King of Country - Wayne Greenhaw
Fiction
ISBN 13: 978-1-57966-077-2
ISBN 10: 1-57966-077-0
Trade paper / French flaps
6" x 9"
350 pp.
$16.95
Bobby Lee Butler has the gift of country music. Given an old guitar, his fingers soon learn to summon forth the music, sweet and lonely. His voice shapes itself into spirituals, gospels, eventually to the blues and boogie tunes that are in his blood. Bobby Lee’s talent carries him from Montgomery (where he lands a singing job on a local radio station) to Nashville (where the Grand Ole Opry is just a stepping stone to a career on national radio, television, and stunning record sales). He is loved by women wherever they can find him, while his wife and children would love just to see him.
Fast-lane living becomes the challenge to Bobby Lee’s intrinsic, simple gifts, the source of his power. Greenhaw captures the grit and glamour of country music—with its roots in the rural churches and on the porches of simple frame houses to the glitzy extreme of Lear jets and limousines belonging to the pampered stars. Imagine Robert Altman’s film Nashville boiled down to the essence of a single character arc, an you have the treatment Wayne Greenhaw gives Bobby Lee Butler’s crowded, crazy, thirty-four year life—a classic, triumphant tale of success behind the bright lights, a shocking look at show business and celebrityhood, love, ambition, and survival in tabloid-saturated America.
Praise for Wayne Greenhaw"Wayne Greenhaw is one of the best-ever writers of narrative." "Wayne Greenhaw is simply one of the best writers in America and truly one of the South’s greatest treasures." "Wayne Greenhaw finds the history that haunts us and writes it smart, sharp and hard, words falling like a tack-hammer on our conscience." |
ABOUT WAYNE GREENHAW
WAYNE GREENHAW is the 2006 recipient of the Harper Lee Award for Alabam'’s Distinguished Writer, given annually at Monroeville’s Alabama Writers' Symposium.
In 2005, he received the Clarence Cason Award for Nonfiction, given annually by the University of Alabama’s College of Communication.
An award-winning journalist and former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Greenhaw's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Miami Herald, Reader’s Digest, Music City News, and many others.
He is the author of more than seventeen books, the most recent of which is The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow (co-authored with Donnie Williams). He divides his time between Montgomery, Alabama, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.