A Few Honest Words

New in late October from University Press of Kentucky comes Jason Howard's A Few Honest Words:  The Kentucky Roots of Popular Music.  Howard, who co-authored Something's Rising:  Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal with Kentucky's literary favorite son, Silas House, is currently a James Still Fellow at the University of Kentucky.  His features, essays, and reviews have appeared in such publications as The Nation, Sojourners, Paste, No Depression, and The Louisville Review, and his commentary has been featured on NPR.

A Few Honest Words contains a foreword by none other than the great Rodney Crowell who has this to say about the book, "Jason Howard has crafted a thoughtful and loving homage to his beloved state of Kentucky, giving us pitch-perfect journalistic prose from the heart of the country."

I am most impressed by the creative nonfiction treatment Howard gives to his interview subjects. This could be yet another interview-type book about famous musicians if it weren't for the author's almost cinematic bent for immersing his reader into the world, the room, the mannerisms, the memories, and the stories of his subjects in every chapter. I have roared up the side of a mountain in the back of a pickup truck with Matraca Berg, experienced a lesson in jazz improvisation from Morehead State professor, Jay Flippin  with jazz pianist Kevin Harris, felt proud at having "Nappy Roots Day" declared by the Governor of Kentucky, and shared a glimpse into the inspiration for Joan Osborne's hit song "One of Us." All of these intimate experiences come to the reader through Howard's conscious structuring of each chapter where an important theme is revealed early on through a focused image, then the interview subject gradually unfolds relevant life events to Howard that function like improvised variations on that theme, and finally each chapter concludes with coming home to the theme.  There is an almost A-B-A musical construction inherent in this treatment that I find both familiar and pleasing, as both a musician and a reader.

If a reader picks up A Few Honest Words expecting a who's-who of famous Kentucky musicians over the generations, she might be disappointed.  While important influences like Bill Monroe, Lionel Hampton, Loretta Lynn, Jean Ritchie, The Everly Brothers and many others are acknowledged, most of the subjects for this work are current, working musicians in roots music who feel the profound influence of place at work in their craft.  Therefore, the roots genres discussed in this book range from the popular country songs of the Judds to the hip-hop of Nappy Roots, from the Bakersfield sound of Dwight Yoakum to Louisville jam band, and from the delicate folk renderings of Daniel Martin Moore to the plucky bluegrass stylings of Dale Ann Bradley.

The book opens with a chapter on Naomi Judd who joined Howard for his reading at the Southern Book Festival in Nashville recently.  The title--A Few Honest Words--comes from a Ben Sollee tune.  Sollee is also featured in the book along with other Kentucky musicians who have been active in the struggle against mountaintop removal like Jim James of My Morning Jacket and Kate Larken.  Nashville songwriters, Matraca Berg and Chris Knight, singer song writer and trad musician Carla Gover, gospel singer and theatre producer, Cathy Rawlings and indie rockers, the Watson Twins are among those also presented.

Perhaps my favorite passage in A Few Honest Words comes in a sidebar of the Kevin Harris chapter called "The Magic of Jazz" where the pianist traces his musical philosophy back to where he first heard his junior high band director play "Georgia on My Mind" on the piano. Says, Harris, "He played the tune, started to improvise a bit, and then came back to it. And that transition, being able to transform something like that, and then come back--it's like being a magician."  Harris goes on to say that years of playing have given him new insight into that process. He learned that whatever he was doing to the music, that transformation was also happening to him and the audience by making everything connect.

The structure of A Few Honest Words by Jason Howard winks a knowing eye at that kind of musical magic by transforming the reader with words that make everything connect. Howard skillfully brings each chapter back home to each musician's Kentucky roots, making much musical and literary sense.

This review aired on WVXU's Around Cincinnati on November 18, 2012.

You can listen to the review at this link:  Click here to listen to the review.

Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky

New this June from University Press of Kentucky's oral history series comes a compelling work from Nora Rose Moosnick entitled Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky: Stories of Accommodation and Audacity. Moosnick reveals in the preface that she came to this project as a way to honor two men she loved, her father, Monroe Moosnick and her adopted grandfather, Mousa Ackall, whose Palestinian family became melded with her own Jewish family through a mutual knowledge of fabrics.  The author speculates that the Moosnicks and the Ackalls might have been drawn together out of an appreciation of their likenesses and an understanding of the odd position they held as Jews and Arabs in Kentucky.

As Nora Rose Moosnick set out to honor these two important men in her life through chronicling the stories of other Arab and Jewish merchant families in Kentucky, she found that women's stories in particular offered an appreciation of Arabs' and Jews' lives in their new surroundings through the overlap between them.  As a sociologist, Moosnick acknowledges that Kentucky harbors a larger story about immigrants settling in places not usually associated with them.  And strangely enough, the author suggests that it may be in places like Kentucky where Arabs and Jews are most apt to discover their likenesses.

Grounded in oral history while informed in research practices, the book is not intended to be an academic work.  Moosnick tells the stories of ten Arab and Jewish women while aiming to confound simplistic notions that states--like Kentucky-- in the Appalachian region lack diversity. The author asserts that the stories of these women tend to speak to larger themes. They tell similar tales about public service to communities, mother-daughter relationships, the agility required to work, mother and be an active community member, and what it meant to be an Arab or Jewish mother nearly a century ago.

In the chapter entitled "Publicly Exceptional," Moosnick looks at the lives of Jewish fashion entrepreneurs Sarah and Frances Myers  who sold high-end women's clothing in Hopkinsville in their family shop, Arnold's. Although socially rebellious--the sisters were known for holding poolside cocktail parties on Sundays during the 1960s--their shop was a gathering place for many in Hopkinsville who described it as a "salon." Socially prominent women frequented both their parties and the shop.

This chapter also inspects the life of former Lexington mayor, Teresa Isaacs, whose political career is firmly rooted in her family, the family business, and her Arab American identity. Her family legend includes enterprising Lebanese ancestors who settled in coal country to work as shopkeepers and peddlers until Isaac's grandparents established a theatre business. Isaac's political bent was probably influenced by her father's term as mayor of Cumberland in the 1960s, but community service loomed large in her family's history in Appalachia.  As a Christian Arab, she has sometimes been accused by political opponents of being a terrorist.  Since Isaacs completely embraces her Arab heritage and her Christian roots, she finds easy allies in both the Muslim community(with whom she shares "blood ties") and the Jewish community(with whom she shares the Old Testament.) In fact, when her political enemies attacked, it was members of the Jewish community who came to her aid, distributing flyers that disputed any connection with extremists.

Moosnick's book also examines Arab and Jewish mothers in the 21st Century and how they balance their working lives with child rearing. She dedicates much discussion to how some Jewish and Arab families established businesses to elevate their children to the professional class, only to dissolve those businesses when their children achieved the desired success. She concludes the book by comparing two family stories of archetypal women from the distant past named "Rose" one of whom is her own Jewish grandmother and another who is Rose Rowady, who left Lebanon in 1909.  Both stories were related to Moosnick by the women's elderly sons.

In the preface of Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky,  Nora Rose Moosnick has this comment about her work:  "in some sense, I am going through an attic. I  hope you find gifts, as I have in what I have uncovered."  The real, examined lives of Arab and Jewish women in Kentucky--who share more in common than we may have imagined--are gifts to the reader for understanding the complexities of our stories.

(This review aired on Around Cincinnati on October 14, 2012.  Here is an audio link for listening to the review:

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