About a year before COME AGAIN NO MORE, my 2025 newspaper novel, was to be published by JackLeg Press, I emailed the publisher with an idea:

My wife and I came up with a quick cover concept. See what you think.

It’s a start, at least. I like that it’s colorful, and a bit in-your-face. It’s not soft.

The mock-up above is more or less what I sent. I’ve changed the font, and swapped in a real blurb for my original made-up one, but otherwise it’s the same. The photo is public domain, via the Library of Congress. It’s titled “Newsboys and Newsgirl,” and was shot on Park Row, New York City, in July 1910 by Lewis Wickes Hine, who was a trained sociologist and specialized in chronicling child labor. He was quite the muckraker, apparently, as you can see from this Smithsonian Magazine story, “The Photographer Who Forced the U.S. to Confront Its Child Labor Problem.”

My novel was set a century later, but I loved the idea of the newsboys and newsgirl being the faces of it. Newspapers are a gritty business, after all. Not for nothing we were called ink-stained wretches. And newspapers, for all their noble intent and high ideals, could also be as deeply flawed as any public institution. The novel plays with that idea, and so, too, could the cover.

Also, one of the fallen journalists was a copy editor named Tommy Miles, who always wore a tweed newsboy cap.

Alas, as they say. Alas. The publisher didn’t like my cover “concept.” I don’t think she said why, and I didn’t push it. The book is the author’s, but the cover is the publisher’s. That’s the rule and I abide by it. The author generally gets to weigh in, offer suggestions, but publishers decide — and ought to. They have a better sense of what sells. And they’re publishing the thing, after all. It’s going out in the world under their imprint.

So, we ended up with the cover you may have seen, the cover below. It’s cool. I’m happy with it. I love old typewriters, which were still newsroom fixtures when I started in the business.

But what do you think? Newsboys (and girl) or typewriters? Or do you even judge a book by, you know …

Bonus material: Charley Hull’s favorite cover song

Charley Hull, erstwhile reporter at a fictional Memphis daily, is the voice of COME AGAIN NO MORE. He loves music (also his old newspaper life; his few dear friends; whiskey; and feeling sorry for himself — that’s pretty much the full list). The book’s title comes from a line in “Hard Times,” the old Stephen Foster song first published in 1854 and covered ever since, by everyone from Bob Dylan to Black 47 to Mary J. Blige.

“Hard Times” is Charley’s personal anthem.

He loves all versions of it, but his favorite is by a young singer in the book. He was half of a duo, but his girlfriend ran off shortly after they arrived in Memphis. When Charley and the young singer first meet, at the novel-opening barroom wake for the laidoff journalists, Charley consoles him, saying his heartbreak will be a fount of great songs. (Charley should know. He got a whole novel out of his.)

They meet again later, in a scene where Charley dreams he’s died. It’s a lonely death, out on his front porch. Some crows show up to pick poor Charley clean. But then his old newspaper friends arrive. They know just what to do —

Flippen said he could write the obit.

Stell said she’d slap on a headline.

Pearl was already snapping pictures.

The journalistic necessities in hand, Barboro said he’d get the drinks.

And then they made a sort of party of it.

Later, when the festivities are winding down, when the tone turns serious and heartfelt things are being said, the young singer shows up …

He stood just below the porch with his guitar, in the moonlight, and serenaded us all. He sang a spiritual and then he sang a lovely, little song we took to be one of his own. He had a clear, bright voice like a bell that rang out with those words of his, backing by the delicate chiming of his guitar. He finished the song and then said, “I only met Charley the once, so I don’t claim to know his favorite song. But the night we met, he asked if I knew this one. So here goes ...”

Then he sang that dear favorite of mine, that old one by Stephen Foster.

“Hard times,” the boy sang, “come again no more.”

It sounded like a prayer, a plea, a requiem for the wreck of me. They all teared up at that — even the birds. Then they all let me be, dead me, walking slumping down the walk, leaning on one another for support, as much from the emotion as from my booze. Or they flapped away on broad, black wings, those that had them.

The ghost of me got up and turned in for the night. It slept deeply and liked to never wake up again.

Oh, I almost forgot. They meet one last time, during the novel’s version of a happy ending. Charley has found love and purpose. He’s upright and functioning again. Also, the young singer’s girlfriend has returned. They’re back together and sounding better than ever …

They were raising a fine and proper ruckus. It was the Church Keys — our young friend’s gal had come back, against considerable odds, after a year or more in New Orleans. The music, culture, and lore of the Crescent City had as much influence on her as the Bluff City’s had on him, in their time apart. When they got the band back together, they added a rhythm section and horns, fashioned a new sound from found parts. There were elements of ragtime and jump blues, the funky penguin and the ooh, poo, pah doo. They still played some of the old songs, but done in all manner of different styles. Their songs had steam and tail feathers, they had froth and kick. They even played a couple of different versions of “Hard Times.” In my favorite of the two, it sounded like Hard Times had won the lottery, or at least found purpose and steady work …

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For more on COME AGAIN NO MORE:

A disturbance in the Southern fiction aisle (Where else?)

Even God reads the obits

One month to COME AGAIN NO MORE

Charley Hull sure is an opinionated cuss

Ode to a desk rat: an excerpt

Cold beer here: Or, how to pitch literary fiction in a world where the average book sells 100 copies

‘A beguiling blue yodel of a book’

The Talking Come Again No More Blues

Interview on the Book Talk podcast of WYPL, the Memphis library system radio station.

The latest review

Small Press Picks says ‘it’s like being seated next to the best storyteller at the local pub.’

The End, 2026
Collage with newspaper and magazine clippings, and paper bag from the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma

A riff for these hard times. Reading time: 50 seconds.

Midnight. Stillness. Cigar smoke swirled and whiskey fumes filled the air and the now gave way to the near future. The recent past lingered for one last sip. The recent past then bowed and was gone, to haunt some other poor souls, or to sleep it off, one. A single guitar note was struck, somewhere far off, a song being written, some begotten ballad or reel.

Trimble sighed and nodded to the near-empty bottle of Three Queens on the table beside. The bottle now did levitate a little and pour a splash into the seafarer’s glass, then likewise did the same for Cheatham’s. The two men sipped and smoked and talked a little, not a lot, about love and levitation, the cruel turns of life, the high cost of free will, and the hangovers they’d have tomorrow, if the end of the world didn’t come and save them.
— from my 2023 novel EVERYBODY KNOWS, a Southern-fried, speculative-fiction satire for these times and those remaining.

