He could not read, but he asked his wife, Ava, to read him the paper every day so he would not be ignorant. He was a man who took giant steps in rundown boots, a true hero whom history would otherwise have beem overlooked.In the decade of the Great Depression, Charlie moved his family twenty-one times, keeping seven children one step ahead of the poverty and starvation that threatened them from every side. He worked at the steel mill when the steel was rolling, or for a side of bacon or a bushel of peaches when it wasn’t. He paid the doctor who delivered his fourth daughter, Margaret -- Bragg’s mother -- with a jar of whiskey. He understood the finer points of the law as it applied to poor people and drinking men; he was a banjo player and a buck dancer who worked off fines when life got a little sideways, and he sang when he was drunk, where other men fought or cussed. He had a talent for living.His children revered him. When he died, cars lined the blacktop for more than a mile.Rick Bragg has built a soaring monument to the grandfather he never knew -- a father who stood by his family in hard times and left a backwoods legend behind -- in a book that blazes with his love for his family, and for a particular stretch of dirt road along the Alabama-Georgia border. A powerfully intimate piece of American history as it was experienced by the working people of the Deep South, a glorious record of a life of character, tenacity and indomitable joy and an unforgettable tribute to a vanishing culture, Ava’s Man is Rick Bragg at his stunning best.

    But a tragedy that touches all of Atlanta sends her reeling in grief. When the family maid challenges her to reach out to the less fortunate as a way to ease her own pain, Mary Swan meets Carl-and everything changes. For although Carl is her opposite in nearly every way, he has something her privileged life could not give her. And when she seeks his help to uncover a mystery, she learns far more than she ever could have imagined.

    Two wonderfully funny books in one edition.

    Her goal was modest: to make a living by offering comfortable lodging and southern home cooking served family style in the downstairs dining room. Mrs. Wilkes' reputation was strong and business was brisk from the beginning, but it was the coverage in Esquire and the New York Times, and even a profile on David Brinkley's evening news that brought southern food lovers from all over the world to her doorstep. Sema is now 94 years old, and four generations of Wilkes help her keep the tables laden with platters of her legendary fried chicken, pork ribs, and biscuits, while friends and strangers pass bowls brimming with her sublime butterbeans, collard greens, mashed sweet potatoes, and banana pudding. The line snakes out the front door and down the street, where along with the locals and visitors, it's not uncommon to find Jimmy Carter or Roy Junior Blount, among other familiar faces, waiting for their turn at Mrs. Wilkes' table. With over 300 recipes and culinary historian John T. Edge's colorful telling of Mrs. Wilkes' contribution to Savannah and southern cuisine, the rich volume is a tribute to a way of cooking-and eating-that must not be forgotten.

    At first, unsure of Free Creek, he slowly learns to lean on its residents as family. There’s Aunt Easter, who is always filled with a sense of foreboding, bound to her faith above all; quiltmaking Uncle Paul; untamable Evangeline; and Alma, the fiddler whose song wends it way into Clay’s heart. Together, they help Clay fashion a quilt of a life from what treasured pieces surround him. . . .

    Her characters, already marginalized economically and socially, confront what many perceive as an invading outside culture, enduring and at times transcending the loss of their "place," both literally and figuratively. Their stories undermine the assumption that just because people don't articulate what happens inside them, nothing much is happening at all.

    Milking the Moon, already a Washington Post bestseller in hardcover, is destined to become a Southern classic.

    In 1969, in the wake of the violence surrounding the civil rights movement, Wilkie left the South and vowed never to live there again. But after traveling the world as a reporter, he returned in 1993, drawn by a deep-rooted affinity with the territory of his youth. Here, he endeavors to make sense of the enormous changes that have convulsed the South for more than four decades. Through vivid recollections of landmark events, Dixie becomes both a striking eyewitness account of history and an unconventional tale of redemption full of beauty, humor, and pathos.

    In the grip of a midlife meltdown, Pick returns with his wife and son to a small North Carolina town, where he confronts the ghosts of his past in the form of the family matriarch and his boyhood nemesis, Mama Lucy. What follows is an extraordinary story within a story, as Pick uncovers startling truths about himself and about the role his grandmother played in the tragic General Textile Strike Of 1934A novel about family, love, and forgiveness, The Bridge explores how much we ever really know about others, and most important, about ourselves.

