Bub
Essays from Just North of Nashville
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Nashville native Drew Bratcher writes musically about memory and memorably about music in uncommonly beautiful essays that announce the arrival of a major new voice. The title essay, a requiem in fragments, tells the story of a grandfather through his ear, comb, hands, El Camino, and clothes. Bratcher delivers a tough and moving tribute to a man who “went on ahead, on up the road, and then the road turned.” Elsewhere, Bratcher directs his attention to Johnny Cash’s looming presence over his childhood, the relative pain of red paper wasp stings, Dolly Parton’s generative homesickness, the humiliations and consolations of becoming a new father, the experience of hearing his name in a Taylor Swift song, and the mystifying hymns treasured by both his great grandmother and D. H. Lawrence.
Seamlessly blending memoir and arts criticism and aiming at both the heart and the head, this is a book about listening closely to stories and songs, about leaving home in order to find home, and about how the melodies and memories absorbed along the way become “a living music that advances and prevails upon us at formative moments, corralling chaos into the simple, liberating stockade of verse, chorus, verse.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Bratcher offers well-tuned notes on country music and growing up near Nashville in his sharp debut. Combining keen observations and tenderness, the author pays homage to singers and songwriters: Lefty Frizzell is "a kind of hillbilly Falstaff" whose "vexed falsetto" was well suited to his songs about heavy drinking and infidelity, Bratcher writes in "It's Strange the Way the Lord Does Move." In "To Be at Home Everywhere," meanwhile, he notes that Dolly Parton has a voice "fit, all at once, for the corner bar, the choir loft, and Carnegie Hall." "The Ballad of Taylor and Drew" considers Taylor Swift's music: "That she didn't have the harrowing backstory or world-weariness of a Loretta Lynn, that she didn't have the pure voice of, say, a Pam Tillis or a LeAnn Rimes, she compensated for with ardent circumspection about adolescence." The title essay is a moving look at Bratcher's tobacco-chewing grandfather who "bucked family tradition" by deciding not to become a miner, and "A Taxonomy of Country Boys" uses tunes by John Denver, Loretta Lynn, and Hank Williams Jr. to get to the root of what a country boy is. Lyricism infuses Bratcher's own prose, and he strikes the right balance between memoir and criticism. This collection sings.