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Charley Patton, a “gen’lman of color,” was fined $25 for policy writing and must face the court again today on a similar charge. He said he had planned to stay here a month when he arrived a few days ago, but that he’s had enough now and intends to move on as soon as the court will let him.
— from the “Howdy, Judge” column of The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal, June 3, 1921

I’m going away / to a world unknown
— Charley Patton in “Down the Dirt Road Blues”

Drive south on Highway 61 out of Memphis into Mississippi. Keep driving. Past Clarksdale and Alligator, past Mound Bayou and Cleveland. You’ll be about two hours out of Memphis by now. Keep the faith. You’re getting close. Pretty soon now you’ll start to feel a sort of cosmic pull. Trust it. Turn left. Drive about seven miles down a country road of dubious condition. Take your half out of the middle. It’s safer there, and you’ll not meet any oncoming traffic. There’s nobody here, and the man you’re visiting, the great blues singer Charley Patton, has been dead for 92 years today.

You’ll see a cotton gin off in the distance. Just shy of that, on your right, is Holly Ridge Cemetery. The historical marker is at the front of the cemetery, near where you’ll park on some gravel on the edge of the cotton gin property. While you’re standing there reading the marker — about how Charley was “the most important figure in the pioneering era of the Delta blues” — you’ll learn that a couple of other blues men are buried here, too. Asie Payton, who sang that great funky blues “I Love You,” from the Larry Brown movie “Big Bad Love,” which I love but my wife, who loathes movies about the angst of writers, calls “Big Bad Movie,” is just a few steps from Charley’s historical marker.

Charley’s grave, with a headstone paid for by John Fogerty (they both sang about “Green River,” after all), is near the far back corner of the cemetery. You may sense it there, from wherever you’re standing. I confess I did not, and traipsed all over the small graveyard, worried to hell about snakes, before discovering Charley about where you’d expect him — near about bottle-passing distance to another blues man, the harmonica player Willie James Foster.

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Think of it. Three blues men, one of them the best ever, all in this one little plot of land down an old country road where you haven’t seen a sign of life (not even of snakes) since you left 61 Highway.

Take it all in. The quiet, the calm. So peaceful.

Yeah, but think how this joint must jump at night.

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On Charlie Patton Highway, the mist, the rain, the mud
Somewhere east of Tunica and I’m close to givin’ up
— Robert Plant, “Charley Patton Highway”

I got a cravin’ love for blazing speed
Got a hopped-up Mustang Ford
Jump into the wagon, love, throw your panties overboard
— Bob Dylan, “High Water Everywhere (For Charley Patton)”

Notes: Some will disagree with the Patton lyric I quote up top. They’ll say Charley was singing about going to Illinois, not a world unknown. The two don’t sound alike, except in the garble of Charley’s mouth. Listen and you truly can’t tell. He may even sing it both ways over the course of the song. You can hear what you want.

The best evidence against the world unknown transcription is that it’s too existential, I guess, for Charley. Too poetic. Too deep. That’s what some smart people say. But there’s a pretty good case to make for world unknown, and I’ll make it some other week. In the meantime, listen to some Charley, who died on this day in 1934. The man was a wonder. Wicked talented. A giant.

For more on Charley’s grave, read this.

It’s some 2,000 miles from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Aracataca to William Faulkner’s Oxford, but what distance is that between writers of such power and sweep? Hell, Faulkner had sentences that long.

In today’s visit to the Museum of Southern Sentences, we have two new additions to our permanent collection. The first is from Garcia Marquez’s autobiography, LIVING TO TELL THE TALE. He’s remembering himself as a young man vowing, in the face of family opposition, “the only thing I want in life is to be a writer.” He’s got it bad for Faulkner, speaking of “my fever of 104 degrees for the sagas of Mississippi…”

The second sentence is from Faulkner himself, though it’s not one of his 2,000-mile mind trips. It’s a mere ten words. But it gives one much to ponder, much to parse, enough even for a trip from Aracataca to Oxford. Or from Macondo to Jefferson, as it were.

In the port I had bought a good supply of the least expensive cigarettes, made of black tobacco and a cheap paper that could have been used to wrap packages, and I began to smoke the way I did in those days, using the butt end of one cigarette to light the next, as I reread Light in August: at the time, William Faulkner was the most faithful of my tutelary demons.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, LIVING TO TELL THE TALE

Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.
—William Faulkner, LIGHT IN AUGUST

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Some background on the museum, from last year:

A few quick questions and answers, by way of explanation:

Why call it a museum? Because I always thought Eudora Welty’s sentences were so beautiful they ought to be in a museum. So I’ve created one.

Will there be an actual bricks-and-mortar museum someday? A gift shop? Can I buy a hoodie or coffee mug? Can I be a docent? Don’t be silly, although a hoodie with a sentence from SUTTREE running up one sleeve and down the other sounds cool.

What do you mean by Southern? I mean sentences written by Southerners or about the Southerners or the South. You can be from anywhere. It just comes down to subject matter. What I call “honorary Southerners” are especially welcome, meaning writers who hail from elsewhere but are entranced by, and/or adept at capturing the essence of, the South. Bob Dylan is an honorary Southerner. James Joyce may be, too. I haven’t fully puzzled that one out yet.

Oh, and the sentence need not rhapsodize or revel in the South to find a place in the Museum of Southern Sentences. The South can be a stunted land of small minds and dark hearts; sometimes it needs to be torn a new one.

More visits to the Museum of Southern Sentences

The Museum of Southern Sentences (a new and occasional feature)

Conjuring the blues in terra incognita

Jorge Luis Borges in the Museum of Southern Sentences

Welcome back to the Museum of Southern Sentences

A time could be seized, close to bedtime, when it was possible to slip down the fire escape and, before the doors were all locked against my getting back, walk to an iron fountain on the campus and around it, with poetry running through my head.
— Eudora Welty, from ONE WRITER’S BEGINNINGS, recalling her days at the Mississippi State College for Women1, where overcrowding made it feel “impossible to be alone,” hence her desire to steal away for solitude and a little late-night reading.

The bookshelf in the photo is Bill Clinton’s — from a display at his presidential library and museum, in Little Rock. (We visited several years ago; I assume it hasn’t changed.) The full-scale replicas of the oval office and the cabinet room were cool, you know, and also the letters to the forty-second president from the likes of Willie Morris (a missive that touched upon Newt Gingrich, William Tecumseh Sherman, the forthcoming movie version of Willie’s book, “My Dog Skip,” and Arkansas Razorback football) and then-Razorbacks basketball coach Nolan Richardson (“Dear Pres”). But I liked Bill’s bookshelf best of all. I liked the idea of Eudora Welty hanging out with the poets, trading lines and conjuring images, telling tales of late-night fire escape exits,2 and other serious daring…

Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn’t hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn’t my mother’s voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or poem itself.
— Eudora Welty, again from ONE WRITER’S BEGINNINGS

The Day Faulkner Met Elvis, 2026
Collage on paper bag

I sometimes wonder what William Faulkner thought of Elvis. I find no record of it.

