A parade of originals sings a country tune
‘Mend of Living’ wins
‘J ohnny’s Cash & Charley’s Pride: Lasting Legends and Untold Adventures in Country Music” (Spring House Press), by Peter Cooper
In his new book on country music, in the midst of a riff about Tom T. Hall’s ascent, Peter Cooper boils the Nashville songwriting business down to its nuclear core.
“When a songwriter signed a publishing deal — and this holds true today — his job was to write songs that would please the publisher. And publishers are pleased by songs that get played on the radio. It’s ‘Figure out what’s working, and then do that.’ Makes perfect sense, though the end of that road is most often frustration and burnout for the creators, and for listeners who don’t want to spend their day hearing twenty slightly different replications of the same tired and silly thing.”
Cooper then tells how Hall began to move away from formulaic “Little Darlin’” songs and began to write what he knew. The breakthrough came when he described a week he had spent behind bars in Paintsville, Kentucky, in the classic, “A Week in a Country Jail.”
It’s one of many eureka moments in a book that reads like a collection of priceless bar stories. The unforgettable characters who refused to toe the line are the ones who interest Cooper, from Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn to Lee Ann Womack and Taylor Swift. His knack for finding the formative experiences that led them to greatness makes these tales come alive.
A talented singer-songwriter himself, Cooper used to write about country for Nashville’s daily newspaper, The Tennessean. In both roles he has gained the trust of some of Nashville’s most colorful figures.
Original
His attention is drawn routinely to the original and the surprising, from the tonsillectomy that gave Ernest Tubb his distinctive singing style to the mysterious death of Hank Williams to the heartache that drove George Jones to greatness.
He tells how Kris Kristofferson lost connections with his mother, who disowned him after he turned his back on an Oxford education to pursue his Nashville dream, and with his first wife. Cooper describes Kristofferson stumbling in a stupor down Music Row, delaying the surprise that he’s about to write the timeless hangover classic, “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.”
And that was before the betterknown story, the one in which Kristofferson flew a helicopter onto Johnny Cash’s lawn to persuade him to listen to a demo tape, which included that very song.
Cooper’s first-person accounts of interactions with the greats may strike some as cloying, and he closes with a “coda” that seems tacked on because, well, it is. In it he invokes the famous line that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, only to argue for the usefulness of his craft.
But there’s no need. The art of the stories is in the telling, which is where Cooper wins the argument. Arriving at the end of this sparkling collection, few will doubt that writing about music is exactly what Cooper should be doing.
A novel that explores the human side of organ transplantation through the story of a single heart won the medically themed Wellcome Trust Book Prize on Monday.
French author Maylis de Kerangal’s “Mend the Living” beat five other finalists to the 30,000-pound ($38,000) prize, which aims to bridge the gap between literature and science.
Translated by Jessica Moore, “Mend the Living” follows a heart over 24 hours, from the time its owner is left brain-dead in a car accident to the moment it begins beating in another body.
Crime writer Val McDermid, who chaired the judging panel, called it a “compelling, original and ambitious” novel that journeys “from trauma to hope.”
Funded by health charity Wellcome, the prize is open to fiction and nonfiction works published in Britain that deal with medicine, health or illness.
The other shortlisted books included “When Breath Becomes Air,” doctor Paul Kalanithi’s posthumously published account of his life with terminal cancer, and Siddhartha Mukherjee’s genetics study “The Gene.”
Also on the list were Ed Young’s look at microbes “I Contain Multitudes,” David France’s AIDS history “How to Survive a Plague” and Sarah Moss’ novel “The Tidal Zone.”
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CONAKRY: As Conakry’s year as World Book Capital gets under way, book lovers in Guinea are seizing a rare opportunity to instil a lifelong appreciation for the written word in a nation where most people are illiterate.
The ramshackle west African capital ushered in a year of all things literary on Sunday with acrobatics, slam poets and books in every corner, beginning a year of events as UNESCO’s designated capital for the promotion of reading.
Images of authors’ faces and dust jackets are newly splashed across walls and billboards in this city of two and a half million people, while books multiply by the minute on stands and in neat arrangements on the floor for pedestrians to browse.
The World Book Capital concept is now in its 17th year after beginning life in Madrid in 2001 with the aim of promoting a yearlong programme of events to make bibliophiles out of the most reticent readers.
Speaking at the opening event in the city centre, President Alpha Conde described the UNESCO designation as “more than an honour”, calling it a unique chance for Guinea to “initiate its cultural renaissance and return to its former place in the cultural arena of Africa”.
Conde described Guinea’s literary figures as bulwarks against an Africa “at risk of losing its cultural identity”.
However, the country’s literary path is laden with obstacles.
According to the most recent UN data just 25 percent of Guineans are literate, and of those who completed school just 35-40 percent read regularly, according to the education ministry.
“We are making a big push because Guineans don’t like to read at all,” said Mamadou Bailo Diallo, president of Guinea’s street booksellers association.
“We are trying to persuade Guinea to buy books,” Diallo added. “But what is really important is not to buy, but to read.”
Many of the booksellers offer second-hand stock in so-called “bookshops on the floor”, selling them directly from the pavement.