Tennessee Books

A fine book by the master historian.

With 500 newly freed African Americans among its members, the 2,000-strong Tennessee State Guard played a crucial role in allowing for elections and keeping the elected Republican governor in office in Tennessee in the first years of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Severance (assistant professor, Auburn U.) refers to this state militia as "radical" because it was used by Brownlow and others who "styled themselves radical Republicans." These "radicals," however, were the duly elected, legitimate political leaders of Tennessee at the time. The determined resistance they met from many Tennesseans, however, including the Ku Klux Klan, made the Northern victory in the Civil War seem "the most gigantic falsehood of the age," as one Radical Republican put it. The State Guard's role has been controversial since Reconstruction. But Severance views it mostly favorably, while not leaving out the controversial aspects of its role. It filled a role between local authorities who were part of the resistance or helpless to curtail it and the Federal authorities and troops who regarded it as outside their jurisdiction. Without the State Guard, Tennessee would have been mostly lawless. Severence studies its necessary, irreplaceable role in laying the political and legal groundwork, however controversial and flawed this was, which the victorious Union side had fought for in the Civil War. This thankless task fell to the Guard, which met it effectively and respectably.

"Negro Folk Rhymes" is one of the great American poetry anthologies; and it is fascinating as it is heartbreaking, to see how racism affects folklore, and folk life. White collectors who also published in the 1920's, Newman I. White, Dorothy Scarborough, Howard Odum, weren't able to collect this quality and kind of material. White commented that "the negro's songs about his women makes an unflattering exhibit." Talley collected another kind of song, a song that possibly would never have been sung for white people in the 1920's. Many of these animal "nonsense" songs carry a double message about racism and injustice; and there is also a wealth of tender and beautiful love songs from both sexes, and the sweetest lullabies. Talley's book was published in 1922, complete with a thinly veiled, condescending racist introduction from a shrivel-souled academic named Walter Clyde Curry, who simply missed the essence and genius of these songs and poems. Charles K. Wolfe did a great service rescuing these melodies from manuscript. These are nothing like the blues, the melodies have the same wise/innocent quality of Scottish and Irish folksongs, though they're not quite like that either. There is many a striking melody - the one for "The Old Man's Song" in the Phrygian mode, rare in Western music. One gathers from Wolfe's introduction that there was a common folk/string band music among blacks and whites in the South, but the record companies emphasized the differences, putting the blacks in blues and gospel and the whites in country and bluegrass, and the world, unfortunately, followed. Contemporary and traditional folk and country music are now nearly entirely white genres, but their roots are equally black and white. The commercial world, for whatever purpose, strove to divide rather than unite Americans. Let us not be unaware of how this pertains today. I wish that these tunes and words appeared on the same page; anyone wishing to match these tricky tunes with the lyrics, and actually sing them, must make a xerox copy. Quibbles. This is a brilliant production and best read aloud; many rhymes are riddles which are better apprehended by the ear than the eye. "Milly Biggers" is as great a folksong as we have, from deep in slavery times.

Anyone even remotely interested in folklore, folk music, or American history should get this book. It contains over 400 rhymes (some with music) collected in the early 1900s by Thomas W. Talley, a black chemistry professor from Tennessee. Most of the rhymes are American, but there are a few from Africa, Jamaica, and elsewhere.

This alone would be worth the price of admission, but this edition also contains a new essay on the work, plus an updated bibliography and index, plus the original introduction by Thomas W. Talley (an excellent 50-page essay which covers performance practice and even details of instrument construction), plus additional rhymes and music that didn't make it into the original edition.

Great to page idly through or to read cover-to-cover, this book would be a fantastic addition to anyone's collection.

I hope to read this one many times. Each time will generate a new insight; a new revelation. The multi-layers of the human condition are all here in their raw glory. Williams could see well beyond the horizon from the atmospheric veranda at the Costa Verde.

Fantastic!

It's amazing how well the works of Mr. Williams have held up after all these years. Then again, when you write classics that's what they're supposed to do.

While all these plays are great, NIGHT OF THE IGUANA is by far his best. My favorite line: "Oh,God, can we please stop now." I'm paraphrasing, but you get the idea.

But the most remarkable thing about Mr. William's plays are that, while they almost always deal with the south, decay, decadence, incredible insight into the human condition, and graphic and moving looks into the human heart, they are all completely different. How much this man must have lived to have produced this varied and complex a body of work.

If you're a fan of Southern literature, and especially Tennessee Williams, please check out some other "finds:" OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS by Capote, BARK OF THE DOGWOOD by McCrae, and AVA'S MAN by Bragg.

mr nall has written the most factual of many works on the subject to date . when doing research on the night rider activities in the black patch you will always see a thank you to dr. nall for his work it is the definative work on this very unique time in history. !!!!!!!!a must for every true scholar on the tobacco night riders of kentucky and tenn.

Nall's is the story one of the greatest movements in the history of the American spirit. It well covers the facts in the agricultural price war that changed the farm economy of the region forever. Faced with economic starvation tobacco farmers united, then had to defend with force their right to live and farm and make a descent return on their labor. In doing so they changed the future for tobacco farmers and instituted price and acreage/poundage allotments to control tobacco production that have remained until this present day. My family was involved in the tobacco wars, my grandfather lived in the town of Cobb, Kentucky next door to the firey Dr. Dave Amoss who led the farmer's army, the "silent brigade....yet the full story has not been told. Expect it to be futher told when "The Last Nightrider" a novel based on the exploits of my family during this time is subsequently published. Nall's book is required reading for the history buff and for the economist, the romantic and those with courage enough to secure their own fate....