Maybe it never came up, just never occurred to anyone to ask such a question, despite them being homeboys, so to speak, born twenty-seven miles apart and their lives overlapped by roughly the same number of years. They were sons of the North Mississippi Hill Country who changed the world with their singular voices, bristled at the fame it brought them, medicated entirely too much, were loyal to family, loved women, airplanes, horses, and home. If nothing else, they could have talked of their travails in Hollywood.

They couldn’t have been more different, of course—except that Elvis, dirt poor, whose daddy did time at Parchman for check forgery, could have been a Faulkner character, a Snopes, kin of Flem and them…

— from my essay, “Old Home Week (The Day Faulkner Met Elvis),” Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature, Vol. 1, Edition 8

I pitched it as “a meditation on fame, privacy, the toll of technology, the inevitability of Elvis, and what Faulkner famously said about the past,” but there’s no getting around it: I wrote an essay about Faulker and Elvis hanging out at Rowan Oak (but really only in my mind), and somehow got it published.

Thank you, Dr. Randy Mackin, editor-in-chief at Porchlight. He’s got a cool thing going — worthy of your time and financial support (see info below). There’s loads of content on the site including a short story from the terrific Cary Holladay, and an interview in which she says,

Without access to nature, I don’t think I could write. I found hawk feathers on the ground: there must have been a midair battle. What happened, who won, and what was the aftermath? Birds have influenced my language all my life. The sky poets. Their impassioned cries, the rhythm of their songs and calls, their bursts of speech like internal lives urgently breaking through. I never had the chance to meet Eudora Welty, but her work has influenced me, and one time I dreamed about her. “Listen, Cary!” she was saying. “You’ve got to listen better.”

There’s also a story by, and an interview with, my friend George Singleton, that Southern king of short fiction. In the interview he says,

My characters have free will, it seems, for better or worse. I rarely know exactly where a story’s going, or what a character might say and do. BUT: Shannon Ravenel gave me some great advice about twenty-three years ago. She said, “A good story’s ending kisses the beginning. Too many of your stories’ endings grope the beginning.” Gee, thanks for having my back, Shannon.

Elsewhere, there’s short fiction from Ron Rash, a novel excerpt from Wes Blake, poetry from Denton Loving, interviews with Michael Farris Smith and David Joy, craft essays, and the annual William Gay Memorial Prize in Short Story.

Some content is available for free, but for full access you’ll want to subscribe ($3 per month, $34 for a year). You won’t regret it.

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Photo: Our late greyhound Hunter visiting Rowan Oak. Summer 2024.

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More on South Bound about my man William Faulkner:

The Writer’s Prayer

Why do you hate Faulkner?

Snopes family reunion

Faulkner’s sense of time

Hemingway, Faulkner, McCarthy and Dread Pirate Roberts walk into a café

Sentences in the dust

Flannery O’Connor and the wrong-eyed guitar

The butterfly hovered over the Caddy’s hood and there alighted. The boy was gaining on it, all this while. When it stopped, he launched himself. Well, flung, more like, without fear or care. He wanted to shoot that butterfly and smother it all in one great act of hurtle and whoop.

A little self-promotion today. I had a short story published last year in Ponder Review, the literary magazine at the Mississippi University for Women — Eudora Welty’s old school! The story is called “Southern Dogface,” and after initially being available only in print, now you can read it on the PR website. (Not that you shouldn’t subscribe to Ponder Review. Did I mention “The W” is Eudora’s old school?)

Click here or see below to read the story. It’s adapted from my forthcoming novel, THE COLDWATER GIRL (Regal House Publishing, Summer 2027), a picaresque about a Mississippi Delta artist’s search for meaning in the God-haunted, armed-to-the-teeth South.

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More about Ivy Coldwater from ‘South Bound’:

Ghost Blues

Hill Country Blues Power

Devil blues and hostile butterflies

More about Eudora Welty:

Eudora Welty: Live at the Fox

When Eudora Welty played a double bill with Fats Waller

School you later, alligator

A disturbance in the Southern fiction aisle

The Museum of Southern Sentences

Slouching towards Jackson

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William, give me the bourbon to accept
with gentlemanly grace
the criticisms of the parts
which might be changed
the clear eye and chops to change the parts
which must be changed
and the old-fashioned horse sense
to distinguish the difference

Cheers and amen

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Memphis is a city of song: Home of the Blues, birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll, Soulsville U.S.A. (Not that it’s a contest, mind, but our musical heritage can whip yours with Elvis tied behind our back. Think of it, the great Al Green recorded for the second-best-known soul label in town. James Carr’s “Dark End of the Street,” maybe the best soul song ever, came from the third.)

Of barbecue, too. Payne’s, Cozy Corner, Bar-B-Q Shop, Central, the Rendezvous, Tops, to name but a few. City of Pork Shoulders, with apologies to Carl Sandburg’s paean to Chicago.

And basketball, although you couldn’t prove it by this season’s Grizzlies and Tigers.

Allow me, also, to put in a word for our writers — from our late greats like Peter Taylor (“The Old Forest,” his best-known story, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A SUMMONS TO MEMPHIS) to Shelby Foote (his Civil War trilogy), to those still very much with us …

Here’s a sampling from three of the latter, whom I’m fortunate to call friends. Enjoy their words. Seek out their books1. And spread the word. Memphis can’t just sing and smoke meat and cross your ass over — it can write.

Barbecue in Meffis2 ain’t like anywhere in the world—they was a bunch of us went to Nashville one time, and we decided to try out the number-one barbecue place up there. I asked for a jumbo-all-white-pulled, and the sumbitch across the counter ast me where I was from. I said, “Meffis,” and he said, “Then why the fuk are you buyin’ barbecue in Nashville?” — John Pritchard, uncorking one of the least profane passages in his novel, JUNIOR RAY (NewSouth Books, 2005).

There was parties all up and down that narrow street with dice set up in the front room of one of them shotgun houses, a bar set up in the house next door, and then music callin from the third. Amen, brother. But that music could be heard all up and down the street and, I imagine, all the way to the river and back. Them houses were packed so tight together you could pass a bottle from porch to porch, or peel the paint right off a neighbor’s clapboard. That was a good time, Memphis was. — Richard J. Alley, conjuring 1937 Memphis in his jazz novel FIVE NIGHT STAND (Lake Union Publishing, 2015).

Tiny Red was from Arkansaw by way of New Orleans by way of the Orient, which is to say Tiny was a grabbag of musical inventiveness. You know him best for “Silver Dollar Pantleg Blues” and “A Frothing of Delight” and for inventing the phrase, “Your world.” But, in his day, Tiny was as hot as they come, as big as Big Bill. In his own tiny way, of course.

