Monthly Archives: June 2024

Last Saturday and Sunday (22 and 23 June) I finished John Parris’ first collection of stories on “the way it used to be” in the Appalachian Mountains. Roaming the Mountains continued to be good, but uneven. Some of the stories … Continue reading →

We were on the road Friday, so I had very little time to read. I managed just two chapters in Roaming the Mountains with John Parris. The first was “The First Gold Dollars” (pp. 126-128) about the minting of gold … Continue reading →

Wednesday I continued reading Roaming the Mountains with John Parris. The book is an easy read, divided into short chapters, which makes it easy to pick up and put down. You could read the chapters in any order and it … Continue reading →

For four decades, John Parris (1914-1999) wrote about the old ways of life in the mountains of western North Carolina. After Parris’ columns appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times, many of the columns appeared again in five books. Roaming the Mountains … Continue reading →

Pages 274-366 in Jimmy McDonough’s Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen (2010) Tuesday evening, I finished Tammy Wynette. The book kept me up well past my bedtime and I really enjoyed the ride. Unfortunately, it’s a tragic tale. The material that … Continue reading →

Things calmed down quite a bit at our house on Monday, so I had a lot of time to read. I ended up covering a big portion of Tammy Wynette’s life in Jimmy McDonough’s biography. At the beginning of Monday’s … Continue reading →

With all of our Father’s Day festivities, it was challenging to find any time to read. But I managed about 50 pages in Tammy Wynette. Sunday’s reading covered some of the pivotal events in her life. The first section that … Continue reading →

Saturday wasn’t a big reading day for me. I read a few pages on Tammy Wynette’s producer, Billy Sherrill. I think that author Jimmy McDonough was using this material to get across to the reader that hit records don’t just … Continue reading →

After getting done with Willeford, I started reading Jimmy McDonough’s book Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen (Viking, copyright 2010, 366 pp.). My mother read this one and recommended it to me, or I probably wouldn’t have read it. Also, I … Continue reading →

Charles Willeford kept his momentum all of the way to the end of Miami Blues. I’m really glad that I read it. As I noted in yesterday’s blog, the novel concerns an inevitable showdown between cop Hoke Mosley and criminal … Continue reading →