"A Song To Kill For" by Billy Edd Wheeler

"A Song To Kill For" is Billy Edd Wheeler's only novel. Wheeler is best known as a songwriter and playwright in addition to also having done some performing in the field of country music, having been a popular after dinner speaker for many years. This novel was self-published under the label Infinity Publishing which is virtually non-existent on the internet. They have been defunct since October 2023. I purchased this copy from Amazon and it was publication on demand. I'm not certain if Infinity which had been primarily a children's book publisher was an imprint of Amazon, or if it might have been owned by Wheeler and later sold to Amazon. While this is a self-published novel,Wheeler has a lenghty history as a playwright having written at least nine plays, several of which were produced for quite a few years as outdoor dramas around the southeastern US and Midwest. Wheeler also wrote several songs which were major hits as performed by others. Those songs include "Jackson" which was a signature duet for Johnny Cash and June Carter; "The Reverend Mister Black" which was a hit for the Kingston Trio;"Coward Of The County" which was a massive hit for Kenny Rogers; and, "Coal Tattoo" which has been recoreded by numerous artists with history in the Appalachian Coalfields including Kathy Mattea, The Kingston Trio, and Jim Croce. His well received plays include ""Hatfields and McCoys", "Young Abe Lincoln", and "Johnny Appleseed". It shouldn't surprise anyone to know that his greatest impact as a writer came in the area of playwriting since he held a masters degree in playwriting from Yale University in addition to his bachelors degree from Berea COllege. This book is worth reading even though it is not a great novel. It is funny, fairly well plotted, and has some well developed characters including the protagonist Gabriel Leatherwood who seems to, at least in part, to have been an alter ego of Wheeler himself. Leatherwood is a native West Virginian who is a musician and songwriter who traveld to Nashville only to have several of his early songs stolen by the lead villian who is the owner of music publishing company. Leatherwood decides to take on the company and its owner along with a sizeable cast of lesser villians who assist in his crimes including murder. Along the way, Leatherwood is lucky enough to fall in love with a beautiful female attorney, get invited to the White House to perform, and survive a rather graphic attempted murder by one of those villians. In the end, he marries the heroine, saves his songs, becomes rather wealthy, and chooses to return to Appalachian West Virginia with the woman of his dreams. I repeat, the book is worth reading especially if you are a musician of the country persuasion, an Appalachian, a writer,or if you enjoy crime stories and mysteries. It is not a great novel or a perfect novel. But it is worthy attempt at a first novel by a gifted writer in other areas of the arts.

"A Place To Come To" by Robert Penn Warren--Book Review

 

When this novel was first released a reviewer in "The Harvard Crimson" had this to say about it: 

"In his latest novel, Robert Penn Warren combines a Southern preoccupation with the past with a typically modern concern with selfhood and alienation. His protagonist literally revels in his aloneness, his rootlessness, his inability to love. Nor is he content with a mere demonstration of his problems; instead, he explains them to us, over and over again, in a style that mixes the lofty literary references of academic--Jed is a medievalist at the University of Chicago--with Faulknerian neologisms and strings of appositives."  (Julia Klein, "Harvard Crimson", April 23, 1977)

In the end, Ms. Klein did not write a positive review of Robert Penn Warren's novel and I firmly believe she erred by doing so.  While this novel is not another "All The King's Men", Warren's best novel, it is a markedly good novel by a great writer and deserves to be read and appreciated just as much as anything else Warren ever wrote.  But, I suppose when you have won three Pulitzer Prizes, one for "All The King's Men" and two for a pair of his books of poetry, you are expected to write stupendously great literature even if your intent was only to produce a grocery list.   It seems to me that simply because Robert Penn Warren was never invited to join the group of American winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature some critics and general readers think he can be forgotten, left by the wayside of mass marketed literature, and ignored.  The list of American Nobel winners which includes Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph Brodsky, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Pearl S. Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and now even Bob Dylan, is a prodigious list and I do not mean to belittle or question the credentials of Bob Dylan by adding him to list as the last person.  But I do believe that Robert Penn Warren was just as deserving of a Nobel Prize as any American writer who was ever awarded one and a bit more than a few on that list. When I make a list of the greatest American writers, the names I put on that list are Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Buck, Warren, and Flannery O'Connor who also never lived long enough to accumulate a body of literature sufficient to earn the Nobel.  I also find it interesting that three of those writers are southern writers, Warren, Faulkner, and O'Connor.  