Tiny came to Memphis that fateful fall to scout up some talent for a travelin’ gig he was offered on the European continent. Most specifically he needed a second guitar and he heard tell of a Memphis bar rat name of Pete Holder played like the murmur of dreaming brooks. This was the word that he got. — Corey Mesler, poet, novelist, and here, short-story master, from “Conjuration: A Fabliau,” in the collection THE WORLD IS NEITHER STACKED FOR YOU NOR AGAINST YOU (Livingston Press, 2024)

Corey Mesler reading at the Black Tulip Press3 pop-up market March 14 at Memphis’s Flyway Brewery.

In Denis Johnson’s Vietnam novel TREE OF SMOKE, Skip Sands of the CIA is asked what Southerners are like in his country. Sands says,

“They’re known to be very gracious and slow of speech. Among their families and friends they’re very open with their affection. Whereas in the North we’re thought to be more restrained, more cautious, we give less of ourselves. That’s how we’re known. But there are exceptions. A person’s birthplace can’t tell you everything. And you know, we had a civil war, too. The North against the South.”

Barry Hannah, in a 1989 talk he gave at Ole Miss, at the invitation of fellow Mississippian and folklorist Bill Ferris, said,

“But I’m going to keep representing the South. I’m a proud Mississippian. I finished Mississippi College in ’64. In those days, I was so ashamed of being from Mississippi, I lied. And made up another voice. I said, ‘No, I’m from Indiana.’”

“Remember how horrible it was then, Bill? And Time magazine, Newsweek, if you were identified as being Mississippian, you were right off an ignorant bigot who burns churches.”

And the Drive-By Truckers, they sang,

You think I’m dumb, maybe not too bright
You wonder how, I sleep at night
Proud of the glory, stare down the shame
Duality of the Southern thing

Which was, of course, misinterpreted by some DBT fans, even though there’s another line that goes, Hate’s the only thing that my truck would want to drag. As the band’s Patterson Hood wrote in a 2015 essay in The New York Times Magazine,

“It was only later, when we started playing songs from the album at shows, that we noticed that fans were bringing rebel flags and waving them during a song called ‘The Southern Thing.’ The song was written to express the contradictions of Southern identity. … Instead, people were treating it as a rallying cry.”

All to say … I sometimes wonder if I’m a true Southerner, or just a visitor who liked the music, the food (just last week, I drove 100 miles for catfish), and the particular way they arrange words on a page down here — and never went home.

Home, originally, is Kentucky — but, crucially, on the northern edge. A small town on the Ohio River, an hour east of Cincinnati. There used to be a sign on the bridge that greeted travelers coming over to Maysville from Aberdeen, Ohio: “Gateway to the South.”

Which made us what? Fringe Southerners? Middling Midwesterners? Rather genial gatekeepers of gray-area origin? That is to say, men and women without a country?

It’s only gotten harder in recent years, this whole idea of who’s a Southerner and who’s not. Who belongs and who doesn’t. I wonder how Barry Hannah, who died in 2010, would feel about the South, and America, in this age of Trumpism and the teardown of democracy, and religious hypocrisy turned up to eleven, and racism given not just a platform from which to spew but the bully fucking pulpit itself.

Ah, the Modern Southern, land of supermajority red legislatures and bonkers bills about books and guns and prayers. About hate and division. We wake up to stories that begin like this, from the Daily Memphian:

NASHVILLE — The Tennessee House of Representatives passed a bill Thursday, Feb. 19, that lets private citizens and businesses refuse to recognize same-sex couples.

The bill states that “private citizens and organizations are not bound by the Fourteenth Amendment or the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges to recognize a marriage between individuals of the same sex.”

A slippery slope, yes, that could eventually lead to state-sanctioned discrimination against people of a certain color or heritage, or religious belief (or non-belief).

But hell, down here one man’s slippery slope is another’s water-park slide.

Rant over for today. I’m not changing any minds with these scratchings, and mental health is real. Calm down, old man. Take a deep breath. Open the blinds. Greet the new day.

Yes. Somewhat better now.

It’s an unseasonably warm late-winter Tuesday morning in Memphis, blue city I love. I’m hunkered here and not going away. I’m writing, in that fine Southern tradition. I’m listening to music that speaks the language of the place. It’s Elvis Costello, citizen of the world, wandering bard, Honorary Southerner by way of London, England, singing one he cut in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a few years back.

This tattered document
A mystery you can solve
Some burnt out filament
Flies still buzzing around the bulb

Country darkness

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It’s time for another visit to the Museum of Southern Sentences. Don’t forget to tip your docents.

For new visitors, here’s a primer from last year:

I’m a sentence junkie. (Not for nothing are they called lines.) I care more about what’s happening on the sentence level than anything else in a story or novel — more than plot, narrative arc, character development. More than pattern and balance, form and completion. More than commensurateness. Full disclosure: I don’t even know what the fuck commensurateness is.

Give me Eudora Welty writing, “The distant point of the ridge, like the tongue of a calf, put its red lick on the sky,” from her novel LOSING BATTTLES, and you can have all the taut thrillers and sprawling epics on all the shelves.

Give me Cormac McCarthy, especially in SUTTREE and his other East Tennessee novels. Give me any number of Mississippi masters of the art — Faulkner and Welty, of course, and also Barry Hannah and Lewis Nordan. Give me Flannery O’Connor. Charles Portis. Jean Toomer.

I’d follow their sentences anywhere.

Now, then, the latest additions to the permanent collection. There seems to be something of a theme happening — weather, extreme. Such cohesion was not intended. I won’t let it happen again.

By morning, all the trees wore glittering cut-glass armor, each twig sheathed in ice, and the earth was frozen iron hard, unpierceable even with a knife, let alone a shovel. — Shelby Foote, from Volume Three of THE CIVIL WAR: A NARRATIVE. I know. He’s Southern to a fault, and loves him some Nathan Bedford Forrest, but the trilogy is one of the great American literary feats, and the man could write the shit out of the weather.

High in chinaberry towers the wind moved swift as a river, the frenzied leaves, caught in its current, frothed like surf on the sky’s shore. — Truman Capote, reminding you what a writer he was, in OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS.

Early morning on a dismal June day, swirls of ground fog like clammy white fingers clutching the throats of trees. — Susan Dodd, in MAMAW, a novel telling of the life of (Kentucky-born) Zerelda Samuel, Frank and Jess James’s ma.

It was so hot, a bird dropped down out of the sky and walked in the shadows of the mourners to cool off. — Lewis Nordan, on a “typical Southern wake,” in THE SHARPSHOOTER BLUES.

