, meaning that a masked plumber spent a couple of hours with us. And today, the painter we contracted with prior to the shutdown began work on the outside of the house - with minimal contact to all. Last week, I also had to pick up the license plates for the car I bought in early March, meaning a trip to the dealer where I had to wait for 15 minutes for someone to figure out where they put them. 

The best laid plans...

Feeling Mortal

I have admired Kris Kristofferson's songwriting as long as I can remember. Kris is one of those bigger than life people who always strike me as living life pretty near the edge, and frankly, I never expected him to be around as long as he has. But as a fan, I am ever so thankful that the man has lived a long, productive life. 

This song, "Feeling Mortal," from about seven years ago is one of my favorite Kris Kristofferson songs ever. If Kris was feeling mortal in 2012, I can only imagine how he must be feeling right now (Kris is now 83 years old). 

And tonight, for obvious reasons, the song seems to fit perfectly the mood a lot of us are in.

The Killer Bs - Bluegrass, Books, and Baseball!

I had every intention of driving to Austin this weekend to attend the 2019 Texas Book Festival. Then I started looking into the various sessions and came to the realization that everyone I most wanted to see required a "Friends" pass costing something like $100 - a ploy I find both distasteful and annoying. And then I started looking into the remaining sessions and found way too many of them featuring authors pushing a book with a political agenda (and this is Austin we are talking about, so I'll let you figure out which political agenda that is all by yourself...it's easy). Even some reporters from The New York Times are there with a session of their own about how the country has gone to hell and it's all my fault for not voting for Hillary in 2016. It just didn't look worth the 300-mile roundtrip and two nights in a hotel at the inflated Festival weekend rates to come away from the experience in a worse mood than I arrived with, so I opted to stay closer to home.

Just ten miles up the road is a little community called Tomball, and on the last Saturday of every October the town presents a little bluegrass music festival that I always enjoy. Since my video camera batteries were all charged up and I had the cameras packed in the trunk of my car anyway, I decided to make this a music weekend rather than a book one.

Here's a little taste of the great music (the bluegrass-uninitiated will have to bear with me on this one) that I enjoyed today:

Paul Williams Proves He Still Has It

Just time to take quick advantage of hotel wifi access (while it lasts) to post one of my favorite performances from last night's MACC 2016 sets from up here in Columbus, Ohio.

This is Paul Williams, a man who has been in the bluegrass music business for a long time and who had the good fortune to be a key member of some of the most influential bluegrass bands in bluegrass history.  He is, of course, a tremendous mandolin picker, but for me it's always been about that great high tenor voice of his. This is Paul proving that at 81 years of age his voice is as strong as it has ever been. 

This is his version of the post-World-War-II country classic, "Fraulein."  

Musicians Against Childhood Cancer: Bluegrass Heaven

I've spent the past two days outdoors at a bluegrass festival near Columbus, Ohio, that, in fact, runs for an additional two days. Throw in the four days it took me to drive up to Columbus from Houston, and you can see why I've been forced to neglect Book Chase for the last week.  And to top things off, wifi access is spotty, \ - at best - at this hotel. (It is so unreliable, that as I type this, I have no idea whether or not I will be able to actually post it.)

Anyway, I wanted to give you guys a taste of what I've been up to this week.  This festival is called MACC, Musicians Against Childhood Cancer, and all the proceeds go to St. Jude's hospital.  All the artists donate their time - and hope to peddle enough CDs and tee-shirts to maybe, just maybe, cover the cost of the gasoline it took to get them to Columbus.

This video is from last night's show-closing band, Larry Sparks & The Lonesome Ramblers.  Larry is a recent inductee to the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, and even though his career now spans more than 50 years, he still looks and sounds great.  Take a look:

On the Road Again Again

This has been a day of physical therapy on my still-healing hip followed by a whole lot of packing for my annual summer road trip. This year I'm heading back up to Columbus, Ohio - and from Houston, that's quite a drive - so it will be a real test for my hip and my overall endurance.  And because I'm leaving one day earlier than I had planned to leave, everything has been in kind of a rush.  Now I'm just hoping that I don't forget to pack something.

I've taken a break to look at some of the video I shot in 2014, the last time I attended MACC (Musicians Against Childhood Cancer) and it's really getting me in the mood for MACC 2016.  I'm going to share one of those videos here because I forgot I had it, and the featured artist, James King, is one we lost very recently.  James was always one of my favorite voices of bluegrass and his soulful delivery was always memorable.



I'll be driving at a rather leisurely pace for the next three or four days, and because I stay off interstate highways whenever possible, it's likely to take me every bit of that time to make it to Columbus.

Anyway, more to come. I'm still going to be reading and hopefully doing a review or two in the next two weeks.  But time will tell.  I'm more likely to post about the trip than anything else.  So please hang in there with me until I get home.

