Cover to Cover

In The Ballad of Blind Tom, Australian author Deirdre O’ Connell describes her subject as “The most famous black performer of the Civil War generation.” Was he a naive genius or a freak? Was he a gifted, original American composer or a mere mimic of the reigning piano styles of the day? O’Connell wades through 50 years of press clips and testimony searching for the answer to the question, “Who was Blind Tom?”

He was born a slave in Columbus, Georgia. Despite his autistic condition, he made his guardians piles of money, perhaps, by today’s standard, millions of dollars, of which he and his family saw almost none. It would be story of overpowering sadness had Blind Tom not been so full of life. He took great delight in playing piano up to 12 hours a day, never regarding it as work even in the midst of a staggering itinerary. (In 1999, the pianist John Davis recorded a selection of his songs, John Davis Plays Blind Tom.)

Full of wit and wild anecdote, The Ballad of Blind Tom has an astonishing cast of characters. It is Deirdre O’Connell’s first book, and she spent a good deal of time in Georgia conducting research. She has also made documentaries for the Jimi Hendrix Estate and the United Nations Environment Program and has worked in news at SBS Australia.

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Byron Pitts has welcomed the challenge of covering a multitude of stories in his television journalism career – everything from the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq War, and just this month the tragedy of the Haiti earthquake.

But overcoming challenges in his personal life may be his greatest achievement. Pitts grew-up with a debilitating stutter and kept an embarrassing secret for years –he was functionally illiterate. A recipe for failure was heightened by his parents’ separation when he was 12.

But in his book Step Out On Nothing, Pitts details how a few key people took the chance and the time to make a positive difference in his life.

His push through the obstacles has earned him a successful journalism career. After a 15-year run in local television which included a stop in Atlanta, he joined CBS News in 1998. Pitts serves as a chief national correspondent for the network, and is a contributing correspondent for 60 Minutes. He’s won a national Emmy Award, and six regional Emmys.

The Baltimore-native was in Atlanta recently to chat with GPB’s Edgar Treiguts.

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Doug Crandell is an award-winning author of fiction and memoir, who ventures into the genre of True Crime with his latest book, Fear Came to Town, the disturbing true story of the Santa Claus, Georgia, Murders. Years ago, Danny and Kim Daniels had taken in Jerry Scott Heidler through foster care. Kim had grown up within the foster care system herself, and she sympathized with the troubled boy. But it soon became clear that Heidler’s problems were far more disturbing than they had thought – and they cut him from their lives. One terrible night in December 1997, Heidler broke into the home of his former foster family and with methodical madness short Danny and Kim, teenage Jessica, and eight-year-old Bryant. He then kidnapped and brutalized three surviving children, abandoning hem on a remote dirt road in the dead of winter. Man Martin interviews Doug Crandell about his process of researching and writing this chilling true story and the remorseless sociopath who destroyed the family that tried to rescue him.

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Taylor Branch is the award-winning author of the great historical trilogy, America in the King Years, but his latest book is an unusual combination of history, biography, and political memoir about the nation’s 42nd president.

The Clinton Tapes rests upon a secret project, initiated by Clinton, to preserve for future historians an unfiltered record of presidential experience. During his eight years in office, between 1993 and 2001, Clinton answered questions and told stories in the White House, usually late at night. His friend Taylor Branch recorded seventy-nine of these dialogues to compile a trove of raw information about a presidency as it happened. Clinton drew upon the diary transcripts for his memoir in 2004 and remains in possession of the tapes.

Branch recorded his own detailed recollections immediately after each session, covering not only the subjects discussed but also the look and feel of each evening with the president. Branch’s firsthand narrative is confessional, unsparing, and personal. The author admits straying at times from his primary role — to collect raw material for future historians — because his discussions with Clinton were unpredictable and intense.

