Blood: A Memoir

★★★★ Allison Moorer DA CAPO. £20

Possibly the most country and western tragedy ever.

Think you’ve got problems? As teenagers, future country stars Allison Moorer and her sister Shelby Lynne heard their father first shoot their mother and then turn the gun on himself. The murder-suicide has, unsurprisingly, shaped both singers’ lives ever since as they have attempted to make sense of the senseless through their music. Blood, and its accompanying album of the same title, fills in the before and after of that horrific moment, pulling no punches, varnishing nothing, making the brutality of Moorer’s honesty sometimes hard to read. But she is also filled with love and, if not exactly forgiveness, at least some understanding of her father’s weaknesses and motives, particularly the thwarted musical ambition which lay beneath his drinking and anger. Tragic, weepingly sad but also redemptive and inspiring, Blood is one of the greatest country songs ever written as a book.