And that last statement brings me to one of the most important misconceptions about Robert Penn Warren.  He is sometimes thought of as an Appalachian writer and he definitely was not.  He was indisputably a Southern writer.  He was a self-avowed member of The Fugitives at Vanderbilt and lived much of his life, especially his academic life, at Vanderbilt University and Louisiana State University neither of which is Appalachian.  And his retirement was spent in New England.  Yes, Robert Penn Warren was born in Kentucky, Western Kentucky, which is not in Appalachia, not even in the ever expanding political definition of Appalachia used by the Appalachian Regional Commission and the congress which is a purely political definition based totally in pork barrel politics and not remotely culturally based.  Warren was born and raised in Todd County Kentucky on the Tennessee border in Western Kentucky far outside both the political and cultural boundaries of Appalachia.  He never referred to himself as Appalachian and rightly so.  He never wrote Appalachian Literature.  He wrote Southern Literature and wrote it just as well as Faulkner and O'Connor, even better at times.  

Now that I  have made one more diligent attempt to murder the myth of Robert Penn Warren as an Appalachian writer, let's talk about this book which is a damn fine novel about a southern college professor, raised in Alabama,  living in Nashville and teaching at a college which we can assume is based loosely on Vanderbilt. The writer and professor moves to Chicago to pursue a doctorate, has an affair with a young Jewish woman there, then marries a young woman from the Dakotas who eventualy dies of cancer.  He returns her to her homeland to be buried near her relatives and after her death returns to Tennessee to teach.  The novel is filled with very unique, very human, very well written characters who move in and out of the protagonists life which is often centered around a group of friends which his wealthy lover and her husband have collected on their southern farm.  The protagonist is drifting loosely along in life, attempting to abandon and deny his youth in the deep south and at times filled with ennui.  The death of his wife and her burial in the Dakotas where she grew up is part of the source of that rootlessness but the character is much deeper than one source of ennui.  He is drifting through a group of friends and acquaintances who ride fancy horses, attend fancy parties with their fancy friends, and also seem to drift from moment to moment without aim or purpose.  

But this is a fine novel filled with excellent character development, precise plotting, and tension which must always seek resolution.  It is, admittedly, not "All The King's Men" and it was never intended to be. Warren intended this novel to be "A Place To Come To" and it is.  He intended this protagonist to be Jed Tewksbury whose father died drunk falling from a wagon box while attempting to urinate on the hindquarters of a mule only to be found graveyard dead on a dirt road in Alabama with his penis out of his pants.  That graphic image haunts Jed Tewksbury throughout the novel and a great deal of his ennui can be said to be rooted both in his childhood poverty and his father's ignominious death and drunken lifestyle along with his mother's eventual love for and marriage to a stepfather whom Jed Tewksbury does not really  like and, yet, Jed finds in the end that his little hometown in Alabama is "A Place To Come To".  The novel is filled with the characteristic, powerful writing of Robert Penn Warren.  He moves through the novel like a world champion boxer scattering a combination of literary left hooks, body blows, and precise three and four words jabs into the mind of the astute reader.   If you love good to great literature, southern literature, you need to read this book, and remember as you read it that it was never intended to be "All The King's Men". 

Colonel Hugh X. Lewis, In Memoriam, December 25, 1930--December 30, 2020

  

Hubert Bradley Lewis, known professionally as Colonel Hugh X. Lewis, died in Nashville, Tennessee, on December 29, 2020, only 4 days after hie 90th birthday due to Covid 19.  He had been born on Christmas Day 1930, in Yeadis, Kentucky, during the heart of the Great Depression and rose to nationwide fame as a country music singer and songwriter.  He was not touring but was still actively working until he became ill.  He was hosting a weekly radio show on WSGS-FM 101 in Hazard, Kentucky, and was a regular caller to the Faron And Scott Show on that station.  During those telephone calls, he would tell some of his thousands of stories about his life as a star in the world of country music from the 1950's to the time of his death. He had known, worked with, and often written songs for many of the biggest names in country music.  He had been married to his wife, Anna Mae Lewis, for 69 years at the time of his death.  He was always devoted to his wife and family and could accurately be described as a "family man" as you can see in the photo below.  He reputedly began hitchhiking from Southeastern Kentucky to Nashville to try to get a start in the music business shortly after he was married and working as a coal miner.  He was a fascinating man with a wonderful memory right up until his death, loved to meet and come to know people, no matter who they were, and could literally talk about any subject.  He will be greatly missed and long remembered both by those who knew and worked with him and by thousands who knew him only as a wonderful story teller on WSGS. 

 

 I have been a regular listener to WSGS-FM 101 in Hazard, KY, for more than 60 years and in the last few years one of the best aspects of that station, which I consider to be the best radio station around, was the fact that about once a week The Colonel would call in to the Faron And Scott Show and talk at length about his long career in country music, the stars and common people he knew, the places he played, the songs and poetry he wrote, and the long happy, productive life he had led. I'm sorry I never got to know him personally. It is a real tragedy that he died at a time when he was still being productive and from a pandemic which never had to happen if the federal government had done its job in early 2020. Hugh X. Lewis has now joined Charley Pride, Joe Diffy, and John Prine on the list of innocent victims of this American tragedy. Somewhere, that is a pretty damn good band!