The Clinton Tapes highlights major events of Clinton’s two terms, including wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, the failure of health care reform, peace initiatives on three continents, the anti-deficit crusade, and titanic political struggles from Whitewater to American history’s second presidential impeachment trial. Along the way, Clinton delivers colorful portraits of countless political figures and world leaders from Newt Gingrinch to Nelson Mandela to Pope John Paul II.

At the end of the interview, I asked Branch if having been given this extraordinary and unprecendented access to a sitting president, he found himself with more or less respect for President Clinton. Did he say to himself, “how did this guy get this job?” Did familiarity breed contempt? Or just the opposite? Tune in to hear his answer.

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Set in New Orleans in the years after the Civil War, A SEPARATE COUNTRY is a novel based on the incredible life of John Bell Hood, arguably one of the most controversial generals of the Confederate Army–and one of its most tragic figures. Robert E. Lee promoted him to major general after the Battle of Antietam. But the Civil War would mark him forever. At Gettysburg, he lost the use of his left arm. At the Battle of Chickamauga, his right leg was amputated. Starting fresh after the war, he married Anna Marie Hennen and fathered 11 children with her, including three sets of twins. But fate had other plans. Crippled by his war wounds and defeat, ravaged by financial misfortune, Hood had one last foe to battle: Yellow Fever.

A SEPARATE COUNTRY is the heartrending story of a decent and good man who struggled with his inability to admit his failures–and the story of those who taught him to love, and to be loved, and transformed him.

The book’s author, Robert Hicks, came to fiction after a successful career in music publishing. His primary interest was to bring greater attention to his hometown of Franklin, TN, the scene of the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. The result was the bestselling THE WIDOW OF THE SOUTH. Hood’s defeat at Franklin, and his controversial post-war reputation, made him an irresistible subject for Hicks’ follow-up. As did Hood’s ultimate home of New Orleans, a city with which Hicks has a long history and deep affection.

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Considering she’s already published three novels, it might surprise you to hear that Dara Horn is in her (very) early thirties. Perhaps even more surprising is that she has also earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Add to that she’s raising three children, and well, you’ll just have to take my word that she’s a remarkable woman.

I can also attest that at least the latest of those three novels is a remarkable book. You might recognize All Other Nights from many of the ubiquitous year-end “Best Of…” lists. It certainly deserves to be there. The story follows Jacob Rappaport, a Union spy, through his travails from New Orleans to Richmond during the Civil War. Along the way he meets a whittling girl, a fetching pickpocket, a bloodthirsty Southern Belle and a child that speaks in palindromes…and that’s just in one family.

Some characters are actual historical figures. Perhaps the most enthralling of these is Judah Benjamin, Secretary of the State for the Confederacy. Horn brought a Confederate two-dollar bill to the interview, which features Benjamin’s profile, and we talked about Benjamin’s important but precarious place in the ill-fated Confederate nation. He was Jewish, and partly because of this, he drew the ire of both Northerners and Southerners. Of course, the idea of a man who was very much a minority holding high office in the CSA is rife for all sorts of literary exploration involving allegiance, identity and motivation. Horn does a remarkable job with this exploration by subsuming the discourse into a very captivating story line involving all sorts of espionage and intrigue.

Dara Horn’s work at Harvard focused on Hebrew and Yiddish literature, so she brings a wealth of understanding to the complexity of this subject. It’s a complexity germane to Southern literature and culture, I think, because it implores us to examine, through storytelling, who we are and why our history is important to us. And most of all, it’s a wonderful read. I hope you’ll tune in. Remember, we’re on at 8 PM in most parts of the state, 6PM on WUGA in Athens.

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Michael Gray’s Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell (Chicago Review Press) is an exhaustive reconstruction of McTell’s life and times.  It will surely stand as the definitive work on the man Michael Gray calls “the greatest blues singer Georgia has ever produced” and “The finest 12-string guitarist of his generation, barnone.”