Surfaced again, the levee was strewn with rubbish—as though it might have been raining one-eyed rag dolls and water-logged mattresses, captain’s chairs and tea chests spilling crawdads, bloated family Bibles like risen black loaves, long johns stuffed with straw. — Steve Stern, on Memphis, after the flood of 1937, in his novel HARRY KAPLAN’S ADVENTURES UNDERGROUND.

More background on the museum, from last year:

A few quick questions and answers, by way of explanation:

Why call it a museum? Because I always thought Eudora Welty’s sentences were so beautiful they ought to be in a museum. So I’ve created one.

Will there be an actual bricks-and-mortar museum someday? A gift shop? Can I buy a hoodie or coffee mug? Can I be a docent? Don’t be silly, although a hoodie with a sentence from SUTTREE running up one sleeve and down the other sounds cool.

What do you mean by Southern? I mean sentences written by Southerners or about the Southerners or the South. You can be from anywhere. It just comes down to subject matter. What I call “honorary Southerners” are especially welcome, meaning writers who hail from elsewhere but are entranced by, and/or adept at capturing the essence of, the South. Bob Dylan is an honorary Southerner. James Joyce may be, too. I haven’t fully puzzled that one out yet.

Oh, and the sentence need not rhapsodize or revel in the South to find a place in the Museum of Southern Sentences. The South can be a stunted land of small minds and dark hearts; sometimes it needs to be torn a new one.

What was all that business about commensurateness? Good of you to ask. Years ago, a good friend and fellow writer e-mailed me with another writer’s treatise on writing. It made my head hurt, beginning as it did with a line from Martin Amis about what makes a “good narrative”—that is, “pattern and balance, form, completion, commensurateness.” Later, there were references to “Linguistic Surface” and “Desire as Engine” and such. My head exploded, but fortunately all the pieces fell back into more or less their proper places, like in a cartoon.

Thing is, writing isn’t that complicated. Difficult, oh hell yes. Complicated, not really.

“When you write, you lay out a line of words,” Annie Dillard wrote in THE WRITING LIFE. “The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.”

I especially like the metaphor of the woodcarver’s gouge. (The other two worry me — thoughts of mine disasters and botched surgeries, you know.) Yes, a woodcarver it is. You’re a craftsman at work. You’re creating something out of something else — or out of nothing. It’s a daunting kind of freedom, but freedom nonetheless.

So tap into that imagination. Don’t overthink it — for God’s sake don’t think about commensurateness. Free your mind and the gouge will follow.

Or maybe think of the typewriter as a piano.

Don’t write. Play.

More visits to the Museum of Southern Sentences

Jorge Luis Borges in the Museum of Southern Sentences

Conjuring the blues in terra incognita

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World Boogie Blues Bar, 2026
Analog collage

Alive, alive, I want to get up and jive
I want to wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive
— “All I Want,” Joni Mitchell

… High on Rose, in Lexington, Kentucky, where my cousin and I wandered upstairs one night to discover a band called Shoeless Joe, and I drunkenly challenged them to play a John Prine song I didn’t know, and the singer busted out “He Was in Heaven Before He Died.” … The Last National Banque, in my hometown of Maysville, Kentucky, where on April 2, 1983, drinking with my brother, I left at halftime of the Louisville-Houston NCAA Tournament semifinal game to run the few blocks up to St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, to say confession, because I promised my mother I would, Bless me father, for I have imbibed (but at least I’ve kept the fifth commandment), and was back (almost) in time for the second-half tip. … The White Rose in York, Pennsylvania, into which a few of us from the newspaper walked one Saturday night to the sound of Old Tommy the bartender, not to be confused with Young Tommy the owner, singing, “I’m a rambler and a gambler,” and Barb finishing the line, “and a long way from home.” And so we’d found the HQ for what we would call the York Area Press Club. … O’Neills, on Pearse Street, in Dublin, which became our local that week of our trip (celebrating our 30th anniversary, with our son in tow), and the last stop on that one pub crawl after which, having gotten away from us down the sidewalk and doubled over in laughter at something known only to her, we declared Barb to be, in that brief moment, the drunkest person in all of Ireland, which was to say the drunkest person in all the world. Then off to the greyhound races at Shelbourne Park …

Have a round and remember
Things we did that weren’t so tender
— “Let the Train Blow the Whistle,” Johnny Cash

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Dammit, Elvis, 2026
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You might say I can’t write a novel without an Elvis reference. I’d say maybe I just haven’t tried yet.

Anyway, some riffs on the King from my three-going-on-four novels:

Elvis Presley was a mama’s boy grown up strange, a public-housing scourge in pink with an oil drip. But he had those hips and he had that voice. Carl Perkins heard it from over in Jackson and he made fast for Memphis.

They all did. Memphis called out and they came. Memphis was a song on the radio and they wanted some. They came to Sun Records to see Mr. Sam Phillips, and their wide eyes met his wild ones, their pleas fell on his cocked ear. They were young and dirt-poor and not averse to a better life through song. It beat chopping cotton or driving a truck or whatever else they’d done to turn dimes to dollars.

So out of Arkansas came Johnny Cash, sounding like doom looked. He had a voice of deep, swaggering sadness and wanted to sing gospel, but it was train tracks and prison bars instead. Jerry Lee Lewis, all piss and high-test, strode up from Louisiana with a piano on his back, keys aflame, just to show all those guitar players it didn’t have to be wood to burn. There were others from elsewhere. There was Charlie Feathers, like Elvis a Mississippi boy. Charlie Feathers — where’d he pick up that name, the pawnshop? But he may have whipped them all with “Defrost Your Heart,” a spooky-sad country croon like something out of the Hank canon.

Memphis called out and they came. Memphis was a song on the radio and they wanted some. They came to Sun Records to see Mr. Sam Phillips. He took them in and together they cut records of uncommon scruff and joy.

— from LONG GONE DADDIES (John F. Blair, 2013)

Punk Elvis, 2021
Decoupage with Tabasco bottle

They drifted on. Past an unmanned canoe filled with books, from which they plucked a Library of America edition of Carson McCullers’ stories and other writings; a fistful of pulp detective novels including one titled, That Girl was Trouble, which began, “‘Armed and dangerous,’ she said, brightly, as if these were the qualities she sought in a man”; a first edition of Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis; a seventh edition, seventh printing Boy Scout Handbook, bookmarked by a small blue “applicant’s record” card for the Reptile Study merit badge, between pages 424 (“Stimulants and Narcotics”) and 425 (“From Boy to Man”); a University Press of Mississippi edition of Eudora Welty photographs; and a Tupelo, Mississippi, phone book from 1941. He clutched this latter as if it were of divine provenance. He paged to the letter P, sought the name Presley, Vernon.

“If only we had a telephone, Mrs. Flood.”

“And the lines weren’t down, Mr. Flood.”

“Well, yes.”

“And it were 1941.”

“True.”

