Tag: Memoir

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Blurb Books

Tom Graves’ White Boy

Memphis-based writer and publisher Tom Graves is set to publish his sixth book on Saturday, June 1st, with a booksigning to follow at Novel bookstore on Tuesday, June 4th.

The author of Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson and of Pullers, a novel about the weird world of competitive arm wrestling, has now set his sights on the art of memoir. The book will be released under the imprint of the Devault-Graves Agency (Graves’ Memphis-based publishing house, co-founded by Darrin Devault).

“Like every book I’ve ever done, this one came at me sideways,” Graves says of his new book, White Boy: A Memoir. The author had been working on a different book, when an autobiographical section expanded, seemingly of its own volition, blossoming far beyond the confines of its chapter.

“I’d been working on a cookbook,” Graves says. He is interested in soul food, specifically in learning to cook it. The only problem: “I wasn’t very good at it.”

So Graves set about trying to find a teacher willing to give him some one-on-one lessons in the great Southern art of soul food.

“I wanted somebody who was a good kitchen cook,” Graves explains. “I put this question to a reverend I know, Reverend Roger Brown, and he put me in touch with an 80-year-old lady, [Larthy Washington], who has been the church cook for him for 40-plus years. Every two weeks, we would meet at the church, and she would give me lessons.”

Graves still plans on finishing and releasing the cookbook he’s co-writing with Larthy Washington, but he decided he would first have to explore the autobiographical idea.

“Because I was working with an African-American lady and working on soul food, it had me thinking about all the different changes in my life regarding race in Memphis,” Graves explains. “I’m a lifelong Memphian; I’ve never lived anywhere else.”

As a witness to landmark events from his elementary school’s initial integration in the ’60s to the removal of the Confederate statues from city parks in 2017, Graves feels his perspective offers something valuable and relatable. So he set about expanding and editing that autobiographical chapter into a full-fledged memoir focusing on race in Memphis.

Graves lists banner moments in his memoir, times when he was forced to confront the injustices of society, and then, afterward, view the world in a different light. One such moment was a time he and his family were entertaining old family friends visiting from out of town.

“We were all picnicking at Overton Park,” Graves explains. They wanted to make a trip to the Memphis Zoo on a later day — a Thursday, which was, at the time, one of the only days that African Americans were allowed to visit the zoo. A young Graves pointed that detail out to his father, who explained that though their black neighbors were prohibited from visiting the zoo on “whites only” days, Tom and his family were not required to abide by the same rules. They could go to the zoo any day they wished. Graves was stunned: “I remember thinking, ‘Wait a minute. Something’s wrong here. That’s not fair.’”

In the memoir, Graves focuses on the multiple moments in his life when he was forced to acknowledge the injustices of racism. “[In White Boy], I talk about the day that my school was integrated,” Graves explains. “It would have been the ’64/’65 school year, and Bethel Grove integrated one black student. And what pressure must have been on that little girl … ” The author trails off for a moment before imagining the unfairness of shouldering so much pressure as a child.

Still, not all of White Boy is devoted to Graves’ childhood, and as the author ages and becomes more aware, he’s forced to confront still grimmer tableaus. And in his memoir, Graves hews close to the bone, not letting himself or his city off, nor shying away from acknowledging the gritty details when necessary. When asked how Memphis has changed, Graves is quick to answer. “It’s changed enormously,” he says of his hometown. “If you saw a fish fry or a barbecue, it was either all-black or all-white.” But, the author admits, “I think we have work to do.”

The author doesn’t intend the book to be a scholarly examination of racism in the South. White Boy is a memoir, and is intended to be read as such, which is why it ends on a personal note. “I ended [the book] with my tragic love story,” Graves says. He met his first wife in Senegal, but the marriage didn’t last long. Of course, like the rest of White Boy, that’s Graves’ story, and it’s best to let the author tell it himself.

Tom Graves will discuss and sign his new book, White Boy: A Memoir, at Novel bookstore, Tuesday, June 4th, at 6 p.m.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Former Governor Dunn Meets His Fans at Bookstar Signing

CREDIT: jb

The lines were respectably long and composed for the most part of vintage campaign colleagues, who smiled and reminisced with the author as copies of From a Standing Start, Winfield Dunn’s political memoir, got signed Wednesday night at Bookstar on Poplar by the onetime Memphis dentist and ex-Tennessee governor.

A typical purchaser was Happy Jones, the well-known Memphis political activist who these days tends to back liberal candidates but back then saw the likeable Dunn, a Republican conservative, as the state’s best hope for reform. She, well, happily stood in line with old friends like retired Cordovans Roy and Sara Jane Greenlee or Dr. Shed Caffey or Harry Wellford, who was Dunn’s campaign manager for the 1970 upset win over Democrat John Jay Hooker.