Beginning in the 1990s, Gray made several trips to Georgia searching for information about McTell.  His interest endured years of frustration.  (He was even rousted by security officials while trying to photograph the Milledgeville state hospital where McTell died.) Nonetheless, he finally assembled a family tree which includes over 100 of McTell’s relatives, beginning with the singer’s white great-grandfather who fought in the Civil War under Robert E. Lee. 

Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes is the portrait of a self-sufficient man who was blind from birth, a gifted black musician who moved freely about the American South during the mean years of segregation.  When he died in Atlanta at the age of 56, McTell was just short of the early 1960s folk revival, which most certainly would have embraced him as a major figure.  Despite this historical mischance, recognition for McTell would begin to grow within a months of his death.  In 1983, Bob Dylan stepped forward to say, “Nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.” McTell’s “Statesboro Blues” has become universally known as a Southern Rock anthem as played by the Allman Brothers.  McTell was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in 1990.

Michael Gray writes for the UK Guardian and many other publications.  He’s the author of several books, including The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia and The Elvis Atlas: A Journey through Elvis Presley’s America.

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The novel, The Motel of the Stars is set in Kentucky and North Carolina. It takes place on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the Harmonic Convergence, a new age event where the planets align signaling more peaceful times ahead. The book tells the story of Jason Sanderson, a foreclosure expert working in the eastern part of Kentucky. He travels to a burned down motel in Kentucky to begin foreclosure proceedings. By chance he meets his son’s former girlfriend, Lory Llewellyn. The two of them are still dealing with the loss of Jason’s son and Lory’s boyfriend, Sam who died ten years earlier while in the military. The book combines a sometimes satirical look at New Age philosophy with the very powerful emotion of grief and loss. Author Karen McElmurray is on sabbatical from her job as a professor at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville. Her other books are, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, which won the Thomas and Lillie D. Chafin Award for Appalachian writing in 2001, and Surrendered Child: A Birth Mothers Journey. The book is a moving memoir of McElmurray and her decision to place her son up for adoption.

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The idea of Southern literature rankles some writers. There are those who rather would disassociate with the region, saying there’s more to their writing that the place they were born. Other writers embrace a Southern identity to the point of caricature. And just what defines Southern literature, anyway? Writer, subject or both?

This question of Southern literature is frequently talked about in terms of fiction, but Southern poetry is rarely discussed. In this conversation for Cover to Cover, GPB’s weekly program about books, Orlando Montoya talks with the editor of a new anthology chronicling 50 years of Southern Poetry Review.

James Smith, the editor of “Don’t Leave Hungry” and the associate editor for the venerable journal, makes the case for a journal that has staunchly stuck to a founding — and some might say, provocative — vision of Southern poetry. Namely, it doesn’t always have to be about the South.

Smith reads three poems, including one by Billy Collins, one of the best-known Southern poets. He also talks about the journal’s founder, Guy Owen, and what made him tick. And he explains how the journal has — and hasn’t — changed over the years. Smith also teaches at Armstrong Atlantic State University. “Don’t Leave Hungry: 50 Years of Southern Poetry Review” is published by the University of Arkansas Press.

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James Iredell’s Prose. Poems. A Novel. is a series of pieces that are impossible to classify – poetry? prose? vignette? – that when brought together along with haunting illustrations by the author and Christy Call create a loosely-woven narrative of a journey from the West Coast to the East, a journey – among other things – out of self-destruction. Tom Franklin (Hell at the Breech and Smonk) writes of Iredell’s book, “Absorbing, fascinating, strange in the best way. This “novel” reinvents the novel, the short-short story and the prose poem, at the same time. Iredell’s spiritual uncle, Richard Brautigan, is happy in heaven, drinking with Raymond Carver, who’s happy too. A delightful book.” This week on Cover to Cover Man Martin and James Iredell discuss James’ book, writing, life in California, Nevada, and Atlanta, talking cockroaches, and other topics you can’t afford to miss.

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