“And little Elvis wasn’t away at school. About a first grader, he’d be.”

“He started East Tupelo Consolidated that year.”

“We could talk to Gladys.”

“We could, if they had a phone.”

“If only.”

“I don’t guess this old party barge can take us back in time. I’m beginning to wonder if it’ll make Memphis.”

“Would Vernon be in or out of jail, at this point in the life of young Elvis?”

“He’d have been out. Done his time. Eight months for forgery. Wasn’t like he killed a man.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Still, shiftless by nature.”

“He worked. Helped build that shotgun shack they lived in.”

“Little ol’ thing,” she said, and sang at him, “You got a gal, six feet tall, sleeps in the kitchen with her feet in the hall.” She was that height, and a hair more; upon her big feet, big shoes: women’s elevens.

“I think it was hard for Vernon, you know, how close Elvis and Gladys were. They were so close I’m not sure there was room for him.”

“All that baby talk between them. No telling what else.”

“It would be fascinating, wouldn’t it? To talk to Gladys. Us calling long distance, to the past.”

“She’d be sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a can of Schlitz, I bet, waiting on Elvis to come home from East Tupelo Consolidated. Just waiting to ask how did first grade go, Little E? Did you get any, baby? And Elvis blushing, saying, Now, Mama.”

She was paging through the Boy Scout Handbook. She read passages from pages 424 and 425. She summarized. “Don’t smoke. Don’t drink—anything but milk. Not even tea or coffee. Jesus, these scolds. Oh, and don’t jerk off—that’s apparently not what the Boy Scouts have in mind by reptile study.”

She looked at him across the length of the party barge. He was looking down at his shoes, his men’s nines. He looked up and laughed, may even have blushed, difficult to say in the crepuscular murk of the day.

“Mostly,” he said.

“Mostly, what?”

“You were about to ask me if I was a good Boy Scout.”

— from EVERYBODY KNOWS (JackLeg Press, 2023)

Love in the Time of Typewriters, 2025
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Robert Johnson at the Boll Rivage (Live, One Night Only, with Special Guest), 2025
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He finished his beer and raised his hand for another. The jukebox played a Replacements song, one they recorded a mile or two away, at Ardent Studios, over on Madison. The song was called “Alex Chilton.” It was a love song to the band’s musical hero, the best song on my favorite album of theirs, but now it just reminded me that Alex was dead now. I didn’t know him, just saw him play a couple of times, long after his days in that great band Big Star. I liked that he didn’t care to be what people wanted him to be. He sang what he wanted, and fuck-all what his fans or the radio or the record companies wanted. What some people saw as an almost cunning knack for sabotaging his career, I recognized as that particularly ornery strain of Memphis-style artistic integrity. It’s some potent shit; I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Jerry Lee Lewis had had a little less of it, and Elvis a little more. I think Alex had just the right amount, somehow. Now he was dead and gone, and fronting strip-club house bands in heaven. Not even God could tell Alex Chilton what to sing.

— from COME AGAIN NO MORE (JackLeg Press, 2025)

Elvis ’53, 2014
Diddley bow with sideburns and lyrics

Ivy’s mama thought it wise to talk about something else. She said, “Well, Elvis was good to his mama. I’ll give the boy that.”

“I’m not talking about Elvis, Mama.”

“I blame that manager fella of his.”

“For what?”

“For everything. For the pills and the weight gain. For that ridiculous Clambake. What was his name?”

“Who, Mama?”

“The manager fella. Elvis’s.”

“Carny Tom Barker.”

“I blame him.”

— from THE COLDWATER GIRL (Regal House Publishing, forthcoming Summer 2027)

More on Elvis from South Bound

Robert Johnson at the Boll Rivage (Live One Night Only with Special Guest)

When Charles Portis met Elvis

Elvis in Shreveport

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Well, I’m sitting here wondering
would a matchbox hold my clothes?
— “Matchbox,” Carl Perkins, by way of the blues

To my collection of small things I hold dear, but for which I have no real use, consider these cool matchboxes. I picked them up a few years ago at Off Square Books down in Oxford, Mississippi. I don’t smoke, but lots of characters in my stories do. In my first published novel, LONG GONE DADDIES (John F. Blair, 2013), I may have overdone it. You can hardly read the words on the page for all the cigarette fog. In my latest, COME AGAIN NO MORE (JackLeg Press, 2025), there’s far less smoking, reflecting the times, I guess, but there is this moment, from the novel-opening wake for the laidoff journalists of a fictional Memphis newspaper:

Stell patted his cheek with her cigarette hand, to calm him; it was a small, tender moment and I watched the good reporters at the table watch it — the slow swipe of the cigarette and the nearness of fire to skin, the ashes left behind on his collar, scattered there, and the smoke like an aura around her hand — with the fascination and attention to detail that the best reporters watch everything.

Later, there’s a chapter featuring two brothers named by their parents after cigarette brands — Winston and Doral.

Cigarettes show up occasionally in my next novel, THE COLDWATER GIRL (Regal House Publishing), coming in 2027. A crow smokes one — this may be magic realism, or maybe it really happened.

(Yes, I know cigarettes are bad for you. So is bourbon, sausage gravy, and walking out your front door in the morning. I’m not being flippant. Just acknowledging that life is chancy, a tough dodge, no matter how you live. People make choices, live as they wish. Also, trains derail, oncoming cars blow through stop lights, and genetics can get you, good people, no matter how many stalks of fucking broccoli you eat.)

In my first “real” novel, THE VERY LAST NIGHT1, a girl named Lucy Miles, who smokes, says to a boy named Billy Heavens, who doesn’t,

“Cigarettes are just props, anyhow. Boys smoke ’em because it makes ’em look cool. Girls smoke ’em because it makes ’em look sexy. Grownups, they just need something to do with their hands.”

Something else to do with your hands — writing! It’s also bad for you, I fear, or anyway takes a toll, all that wrangling of sentences and wrestling with stories, and then the rejection, of course, and how people don’t read much literary fiction these days, don’t have the time or inclination, or the mental rigor, what after all that phone scrolling, to take it on. But I digress.

Anyway, I just had to have those matchbooks — tiny versions of THE SOUND AND THE FURY and THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY, only filled with matches instead of those matchless words, as written by writers who had a lot of pain and torment in their lives, but still got the work done. Maybe that’s why I keep them close. Not because I might need a match but as a reminder to show up for work here every day. A match brings light, after all. A match is a little beacon.

I put them in a drawer of my desk, along with a stainless-steel guitar slide I picked up years ago. I don’t play guitar, either, but I’m thinking about giving it a go. Like innocent Billy Heavens, Lucy’s pal, I could use some bad habits. Besides writing, I mean.

More on South Bound about my man William Faulkner:

Why do you hate Faulkner?