The Grand Tour: The Life and Music of George Jones

Country singer George Jones lived such a colorful and public life that several biographies about him have been written in the past few years.  I have three of those on my own bookshelves: George Jones: The Saga of an American Singer (Bob Allen - 1984), Ragged but Right: The Life & Times of George Jones (Dolly Carlisle – 1984), and George Jones: I Lived to Tell It All (George Jones & Tom Carter – 1996).   Interestingly, both the first two books were published about the time that George returned to his roots and built Jones Country in tiny Colmesneil, Texas (population 600).   But Jones continued to add to his legend after 1984, of course, and although Tom Carter’s book covers the years up to 1996 when it was published, those years are somewhat filtered through the eyes of Carter’s co-author, George Jones himself.

Now, a full three years after Jones’s death, his legacy has become more settled and his whole story can be told in one volume – and that is exactly what Rich Keinzle has done in The Grand Tour: The Life and Music of George Jones.  From the very beginning of his career, country music fans were intrigued by the craziness that always seemed to follow Jones around the country as he performed.  By the end of that career, George Jones was a respected vocalist (still with a reputation for craziness) who had managed to grab the attention of music lovers around the world.  It was never easy for the shy, insecure performer that Jones was throughout his lifetime, but, public warts and all, he was just too good to ignore.

Rich Keinzle has done his George Jones homework, and it shows.  The Grand Tour recounts everything from the life of poverty into which Jones was born, through his battle with drug and alcohol addictions that almost killed him, and on to his rescue by Nancy Sepulvado, the Shreveport woman, who saw him through the worst of his addictions and saved both his life and his career.  It is impossible to recount the life of George Jones without spending a great number of pages on the singer’s problems and demons – and Keinzle does that.  But the high points of Jones’s life, including the best (and worst) of his recordings are also recounted in great detail. 

I appreciate The Grand Tour – and I am no casual George fan.  George Jones and his music have been in my life for more than five decades.  I grew up near the city of Beaumont, Texas, which Jones called home for a number of years.  My wife’s grandparents knew the Jones family in Saratoga, Texas, and her grandmother occasionally had George over to the house when he was a boy.  Too, I personally witnessed two of the milestone events cited by the author in The Grand Tour: the one and only country music show ever presented at Jones’s Rhythm Ranch in Vidor, Texas, and his later induction into the Beaumont Walk of Fame, a site that honors the most famous citizens born in the county surrounding that city.  And all that said, Rich Keinzle still told me a thing or two about George Jones I never knew; it’s that kind of book – maybe a little bit crude and rough around the edges…but then so was George.

Comin' Right at Ya

One of the presentations I most looked forward to at the 2015 Texas Book Festival was the one featuring Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel.  Even though Ray and his co-author David Menconi were allotted the very last time slot on the second day of the festival and I still had a three-hour drive ahead of me, I was determined to make that session.  Good decision.

I’ve been a fan of Ray’s music since the early eighties and especially appreciate his efforts to keep Western Swing music alive.  Not only has Asleep at the Wheel recorded Western Swing albums of its own, Ray has produced three very fine Bob Wills tribute albums, and recorded a successful swing-oriented album, “Willie and the Wheel” with the one and only Willie Nelson.  But that’s the public Ray Benson everyone knows.  And I wondered if he would be anything like that public persona when seated on a small stage to discuss his new autobiography, Comin’ Right at Ya?  Well as it turns out, I had nothing to worry about.

Comin’ Right at Ya is the life story of Ray Benson Seifert, one of four children born into a Jewish Philadelphia family, a guy whose inventor father founded the Seifert Machinery Company and whose schoolteacher mother earned a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.  Ray Seifert grew up and became a self-described “Jewish Yankee Hippie” – and then his love of roots music led him to invent the “character” that the world now knows as Ray Benson, Texas country music star.

It took a while for Ray to make his way to Austin, Texas but thanks largely to Willie Nelson’s invitation he finally got here.  And he brought Asleep at the Wheel with him.  And the rest is history.  The Jewish Yankee hippie is now one of the state’s favorite sons, even to having been named “Texan of the Year” in 2011 by the Texas legislature. 

Ray Benson Signing at 2015 Texas Book Festival

A whole lot happened to Ray and the band before he achieved that lofty status, of course, and Ray tells it all - well, most of it because he admits that his publisher lightly censored some of his stories.  But even with the publisher looking over his shoulder, Ray shares stories about Willie, Dolly, Garth Brooks, Vince Gill, George Strait, Lyle Lovett, a lot of other friends he’s made in the business, and a few folks he doesn’t think too highly of.  Ray is as bluntly honest about his business and personal failures as he is about his successes, and his is a career which has seen many of both, including the nine Grammies Ray and the band have earned along the way.

Comin’ Right at Ya is for the fans, especially those who appreciate the heck out of Ray’s music but are only vaguely aware of his roots and how he has so successfully reinvented himself.  He’s Texas’s number one “Jewish Yankee Hippie” now, and the state is proud to claim him as one of its own.