With Music and Justice for All: Some Southerners and Their Passions

by Frye Gaillard

Overview

For nearly forty years, Frye Gaillard has covered the American South as a journalist, historian and writer of memoir. With Music and Justice for All is a collection of Gaillard's most compelling work, one writer's odyssey though a time and place. There are stories here of the civil rights movement, a moral, social and political upheaval that changed the South in so many ways. Gaillard has captured the essence of that drama by giving it a face—telling the stories of the ordinary people, as well as the icons. In the course of these pages, the reader not only meets Dr. Martin Luther King, but also the lesser known heroes such Perry Wallace—the first African American basketball player in the Southeastern Conference and Thomas Gilmore, the first black sheriff in one of the toughest counties in the Alabama Black Belt, a man of non-violence, who refused, in deference to the fallen Dr. King, to carry a gun during the thirteen years he served as sheriff.

But Gaillard examines the South from other angles as well—the religious heritage, for example, that once led Flannery O'Connor to write about a "Christ-haunted" South. We meet Billy Graham, the greatest evangelist of his time, who admitted in the course of interviews with Gaillard that his ministry represented a "very narrow gift." There are profiles here of the Southern Baptist renegade Will Campbell and former President Jimmy Carter, whose commitment to his own understanding of Christianity has sometimes led him into controversy. Gaillard writes also about the revealing power of Southern music—how the great Johnny Cash, for example, became a force for reconciliation in America. In the final section of the book we meet some of the characters Gaillard has covered through the years, including John T. Scopes, whose final public appearance Gaillard wrote about as a young reporter in Nashville.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826515889
Publisher:	Vanderbilt University Press
Publication date:	03/24/2008
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Frye Gaillard, writer-in-residence at the University of South Alabama, is the author of seventeen other works of non-fiction, including Prophet from Plains: Jimmy Carter and His Legacy; The Dream Long Deferred: The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina; Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America; and Watermelon Wine: The Spirit of Country Music.

Table of Contents

Part I A Change is Gonna Come
1 Deliverance: The Greensboro Four
[FRANKLIN MCCAIN, JOE MCNEILL, JIBREEL KHAZAN]
2 The Power and the Glory of a Tuna Fish Sandwich
[CHARLES JONES]
3 Perry Wallace: The Long Road Home
[PERRY WALLACE]
4 The Sheriff Without a Gun
[THOMAS GILMORE]
5 RFK: A Night at Vanderbilt
[ROBERT KENNEDY]
6 Free at Last, Free at Last
[LEWIS BALDWIN]

Part II Amazing Grace
7 The Gospel According to Will
[WILL CAMPBELL]
8 The Double-Edged Legacy of Billy Graham
[BILLY GRAHAM]
9 Charlotte's Holy Wars: Religion in a New South City

10 The Lonely Crusade of Karen Graham
[KAREN GRAHAM]
11 Koinonia: The Birth of Habitat for Humanity
[MILLARD FULLER]
12 The Lion's Den and Jimmy Carter
[JIMMY CARTER]

Part III Soundtracks
13 The Man in Black
[JOHNNY CASH]
14 Southern Rock: The New Good Ole Boys
[CHARLIE DANIELS]
15 Old-Fashioned Notions of Love and Music
[SQUIRREL NUT ZIPPERS]
16/17 Country Queens: Cowgirl's Prayer & Sweeter with the Years
[EMMYLOU HARRIS, MARSHALL CHAPMAN]
18 With Music and Justice for All
[SI KAHN]

Part IV Characters
19 A Visit with John T. Scopes
[JOHN T. SCOPES]
20 James Baldwin's First Journey South
[JAMES BALDWIN]
21 The Many Crusades of Tipper Gore
[TIPPER GORE]
22 The Education of Robert Howard Allen
[ROBERT HOWARD ALLEN]
23 Pride and Prejudice
[DR. C. ERIC LINCOLN]
24 The Last Confession
[PALMER GAILLARD, ROBERT CROSHON]

Editorial Reviews

Frye Gaillard writes with poetry in his heart and a mind set on justice. A storyteller in the best Southern tradition, Gaillard has a fine eye for the connectedness of things, usually including music and religion. Here he gives us the measure of the best of the south for an entire generation, from Johnny Cash to Jimmy Carter, from Tipper Gore to Country Queens.
—Susan Ford Wiltshire

..a good time, a good read, and a lot to think about.
—The Journal of Southern History

He does, however, offer wonderful prose and the kind of unshakeable faith in humanity that grows rarer by the day.
—Nashville Scene

These pieces amount to a fresh, non-standard survey of Southern culture over the last 40 years: significant figures who are not well known and new lights on ones who are. It will buck you up, I believe, if you have strong feelings about the South.
—Roy Blount Jr.

Frye Gaillard's latest collection of essays confirms once more that he is one savvy writer on the heartbreaking contradictions of the South.
—Relishnow.com

"Frye Gaillard...has earned a place on the top shelf of interpreters of the recent South."
—Don Noble, Alabama Writers' Forum

...a stellar collection of some of [Gaillard's] finest profiles of various Southerners, garnered from decades of work. Think of it as a sort of Frye's Greatest Hits, as this collection is one of his very best.
—John Grooms, creativeloafing.com

Frye Gaillard tells the truth at all costs, confronting racism head on, explicating Southern music better than anybody else in the world, presenting indelible (and often surprising) portraits of everybody from Marshall Chapman to Billy Graham, Tipper Gore to Johnny Cash. Rigorous integrity and generous, graceful writing characterize this fine book.
—Lee Smith

Gaillard also isn't afraid to confront the difficult side of what it means to be Southern.
—The Decatur Daily

From the Publisher