Snopes family reunion

Faulkner’s sense of time

Hemingway, Faulkner, McCarthy and Dread Pirate Roberts walk into a café

Sentences in the dust

Flannery O’Connor and the wrong-eyed guitar

The Devil and Skip James, 2026
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Was nothin’ but the devil, changed my baby’s mind
—“Devil Got My Woman,” Skip James

Ivy sang a little of the old Skip James blues, “Devil Got My Woman.” She sang, “I’d rather be the devil, than to be that woman’s man.” Ivy could sing a little blues, all down low and scratchy, but she couldn’t go up high and moan like only Skip James and some ghosts could do. Ivy was pretty sure she believed in ghosts, but it didn’t matter, really, whether she did or not: Ghosts believed in her.
— from my story “I’ll Take You There” (Fifty-Two Stories) and forthcoming novel THE COLDWATER GIRL (Regal House Publishing, Summer 2027)

More about Ivy Coldwater and the blues from ‘South Bound’:

Hill Country Blues Power

Devil blues and hostile butterflies

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I feel rage and dread on a daily basis. Helplessness, hopelessness. It’s not just about what Trump and Trumpism have done to America. It’s about tens of millions of Americans (some of our friends, neighbors, relatives) seeming fine with whatever he does.

But for this week’s Substack offering, I’m reprising a more hopeful post. Because this shit will end someday, and more rational people will lead the way in the rebuilding, like after a hurricane or any other disaster. Also, because I’ve got to believe in something, and a song is a pretty good thing …

(Originally published 3.11.25) Just a little song about songs and singers, and wishful thinking. About a beautiful delusion — that a song can change the country, save lives. But we need our delusions, even in these days of dread. And so, this beautiful one, this song for the day: Over the Rhine’s 2007 “If a Song Could Be President,” imagining a country where John Prine had run of the FBI, Emmylou Harris was an ambassador, and Neil Young a senator (“even though he’s from Canada.”)

No more the “minor key” of “half-truths and hypocrisy.” Harmony isn’t just what happens when voices join — it’s literally our foreign policy. (Scoff, sure, but remember who’s our ambassador: “World leaders would listen to her.”) And if things go sideways, at home or abroad, we have a trusted man at the desk to tell us about it: “Steve Earle would anchor the news.”

If a song could be president — if only, if only — there’s no (fuc)King Trump. No more the politics of fear and fealty. We would respect the planet, each other, and our allies — although I guess if Canada becomes the fifty-first state, Neil Young could become a senator. Maybe he could bring back, I dunno, democracy.

So, altogether now…

If a song could be president
We’d hum on Election Day
The gospel choir would start to sway
And we’d all have a part to play

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Hill Country Blues Power, 2026
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She drove on. The Delta had slowly given way to the Hill Country. The land had been so flat a pitcher’s mound would have seemed a natural wonder, but in time the land began to rise and plummet and then rise again. It seemed to move before her, like a blanket being shaken out.

This was good country for kudzu. Ivy saw two-headed beasts and broad-shouldered ghosts and her old long-necked third-grade teacher, Miss Hoop. She pulled over onto the dirt-and-gravel shoulder and there parked. She clambered down a hillside and into a little meadow facing what seemed to be a forest of the demon leaf. She stood looking at it for the longest time, as if communing with the shapes, the beasts and the ghosts, and the old schoolteacher who was the scariest of the lot.

She went back up to the car for her painting supplies and returned to the little meadow. She set up her easel and began to paint the kudzu-covered woods. She loved the shapes but even more so the shade, a green that was slightly darker and more vibrant than existed in the world’s known complement of colors, or anyway in Ivy’s. She made do. She painted an upright grizzly bear, up to its calves in kudzu, playing a fife as a menagerie of small bears and children, too, drummed drums in his wake.

— from THE COLDWATER GIRL (Forthcoming Summer 2027, Regal House Publishing)

Short stories adapted from THE COLDWATER GIRL:

“Southern Dogface,” Ponder Review, 2025

“Sources of Outlaw Country,” Eucalyptus Lit, 2024

“We’ll Always Have Shiloh,” The Museum of Americana, 2024

“I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” Bottle Rocket, 2024

“I’ll Take You There,” Harper Perennial’s Fifty-Two Stories with Cal Morgan, 2012

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But I’m goin’ back to Friars Point, if I be rockin’ to my head
— “Traveling Riverside Blues,” Robert Johnson

It’s some five thousand miles from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Friars Point, Mississippi, but master of magic realism Jorge Luis Borges could make short work of such a trip. His early story “The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell,” from the collection A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INIQUITY (1935), is an outlaw tale, set around the Mississippi River and drawing inspiration from one who knew it well, Mark Twain.

Here, then, a raft of sentences from JLB…

The Father of Waters, the Mississippi, the grandest river in the world, was the worthy stage for the deeds of that incomparable blackguard.

The Mississippi is a broad-chested river, a dark and infinite brother of the Paraná, the Uruguay, the Amazon, and the Orinoco.

It is a river of mulatto-hued water; more than four hundred million tons of mud, carried by that water, insult the Gulf of Mexico each year.

All that venerable and ancient waste has created a delta where gigantic swamp cypresses grow from the slough of a continent in perpetual dissolution and where labyrinths of clay, dead fish, and swamp reeds push out the borders and extend the peace of their fetid empire.

A bullet, a low thrust with a blade, a knock on the head, and the turtles and catfish of the Mississippi would be left to keep the secret among themselves.

— all from “The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell”

More from the Museum of Southern Sentences

The Museum of Southern Sentences (a new and occasional feature)

Conjuring the blues in terra incognita

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Eudora Welty: Live at the Fox, 2025
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She’d be celebrated as one of the South’s great photographers if she never wrote a word. But lord, those words. The best sentences ever — museum-worthy. Sentences like, The distant point of the ridge, like the tongue of a calf, put its red lick on the sky. And those stories she gave us — “tales of the raffish, the commonplace and the grotesque in the modern South,” as The New York Times said in a review of the 1941 collection, A CURTAIN OF GREEN. And those novels, DELTA WEDDING being my favorite, with that wonderful description of Memphis as “the old Delta synonym for pleasure, trouble, and shame.” A nod, also, to her novella, THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM. The lectures that became her beloved ONE WRITER’S BEGINNINGS, with its famous declaration — “A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.” There was literature in her letters. I imagine her grocery lists must have been wry, playful.

She was an inspired caricaturist, too, if a 1930s drawing of William Faulkner is any indication. (Seek it out. Or just imagine Faulkner looking like a het-up 13-year-old having fever dreams of the books he’d write.)

So who’s to say multi-talented Eudora Welty, out of Jackson, Mississippi, didn’t have a turn as a mandolin player in a bluegrass band?

