A truly definitive look at a bluegrass legend and the scene that produced him.
An exhaustively researched profile of bluegrass legend John Duffey (1934-1996) that covers not only his life in music, but also those of his colleagues and contemporaries.
Duffey was a musician and singer who founded the important bluegrass groups The Country Gentlemen and The Seldom Scene. But even in the late 1950s, when The Country Gentlemen were forming, Duffey felt that the popular bluegrass sound was starting to get stale. When the band started recording in the early ’60s, he pushed them to incorporate more modern sounds to accommodate the folk boom. Purists scoffed, but it allowed the band to play a wider variety of clubs. That’s also when Duffey realized that entertaining a crowd took showmanship as well as musicianship, and he encouraged the band members to do things like play an agonizingly slow version of the usually fast-paced song “Cripple Creek.” Duffey also had some quirks of his own, and the authors collected extensive quotes from his friends and band mates that describe them. The Country Gentlemen were limited by Duffey’s fear of flying and his love of bowling, for example—both of which may have factored into his quitting the band in 1969. That didn’t last long, though, and Duffey pushed the boundaries of bluegrass again with The Seldom Scene in the early ’70s. Moore (co-author: Cerphe’s Up, 2016, etc.) and Keplinger (Film/Stevenson Univ.) also devote considerable time to their subject’s band mates, such as Charlie Waller, Eddie Adcock, and Tom Gray, as well as fringe figures in Duffey’s story, including musician Buzz Busby, photographer Carl Fleischhauer, and bluegrass luminary Ralph Stanley, who respected Duffey’s ability but not his off-the-cuff personal style. It’s obvious from the first chapter of this book that Moore and Keplinger aim to spare no details. They even start with a short history of Washington, D.C.’s Columbia Hospital for Women, where the musician was born, and include a photocopy of the hospital birth certificate. The book is roughly chronological from there, occasionally circling back to offer a different perspective on a particular story or some additional background. As a result, the authors leave very little untouched, right down to what Duffey preferred to eat for breakfast when he was hungry (six eggs, fatback, and buttered toast) and when he wasn’t (four eggs, fatback, and buttered toast). Despite the copious detail, however, the book offers a rich and entertaining musical history of the bluegrass scene as well as more academic materials, including an essay by Robert Kyle on Duffey’s Irish roots and a lengthy discography. Throughout, the authors’ prose is straightforward, but it can be a bit dry, as when they devote a single paragraph to breakthrough surgery that was used to restore Adcock’s playing ability but offer no quotes from the man himself about the experience. Also, when they use Duffey’s own words, they frequently and distractingly italicize them throughout the book rather than more smoothly working them into the text.
A truly definitive look at a bluegrass legend and the scene that produced him.Pub Date: April 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63263-840-3
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Booklocker.com, Inc.
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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