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My Daddy's Blues: A Childhood Memoir from the Land of Huck & Jim
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About My Daddy's Blues: A Childhood Memoir From The Land
Product Description Born near a dusty cement plant in the northeast Missouri village of Ilasco, close to Mark Twain Cave, Hannibal native Gregg Andrews draws on the voice of a child, the voice of a songwriter, and the voice of a historian to take readers on an intimate lyrical journey through the turbulent childhood of a white, rural, working-class boy in the 1950s and 60s. A tiny three-room house on the Mississippi River—a house that lacked indoor plumbing—provides the author's lookout perch on the American dream. Bottled up in that sweatbox house was a family of five struggling to cope with a father's alcoholism, war demons, crippling illness, and early death. My Daddy's Blues captures a riverbank childhood that despite its dark and dangerous aspects was rich in experience, grounded in strong family and community networks and guided by an incredibly strong mother. It was a childhood that fueled imagination, creativity, and a burning desire for education as an escape from the plant that helped send father and grandfather to early graves. An education that broke down walls of racism and parochialism.Set to a bluesy songwriter's rhythm and rhyme, the memoir celebrates belly laughs, storytelling, resilience, resistance, and triumph over adversity. It does not celebrate Tom Sawyer as the enduring symbol of Hannibal, Twain's boyhood home. Rather, it champions Huck Finn, who chose Hell over conventional morality, and it elevates the humanity of Jim and decries his bondage and its twisted legacies. About the Author Gregg Andrews is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Texas State University, former National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and prize-winning author of five books as well as a singer-songwriter/recording artist who fronts the south central Texas band, Doctor G & the Mudcats. He grew up in a tiny home without indoor plumbing in the shadows of a sprawling cement plant in Monkey Run, a section of the company town of Ilasco, Missouri. His childhood playground was a creek at the mouth of the Mississippi River, a couple of miles south of Mark Twain's boyhood home of Hannibal. Occupational lung diseases killed his father and grandfather in their late 40s, but education perhaps saved him from a similar fate. In the past 20 years, songwriting pulled Andrews away from writing scholarly books for an academic audience to creative non-fiction and his recent memoir, My Daddy's Blues: A Childhood Memoir from the Land of Huck & Jim. Many of his storytelling songs represent the soundtrack to the memoir.