    Yet the songs Hank Williams left behind-including "I Saw the Light," "Cold Cold Heart," "Your Cheatin' Heart"-transformed him into a legend whose influence is felt as strongly today as ever. But for all that Hank Williams's music seems to reveal, his fans have been given remarkably little of the man himself. Now Colin Escott and Kira Florita present a previously undiscovered wealth of private family snapshots, letters, unpublished interviews, and other ephemera-including his final lyric, found in the backseat of the car where he died. Most extraordinary, though, are the previously unseen handwritten lyrics-almost thirty songs altogether. In paperback for the first time, this is a windfall of memorabilia for his fans everywhere."An amazing slice of music Americana....This haunting volume has the jarring effect of a train wreck: You simply can't look away. Country artist Marty Stuart provides a fascinating introduction." -Nashville Scene

    The hallmarks of her style, so finely wrought in the award-winning Tongues of Flame (1986)--the fully realized characters, her deep sensitivity, a defining sense of place and time--are back in all their richness to involve and enchant the reader.All but one of the stories are set in Alabama. They deal with dramatic turning points in the lives of charcaters who happen to be southerners, many jaxtaposed between Old South sensibility and manners and New South modernity and expectations. Among these is a new widow who is not consoled by well-meaning, proselytizing Christians; a middle-aged waitress in love with the town "catch"; a bedridden belle dependent upon her black nurse; a "special" young man in a newspaper shop; a young faculty wife who attempts generosity with a lower-class neighbor; and a lawyer caught in the dilemma of race issues. Through their diverse voices, Brown proves herself a graceful and gifted storyteller who writes with an authoritative pen, inventing and inhabiting the worlds of her set of characters with insight, compassion, and wit.Most of the stories in It Wasn't All Dancing have appeared previously in prominent national magazines and literary journals, including the Atlantinc Monthly, Grand Street, and Threepenny Review. This fine collection should appeal to a wide audience among writers, literature scholars, and general readers alike.Mary Ward Brown won the 1987 PEN/Hemingway Award, the 1991 Lillian Smith Award, and the 1987 Alabama Library Association Award for her first collection of short storied, Tounges of Flame. She lives in the family home in Marion, Alabama.

    From the moment a propeller blade shears off in mid-flight, destroying one of the plane's engines, the passengers and three crew members have 9 minutes and 20 seconds in which to prepare for their ordeal. You will be amazed by the way Pomerantz captured the human drama of those fateful moments, and by the remarkable personal journeys in the days and months that follow for those who walked away.

    Malone explores how the music's defining themes (home and family, religion, rambling, frolic, humor, and politics) have emerged out of the particularities of working people's day-to-day lives. He traces the many contradictory voices and messages of a music that simultaneously extols the virtues of home and the joys of rambling, the assurances of the Christian life and the ecstasies of hedonism, the strength of working-class life and the material lure of middle-class aspirations. The resulting tensions, Malone argues, are a major reason for the music's enduring appeal.

    A family saga depicting life in early 1900s North Carolina unfolds when 100-year-old matriarch Abigail Porter relates the events of her life to her great-granddaughters, starting with the tragic circumstances of her birth and including the drama of two feuding families, war, and the deadly pandemic

    This annual commute is ostensibly for the purpose of hunting squirrels, but they are seeking more, and in doing so they discover solace and legends in those wet, foggy woods above the Ohio River and in the loveable characters they discover there and in the nearby town of Persimmon Gap. The book offers a fond look back at 1960s small-town America: sweating red metal Coca-Cola coolers filled with bottled soft drinks whose caps are embedded outside the store in an asphalt apron paved with hundreds of flattened bottle caps, country stores where old timers of various shapes and sizes leaned into their stories, fresh-picked tomatoes that were still warm and tasted of the sun, and legendary baseball teams like the Undefeated Persimmon Gap Bobcats. Ellis offers lasting images and sensory paintings, all gleaned from this land where he and his father travelled, hunted, and rested.In the end, it is this simple mantra, offered first by a gravedigger and later by his dying father that settles into the boy's heart: It's important to remember, it's so important to remember.

    How apt that a refugee born in Transylvania found his home in a place where vampires roam the streets and voodoo queens live around the corner; where cemeteries are the most popular picnic spots, the ghosts of poets, prostitutes, and pirates are palpable, and in the French Quarter, no one ever sleeps. Codrescu's essays have been called "satirical gems," "subversive," "sardonic and stunning," "funny," "gonzo," "wittily poignant," and "perverse"—here is a writer who perfectly mirrors the wild, voluptuous, bohemian character of New Orleans itself. This retrospective follows him from newcomer to near native: first seduced by the lush banana trees in his backyard and the sensual aroma of coffee at the café down the block, Codrescu soon becomes a Window Gang regular at the infamous bar Molly's on Decatur, does a stint as King of Krewe de Vieux Carré at Mardi Gras, befriends artists, musicians, and eccentrics, and exposes the city’s underbelly of corruption, warning presciently about the lack of planning for floods in a city high on its own insouciance. Alas, as we all now know, Paradise is lost.New Orleans, Mon Amour is an epic love song, a clear-eyed elegy, a cultural celebration, and a thank-you note to New Orleans in its Golden Age.