When these political comrades-in-arms, most of them fellow toilers in the building of the modern Republican Party in Shelby County, finally reached the table, they got more than a signing. Almost uniformly, they got hugged by the author.

There were more youthful book-buyers, too – many of them cadres of today’s Republican Party, like Young Republican Drew Daniel or current Shelby County party chairman Bill Giannini or Fayette County state representative Dolores Gresham, who intends to take on longtime Democratic titan John Wilder in a state Senate race next year.

Gresham might well study From a Standing Start, which details how Dunn came from relative obscurity to out-point better-known Republicans in the ’70 GOP primary for governor, then overcame Nashvillian Hooker to become his party’s first elected governor since Reconstruction.

Nor is Dunn’s book the usual pro forma memoir. Opening it at random, one might find a passage in which the author, close up with Hooker at an oudoor event that summer of 1970, realizes to his horror that his Democratic opponent is wearing pancake makeup. The discovery fueled his determination in that campaign, Dunn writes.

But there is an aura of good will in the book, as there was at the Wednesday night signing. When someone mentioned the Hooker reference to Wellford, the former judge nodded and said, “But they’re good friends now,” then smiled and added, “And that’s as it should be.”

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Book Features Books

Photo Finish

CREDIT: From Roadwork

In the spring of 1962, Tom Wright was in his late teens and an American studying photography at Ealing Art School in London. He was also already a heavy drinker and pot smoker, but he had two things going for him: talent and an impressive R&B record collection. Then he met Pete Townshend. Townshend was at Ealing too, and Wright turned Townshend, guitarist at the time for a band called the Detours, onto both the blues and to pot.

In the fall of ’62, however, English authorities busted Wright for marijuana possession. They ordered him out of England, but his albums fell into good hands — Townshend’s hands. Townshend, for his part, went on to found the Who. Wright fled to France and … and … well, you name it, Wright did it. But you don’t have to name it. Wright, in Roadwork, a memoir and collection of over 200 of his black-and-white photos, does it for you:

“From the late ’70s until the early ’90s, I was a walking garage sale, moving from one place to another. I wound up doing odd jobs, and if I wasn’t asleep, I was drinking. Not just drinking, but revenge drinking: passing out, not wanting to wake up.”

But he did wake up, and he was armed.

“For two decades,” according to Wright, “I wore my camera like a gun in a belt. I’d wake up with it around my neck — I didn’t want to miss anything … . To me, a new roll of film was like a fresh clip of silver bullets.”

So Wright began to shoot his friends, onstage and off: the Who, the Blues Magoos, the Faces, the James Gang, the Amboy Dukes, Bob Seger, and the Eagles. But Wright wasn’t always on the road. He once managed Detroit’s ground zero of hard rock, the Grande, which meant he got to hang out with (and photograph) the MC5. He also once married and fathered a son by a woman he hardly knew, which meant the marriage didn’t last. And he once established an art school in a derelict building in downtown Austin, but he took off from it too.

Where Wright ended up (in the mid-’80s and in his mid-40s) was Divine,Texas, where he lived alone inside an abandoned bank building — abandoned except for his boxes, trunks, and footlockers full of photos: an estimated half-million photos, including early publicity shots of the Who (in a field outside Jackson, Mississippi); of Joe Walsh atop a motorcycle (for the James Gang’s Rides Again); of Rod Stewart (blotto) after a show; of Ron Wood enjoying a joint; and of Don Henley looking as you always pictured him: a real sourpuss. Count in, in Roadwork, an assortment of groupie shots and roadie shots, and you have a portrait of an era, but it isn’t all rock in Roadwork, and it isn’t all fun and games. There’s fine-art photography here too. And there’s some personal coming-to-terms:

“If someone had told me back in ’62 that I’d be living alone, smoking cigars, and watching my hair fall out when I was forty, I probably would’ve blown my brains out,” Wright writes of his days in Divine. But Wright didn’t blow his brains out. He simply survived a heart attack and rehab. And as for his prints, negatives, slides, writings, and tapes: The University of Texas has done its duty. It’s keeping Wright’s work in safekeeping.

But first, it was Wright’s duty to get it right — not the least of which: introduce Pete Townshend to his library of the blues. Townshend returned the favor and, according to Wright, turned him into rock’s go-to “photo guy.” Back in the ’60s, the times were right for it. Wright and Townshend were right for it:

“Both of our lives were changed drastically by meeting each other — and therein lays a microcosm of the era. Nitro was splashed on glycerin all those years ago, and people’s lives and new dreams were exploding all over the place … all over the world. As a witness to that rock renaissance, that rock revolution, I was a sort of custodian of cultural and social history. And it was my duty to get it all down.”

Wright did and in Roadwork does.

Roadwork: Rock & Roll Turned Inside Out

By Tom Wright, with Susan VanHecke

Hal Leonard Books, 303 pp., $29.95