Thacker Mountain Radio returns to Off Square Books this week and is proud to welcome back one of the show’s co-founders, singer-songwriter Caroline Herring. Our broadcast will also feature authors with books about Mark Twain and Tammy Wynette, as well as music from Delta songwriter Jimmy Phillips.

Join host Jim Dees and the Thacker Mountain house band, the Yalobushwhackers, at Off Square Books this Thursday, March 11 at 6PM. If you can’t make it in person, tune in to Rebel Radio, 92.1FM in Oxford. Don’t forget our rebroadcast every Saturday night at 7PM on Mississippi Public Broadcasting immediately following A Prairie Home Companion.

Jimmy McDonough’s Tammy Wynette, Tragic Country Queen (Viking) is considered the first exhaustively researched biography of the late Queen of Country Music. McDonough is unsparing in his depiction of Wynette’s ups and downs, from her humble Mississippi beginnings to sudden Nashville ascension. Along the way there are painkillers and a long string of hit records… and husbands. Chief among her exs of course, is George Jones, with whom Wynette recorded what are considered some of the finest country duets of all time. Jones, of course, had his own demons: “When drunk, Jones claimed to see ghosts and monsters. High on cocaine, he adopted a Donald Duck voice and wanted to do an album as his duck alter ego, “De Doodle.”

McDonough is also the author of Shakey, Neil Young’s Biography, as well as books on filmmakers Russ Meyers and Andy Milligan.

Related link: Jimmy McDonoughs Website.

Roy Morris Jr. is the author of Lighting Out For The Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West And Became Mark Twain (Simon and Shuster). This action-packed, often hilarious, book recounts how the twenty-five year old Sam Clemens, out of work in Missouri as a riverboat pilot and with the Civil War spreading his way, accepted his brother Orion’s offer to join him in the Nevada Territory. With the frequent help of Twain’s own words, Morris follows his subject as he dodges Indians and gunfighters, receives marriage advice from Brigham Young, burns down a mountain with a frying pan, hikes across the floor of an active volcano, becomes one of the first white men to try the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing, and writes his first great literary success, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

Morris is the editor of Military Heritage magazine and the author of four books on the Civil War and post-Civil War eras. He lives in Chattanooga.

Related link: Roy Morris Jrs Website.

Greenville native Jimmy Phillips is a true Mississippi Delta musician. He taught himself guitar and has accompanied some of the last great Delta bluesmen, primarily Son Thomas and Sam Chatmon. Besides earning two degrees from Ole Miss, Jimmy has spent his life playing, composing and recording music. In 2002, his underground hit, Fried Chicken, was called a “genius stroke,” by The New York Times. Jimmy now resides in Taylor (near the catfish store) and coordinates the Oxford Songwriter's Association.

A recent feature story about Caroline Herring on National Public Radio said: “Mississippi singer-songwriter Caroline Herring's new album, Golden Apples of the Sun, is her most intimate and mature work to date, mixing timelessly personal story songs with "Gothic tales of the modern South.” The record also includes inspired covers of "See See Rider," "Long Black Veil" and even Cyndi Lauper's 1986 hit, "True Colors." Another tune from the CD, “The Dozens,” was included in the 2009 Oxford American CD. Herring grew up steeped in Southern literature and church choirs, and has developed a writer’s eye for music. The first tune on Sun is about Gulf Coast artist Walter Anderson (1903-1965).

“I’ve been working on the first song, ‘Tales of the Islander’, for several years,” she says. “The melody has changed a lot, the structure has evolved. Walter Anderson is a Mississippi artist I’ve always loved. He was a naturalist – and I’m not. I was intrigued with his long trips to the islands around Mississippi. He was so thirsty for life. I built the song around this little cottage he lived in that no one was allowed to go into. After he died, his family went in and discovered – in addition to thousands of pieces of art – that he had painted magnificent murals on the walls. Each wall was part of a day’s cycle: sunrise, sunset…”

Related link: Caroline Herrings Website.