This and it's sister publications are some of the most detailed, informative tour guides you will find! We simply love this series and the way it is written. There are few commercial details, i.e. hotel recommendations, restaurants etc.If you need that buy the Frommer's or Fodor's books but this one will take you way off the beaten path and bring you back again much more informed than when you left. You can't go wrong with any of the books in this entire series.....I know, I have them all!

This is a must for anyone wanting to see East Tennessee and get everything you can out of it! The book is easy to read and very informative. Maps are at the beginning of each section showing your possible journey, so you can take the entire journey or a portion and know exactly what you will find and see. The directions are excellent so you can't get lost. Now the only downfall...it is very similar to another book I purchased so don't waste your money this book has it all.

Cathy and I looked through many guide books before attempting to write Traveling Tennessee. We found none covered the state in our easy helpful style (see Traveling the Trace and Traveling the Southern Highlands).

We followed the pioneers through the state from east to west giving you a brief history of the people and the area, and what you would find there today. Tennessee offers many pleasant surprises along its highways from scenic sites to activies you may participate in. For instance, you know of the Great Smoky Mountains but do you know the quite side of the Smokies? where Tennessee's first gold rush was? about a failed Utopia brought back to life? the courthouse stolen in the middle of the night? or where you can swim at the end of a scale model of the Misssissippi River?

We strove to give you information and details about interesting attractions all across Tennessee as well as B&Bs, dining, shopping, special events, camping, and where to get more information. More than 200 photos help tell the stories in this 316-page guide.

This guidebook never leaves my car! It always tells me something new to discover about Tennessee!

This book did something really extraordinary for me. The period of antebellum literature, as I studied it in graduate school, was always difficult to get through because much of it seemed fairly formulaic and lacked depth. Paul Jones has remapped the territory to include the incredibly important subversive voices in antebellum Southern literature. He does an insightful study of the dominant ideology at the time and the way that the works usually considered representative reinforced and recreated the dominant values of the time. Working counter to those forceful trends were creative voices who did not uphold the creation of southern nationalism and were openly critical to the plantation ideology. I am very grateful to Jones for shining a different ray of light on this period and finally providing readers with a scaffolding to classify a writer like Edgar Allan Poe. I recommend this work very highly.

Jones departs from the "story of southern literature that was constructed by literary critics early in the twentieth century" to identify five authors falling outside of the conventional understanding of antebellum southern literature. In different ways according to their creativities and chosen literary forms, these five authors evidence countervailing views of southern society from the one pictured in the predominating literature heavily influenced by the romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott. Poe with his horror tales vividly disclosing the anxieties embedded in the slave-owning society that was being increasingly challenged and Frederick Douglass with his heroic slave characters giving a different formulation and image of African Americans from the one maintained by the slave-owners put forth clear alternatives to the southern propaganda about a harmonious, peaceful southern society. James Heath, John Pendleton Kennedy, and E.D.E.N. Southworth employed within the familiar form of the novel the relatively subtle, partly ambiguous elements of character, dialogue, description, and narrative to question the prevailing southern values and class structure based on slavery. The five authors Jones studies with considerable originality are "probably only the tip of the iceberg of writers and texts that offer a dissenting voice to the dominant one that has been established in literary histories." Jones is an assistant professor of English at Ohio University whose articles have appeared in Southern Literary Journal and other periodicals. This study of his shifts the perspective on the antebellum southern literature, while at the same time it encourages further study of other aspects of the little-known and under-appreciated alternative literature.

A very revealing book by an extraordinary man. In the course of telling his family's story, Mr. Lytle makes the South's colorful past and its original characters come alive. He has a gift for simply seeing the world in a very different way than most of ever can, but he is also able to put the experience on paper in such a way that we can all soak it in.

Some of Mr. Lytle's prose can be almost too thick--The Velvet Horn. But his short stories in Alchemy are very good, well crafted but still juicy. The bio on Forrest is good also, its beginning as artistic a rendering of a portrait as I have ever read, quite unique. But in A Wake for the Living, he shows--I think to some extent like Hemingway in A Movable Feast--that he writes extremely well about nonfiction that is intimate. I would recommend his short stories in Alchemey and also this book as good first ones of Lytle to start-out with.

The book is like a magnet. It does not want to leave your hands untill the last page. Gives a different prospective of the civil war and reconstruction, along with a great story. I would forsee a movie.

I am an adult and unable to find the adult form so let me say here whan I started this book I was unable to put it down.
The detail and accuracy of history shows the ammount of research that went into this book.Aside from history it was a great book that covered more than I expected.If your interest is the civil war,the development and eveloution of the guns of that era or romance,you will love this book

Mark Royden Winchell, the leading scholar of the Southern Agrarians of his generation, studied under the last of the Agrarians at Vanderbilt, and was thus perfectly suited to prepare this outstanding bio. Sadly, Winchell died on May 8, 2008 at the young age of 59. This work will stand as a testament.

The lack of attention Donald Davidson has received since his death is scandalous. No doubt it stems in part from his racicialist views and resistance to the civil rights movement. Well Davidson was a flawed man--but to call him a "Racist" ( His old friend Robert Penn Warren's daughter says that his name was never spoken in their house on that account--I find it hard to believe) is simply to miss the measure of the man. He was a fine poet (just a notch below Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom) and a brilliant literary critic and teacher. His "Attack on Leviathan" is essential reading for those who confuse conservatism with Newt Gingrich, and his poem "Lee in the Mountains" is a tribute not only to a lost cause, but to all lost causes, and should therefore resonate with all but the incurable narcissist. Winchell has done us a great service by presenting the man warts and allto us. If we ever get beyond the name calling that passes for political and literary judgement these days it will be due in large measure to books like this one.