    B. King, Little Milton, Elvis Presley, Bobby Rush, Junior Kimbrough, R. L. Burnside -- the list of great artists with Mississippi connections goes on and on.A trip through Mississippi blues sites is a pilgrimage every music lover ought to make at least once in a lifetime, to see the juke joints and churches, to visit the birthplaces and graves of blues greats, to walk down the dusty roads and over the levee, to eat some barbecue and greens, to sit on the bank of the Mississippi River, and to hear some down-home blues music.Blues Traveling is the first and only guidebook to Mississippi's musical places and blues history. With photographs, maps, easy-to-follow directions, and an informative, entertaining text, this book will lead you in and out of Clarksdale, Greenwood, Helena (Arkansas), Rolling Fork, Jackson, Natchez, Bentonia, Rosedale, Itta Bena, and dozens of other locales that generations of blues musicians have lived in, traveled through, and sung about. Stories, legends, and lyrics are woven into the text so that each backroad and barroom comes alive.Touring Mississippi with Blues Traveling is like having a knowledgeable and entertaining guide at your side.Even people with no immediate plans to visit Mississippi will enjoy reading the book for its photos, descriptions, and lore that will broaden their understanding and enhance their appreciation of the blues.

    The centerpiece of this collection offers a moving description of life on his son's cattle farm, capturing Brown's deep-seated attachment to his family and to the land. In other pieces, Brown takes readers inside the writing cabin he built, chronicles his attempt to outsmart a wily coyote intent on killing the farm's baby goats, and reveals his reactions to being constantly compared to William Faulkner, a writer inspired by the same geography. Threaded through each piece are warm reflections on the Southern musicians and authors who influenced his writings. At once entertaining and insightful, "Billy Ray's Farm" brilliantly illuminates how a great writer responds, personally and artistically, to the patch of land he lives on, providing a wonderful look into the mysterious sources of a writer's motivation.

    Filled with warmth and humor, meaning and tender-ness, this ia an unforgettable collection of tales that will make you smile, encourage you and help you to remember that sometimes, truth is best discovered in a good story.

    It features selections by such insurgent American writers as Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ishmael Reed, and Patricia J. Williams, representing a diverse range of political and personal points of view that illuminate The Nation's steadfast commitment to racial justice, each infused with the moral passion and urgency that the subject demands. The writers in this anthology have addressed these questions not to embitter but to provoke, educate, arouse, and inspire. James Baldwin once wrote that "the story of the Negro in America is the story of America.... It is not a very pretty story." Baldwin and others in this collection shed light on the ugliness of American racism to certify that it is intolerable, that America can—must—do better. "The Nation's editors ... have provided space for those persistent and ... often lonely voices inveighing against the evils of racial injustice."—Derrick Bell

    In Fisk’s Landing, Mississippi, at the dawn of the Korean War, sixteen-year-old Swayze Barksdale is suddenly called to an unexpected duty - playing "Taps" at the gravesides of the town’s young casualties sent home from the front. Gradually, Swayze begins to pace his life around these all too frequent funerals, where his horn sounds the tragic note of the times. At turns funny, at turns poignant, TAPS abounds with colorful characters and yet "sings and sighs . . . with a kind of minor key wistfulness" (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette) as Swayze learns what it means to be a patriot, a son, a lover, a friend, a man.

    Against a dramatic mountainous backdrop, these pioneers carved out farms and small communities in perilous isolation and created an American experience vastly different from that of the plantation-style society established along Georgia's coast. Battling Creek and Cherokee warriors, government intervention, natural disasters, and a landscape not easily tamed, year after year, these men and women of Northeast Georgia stamped their self-reliance, their perseverance, and their industriousness upon generations to follow and upon the very geography they called home.In Northeast Georgia: A History, readers travel across several centuries of change, from the early American Indian tribes that once made this territory their hunting grounds to the present day, a time of unprecedented growth and expansion in both industry and population. Truly a world unto itself, Northeast Georgia has served as a haven and destination for all classes over the past two centuries: the bold gold miners of 1829, the stalwart sustenance farmers, the social elite enjoying fresh mountain air at the many summer resorts, a multitude of businessmen seeking opportunity in railroading, cotton, lumber, and poultry farming, and bootleggers finding the landscape convenient for clandestine whiskey-making and distribution. These stories and more provide insight into understanding a people and place unique in Georgia.

    Starting life in the public service in the 1920s and serving in the US Army during World War II, he long held political ambitions which were realised with more than 48 continuous years service in the Senate.

    Yet very few realize that Andrew Goodman had been in Mississippi for one day when he was killed; Rita Schwerner, Mickey's wife, had been organizing in Mississippi for six difficult months.Organized around a rich blend of oral histories, Going South followsa group of Jewish women--come of age in the shadow of the Holocaust and deeply committed to social justice--who put their bodies and lives on the line to fight racism. Actively rejecting the post-war idyll of suburban, Jewish, middle-class life, these women were deeply influenced by Jewish notions of morality and social justice. Many thus perceived the call of the movement as positively irresistible.Representing a link between the sensibilities of the early civil rights era and contemporary efforts to move beyond the limits of identity politics, the book provides a resource for all who are interested in anti-racism, the civil rights movement, social justice, Jewish activism and radical women's traditions.