Rheta Grimsley Johnson – Memphis Flyer

Who knew that Al Green can write as well as he can sing and preach? Or that Hank Williams could heal so many broken hearts? Or that the Jimi Hendrix experience once opened for Davy Jones and the Monkees?

I learned all of these things this week because of a confluence of musical forces.

One of them was an advance copy of a new book by Rheta Grimsley Johnson, former columnist for The Commercial Appeal. “Hank Hung the Moon, and Warmed Our Cold, Cold Hearts” is not a biography of Hank Williams but more of a musical memoir. The Alabama-born singer has been a comfort and inspiration to the Alabama-born writer all her life, helping her through the awkward phases of childhood, hundreds of long lonely drives as a columnist, and the sudden death of her second husband in 2009. The book is published by NewSouth Books and should be out soon.

Changing genres, Davy Jones, the cutest of the Monkees, died this week at the age of 66. The tidbit about Jimi Hendrix was in one of the obits. If you think about it, it’s pretty funny that Jimi Hendrix opened for anyone, especially some goofy white boys. The Monkees were the sixties answer to “American Idol” — a made-for-television band modeled, loosely, after the Beatles. Their big hits came out in 1967, the year I graduated from high school, and you could not possibly avoid them. Which brings me to . . .

Class reunions. If you are 27 or over you probably have gotten an invitation to one or two of these. Now they come supercharged by Facebook and e-mail, although I wonder if many in my demographic are paying attention. The Class of 1967 is having a 45th reunion. A tenth, sure, a 25th, maybe, a 50th if you’re lucky, but a 45th?

I guess it’s fitting because in a lot of ways we were the Class of In Between.

We were the first class of freshmen in the “new” East Grand Rapids High School. Newbies in a new building. You can’t get much lower than that. The old high school, still standing, reeked of history and tradition. The “new” one, which will be 50 years old next year, reeked of newness, Clearasil, and Canoe.

The touchstone of our freshman year was the assassination of President Kennedy on a Thursday afternoon in November. The see-you-later after graduation was the riots in Detroit in the Summer of ’67. We were products of the fifties but took the full brunt of the sixties.

The significance of those events was not lost on us, even then. But the truth is, my mind was probably preoccupied at the time with impure thoughts of some of my female classmates or the first day of basketball practice the next day. In sports as in algebra, the schedule proceeded as normal. Friday afternoon, as the nation mourned, the boys who would disappoint our classmates and coaches for the next four years took the floor. The athletic production line that had churned out so many champions pretty much shut down on the Class of ’67 and we managed to break winning streaks, start losing streaks, and set records for ineptitude. We even lost in sports like tennis and swimming as other schools and suburbs discovered the wonders of country clubs, affluence, courts with nets, and indoor swimming pools. Girls had three sports options: cheerleading, water ballet, or not being in cheerleading or water ballet. But times changed. Thanks to them, the school now boasts hundreds of championships.

We lived in an unannexed bedroom community not unlike present-day Germantown or Collierville, minus the black students. The Grand Rapids ghetto was a few miles from my house but might as well have been another planet for all I knew about it. Only last year, when someone loaned me “Thin Ice,” a book of coming-of-age stories about growing up in Grand Rapids, did I learn that one of its residents was a future Memphian and musical legend.

Al Greene, as he spelled his name then, moved from Forrest City, Arkansas to Michigan when he was a boy and lived there for about ten years. His story, “Half a Chance to Prove Myself,” is the best one in a very strong collection, for my money. He took and gave some beatings, learned that his gift was for singing not fighting, formed a group called Al Greene and the Creations, went solo, dropped the final “e” and moved to Memphis to record with Willie Mitchell’s band in 1968.

His autobiography is called “Take Me To the River.” Get it, or get “Thin Ice.” He was saved, as he tells it, by his own toughness, a caring teacher or two, and a local church. And, of course, that voice.

Back in 1984, the editor of The Commercial Appeal, Mike Grehl, sent reporter Rheta Grimsley Johnson on a journalistic mission to roam far and wide across the country looking for regional distinctions. The result was a book called America’s Faces, a successful career as a syndicated columnist, and, in a roundabout way, a love affair with the town of Henderson, Louisiana, deep in Cajun Country.

Johnson, who splits her time between Henderson and Iuka, Mississippi, will be in Memphis June 9th at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library at 6:30 p.m. for a celebration of all things Cajun and a reading from her new book, Poor Man’s Provence: Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana (NewSouth Books).

A road warrior if there ever was one, Johnson turned out four columns a week for The Commercial Appeal and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Lately, she’s been back on the road publicizing the book with her trademark humor and independence.

“I went to Oxford to speak to the Rotary Club,” she says. “They said it was against Rotary bylaws to let me sell books. And they made me take off my Travis Childers lapel pin.” She tried bootlegging books out of the back of her van afterward, but when only one straggler followed her outside, she decided to drive home. A few weeks later, she spoke to another Rotary Club in Alexandria, Louisiana, where her now-weekly column runs, and drew a big crowd and sold several books. “Evidently, they didn’t know about the policy. It sort of made me forgive Rotarians.”

The title of her book, she admits, throws some people.

“I thought everyone knew about poor-man’s-this and poor-man’s-that, but some people think it’s a slur. What I’m saying is that I’m poor and this is my way to go to Provence. But a lot of people have never heard of Provence.”

It was hard to write unflinchingly about a place where she also lives.

“It took me, literally, a decade and change. As a columnist, I’m used to going places and parachuting in. But to presume to write a whole book about a culture not your own and a place where you only spend part of the year made me a little hesitant.”

Johnson’s favorite writer is Raymond Chandler, but her hero, I suspect, is Chandler’s hard-boiled detective, Philip Marlowe, a knight in the decadent world of Southern California. In Johnson’s world, 2,500 miles and 70 years away, the columnist is also a knight, bound by a code of honor to treat both subjects and readers fairly and honestly, to travel any distance in all kinds of weather to meet them on their own turf, to avoid clichés and well-worn paths, to meet all deadlines, and to do it year after year for 20 years. Pretty amazing. Here are a few excerpts from the book:

On Henderson: “Friendship meant something here. It meant sitting up with folks who had lost a family member, giving even when it meant you would have to do without, staying in touch even if you had to ride your lawnmower to visit.”

On following popular good-old-boy columnist Lewis Grizzard at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “If only I’d saved my angry e-mail from that first year in Atlanta I would have had an effortless book: Grizzard Is Dead, and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself.

On the Angola Prison Rodeo: “The spring version begins with a purely Protestant prayer, a prayer to age an ACLU lawyer by a decade.”

On a cockfight in Cajun Country: “To the uninitiated, a cockfight looks something like two men shaking feather dusters at each other.”

On the difficulty of finding good bread in Henderson: “French bread is a lot like a Southern accent. It doesn’t travel well.”

On her trade: “Fate is sometimes kind to desperate columnists, which, of course, is a redundancy; any writer with four deadlines a week is desperate.”

Rheta Grimsley Johnson reads from Poor Man’s Provence: Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library on Monday, June 9th, at 6:30 p.m.