Backlist Treasures: Worthy reads from a little while back, newly out in paperback, found dirt-cheap online or at used bookstores or recommended at lunch or happy hour and whatnot. Or we just happened to think about it.
CHINABERRY
SIDEWALKS
Rodney Crowell
Knopf, 2011
259 pages
Since Rodney Crowell appeared in the May/June issue with Willie Nelson’s album of Crowell covers, and appears in this issue with his upcoming new solo album, it’s a good time to take another look at his 2011 autobiography.
The Grammy-winning singer and songwriter delivers a truly moving account of a poor, rough childhood on the outskirts of Houston in the early 1950s. His father drank heavily and was often physically abusive. His mother was an epileptic Holy Roller who would sometimes drink and then repay her husband’s abuses in kind. As a small child, Rodney often had to defuse their fights. They all wound up in the emergency room at least a few times, once even on his tenth birthday. In lesser hands, this might’ve been a bitter tell-all screed of victimhood and reproach. But Crowell stands the misery-memoir trope on its head and instead gives us a much richer, nuanced, and often funny, brutally honest but fiercely loving portrait of these two flawed people and the world they inhabited.
Wrenching details of dire poverty, a disintegrating house (literally and figuratively), a Category 4 hurricane, and bug infestations alternate with comic and near-idyllic recollections of boyhood misadventures, tent revivals, and friendships so vividly depicted, it’s tempting to go Google the names to see what ever came of them. But it’s difficult to put the book down that long.
Anyone familiar with Crowell’s songwriting knows the man can turn a compelling phrase. But he’s equally adept, if not more so, at long, flowing narrative that finds humor, grace, and love in even the darkest places.
In 2022, he also published Word for Word, taking a more intimate look at his career, his songwriting, and his overall creative process. That one is a little harder to find, but sounds like an absolute must-read. –L. J. Gouveia