Bonus material:

Here’s a riff on Welty the photographer, from my 2023 novel EVERYBODY KNOWS (JackLeg Press):

They drifted on, silently. An hour became two. He was studying the photographs by Eudora Welty, mostly of 1930s life in Mississippi. They were like reading a Eudora story, sly and playful and sadly wise. Her pictures told stories, spun tales, cracked windows to lost worlds. There was a picture of an old Black woman, seated, in white rumpled house dress and wearing what looks like a man’s hat, a Homburg, and the shadow from the brim covers her eyes save for the lower lid of the right. She’s smiling, just shy of a grin. In her raised right hand she grips an ice pick, but not to pick ice. On the opposite page, there’s an old, blind, white woman at her weaving.

There were pictures of dusty small-town Mississippi streets and country shacks, plum pickers, and a hog killing. There was a woman chopping cotton and another holding a baby. There were farmers in town, in their suspenders and hats, a Baptist deacon with a mustache that could have spanned the Yazoo River, a couple of Confederate veterans on a park bench. State-fair floats and women with wings in a pageant of birds. Shanty boats and a man buying a ticket from a booth under a sign that read “Colored Entrance to All Performances.” There was another of a group of tomato packers in Copiah County. They’re on a break, huddled around a man playing guitar. His right hand, the strumming hand, is a blur. Just to his right, a man in rolled-up shirt sleeves and no hat, looks on with a grin. The musician and the other workers are elevated, on some sort of platform or porch. There’s a boy in overalls and ballcap, on the ground, gazing up at the guitar player. He has one arm on the platform and the other is bent slightly backward with his hand on a hip. He’s in awe, looking up and gazing as if at some Tuesday-afternoon comet streaming across the Copiah County sky.

John showed the picture to Cora.

“What’s in that boy’s head, you think?”

“What’s he thinking, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

She thought about it, but not long.

“He’s just come to realize,” she said, “there are two kinds of people in the world.”

They drifted on. A couple of minutes became ten. He watched the sky for Tuesday-afternoon comets but all was calm up there. It was as if God and His angels were waiting to hear what she would say.

“Two kinds, huh?” John said, finally. It was another ten minutes before she answered. Maybe she just assumed he and God and His angels already knew the answer, since it was plain even to that boy in Copiah County, Mississippi, in nineteen and thirty-something.

“There are tomato packers,” she said, “and there are guitar pickers.”

More on Welty from ‘South Bound’:

Devil blues and hostile butterflies

When Eudora Welty played a double bill with Fats Waller

School you later, alligator

A disturbance in the Southern fiction aisle

The Museum of Southern Sentences

Slouching towards Jackson

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S.G. Goodman’s “Planting by the Signs,” and more sounds of life from 2025 …

Songs about fire signs and seekers, turnrows and snapping turtles. Songs about mamas and their babies, the devil and drunk Jesus.

Songs about dogs and the sun and how the sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass every day.

Songs about soil and stars, about talking shit and having fun.

A song about lighting out for heaven in an old Chevy Malibu. An epic worthy of Gillian Welch’s “I Dream a Highway” and Dylan’s “Highlands,” it goes on for a second shy of nine minutes, and is too short by half. (Maybe just wait for the movie version — wonder who plays the role of Death and who’s drunk Jesus? The Chevy Malibu can be the one from Repo Man.)

Midtempo meditations on mortality. Story songs for old souls. Hymns for heathens — and by heathens, I mean those who seek their own path of knowing (or not) and believe (or don’t) as they see fit, not as they’re told.

Surely the only album this year that references any of the following,

Spoonbread, butter, and some Karo
Potlikker hugging on a hambone

And the only songwriter (except for maybe Iris DeMent) who would come up with these next lines:

It’d be my last request up on death row
To taste the sunshine that make the little greens grow

By the time Goodman’s fellow Kentuckian Bonnie “Prince” Billy joins her for a duet on “Nature’s Child,” it’s as if she’s been traveling the backroads of the Bluegrass State, ruminating on all these songs and the stories behind, letting the words and melodies breathe some good country air, and just happened upon Mr. Oldham, there on the side the road, waiting for a ride.

The whole album feels that way — natural, I mean. As if these songs weren’t written and recorded but planted (by the signs) and cultivated. Because this isn’t product, a piece of entertainment. It’s art, but not for art’s sake — for sustenance (Goodman’s, and ours) in this strange world of dangers.

Gillian Welch, in the eleventh and final verse of her 14-minute, 39-second “I Dream a Highway,” asked the question, “What will sustain us through the winter?”

S.G. Goodman’s “Planting by the Signs” is this year’s answer.

More of my favorite music from 2025:

Second- and third favorite albums: “Orcutt Shelley Miller,” Orcutt Shelley Miller; “Snipe Hunt,” Tyler Childers.

Fave songs: “Wild One,” Cat Clyde; “Cowboy Dreams,” Boy Golden (feat. Cat Clyde); “Elderberry Wine,” Wednesday; “Beautiful Strangers,” Mavis Staples.

Fave lyrics:

Candle wax is dripping, pooling on the table cloth
Wine stain rings make moon phases that won't come off
— “Fumblin,” Paper Wings

Old faves I returned to, as ever: “World Gone Wrong” and “Street Legal,” Bob Dylan; “Straightaways,” Son Volt; “Red Cross,” John Fahey; “The Complete Recordings (The Centennial Collection),” Robert Johnson; “Wind Dark Sea,” Jolie Holland.

New/old discovery: “The Last Word on First Blues,” Allen Ginsberg, 2016 Omnivore Recordings edition of songs recorded 1971-84 w/ a little help from the likes of Bob Dylan and Don Cherry.

Blues album I wore out: “Ain’t the Man’s Alright,” R.L. Boyce from 2013.

Jazz albums I wore out: “Izipho Zam (My Gifts),” Pharoah Sanders, 2025 reissue on Strata-East; “Byrd Blows on Beacon Hill,” Donald Byrd; “Black Beauty: Miles Davis at Fillmore West” and Miles’s “Agharta”; “The Carnegie Hall Concert,” Alice Coltrane.

Best playlist I made: The “soundtrack” for my latest novel, COME AGAIN NO MORE (JackLeg Press), a Memphis-set tale of the newspaper life in the digital age, filled with local spoils including Alex Chilton, Little Junior Parker, Memphis Minnie, Mudboy and the Neutrons. Obscure fave: “Liquid Mood,” Timmy Thomas.

Best show: Jake Xerxes Fussell, free afternoon set, Raised by Sound Fest, Crosstown Concourse, Memphis.

Best Christmas gift: Pharoah Sanders notebook, from my son.

From 2024: My favorite music of the year: Riffing on the raff and hurray for the past

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