Chinaberry Sidewalks

Starred review from October 25, 2010
Singer-songwriter Crowell's upbringing in Texas had all the prerequisite elements of a hardscrabble country music story—drinking, guns, fistfights, fierce spankings, infidelity, Pentecostal preachers, fishing, love, hate, laughter, tears, sex, drugs, and of course, music. But Crowell's storytelling abilities and narrative flair elevate this book far above the average music memoir. Born in 1950 to a blue-collar, hard-drinking, country-singing father and religious mother, Crowell lived in Jacinto City, east of Houston, in a shoddily constructed house cursed with leaks, mosquitoes, and vermin. He recalls hurricanes, fishing trips, rock throwing fights, and bow-and-arrow mishaps, all with the enthusiasm of a hyper 10-year-old pedaling at full speed (something he and neighborhood kids did when following the "Mosquito Dope Truck," a DDT spraying vehicle that they chased on their bicycles). Crowell touches on his early musical influences, including a Hank Williams concert when he was only two, and an outdoor show by Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash in a thunderstorm, as well as his first time playing music with his father's band. It's not music that's at the heart of this book, however, but his loving and turbulent relationships with his parents and their often strained but deep love for one another.

October 15, 2010

A Grammy-winning singer/songwriter reveals the early genesis of his family, predating a marriage to Rosanne Cash (whose 2010 memoir, Composed, is a can't-miss) and the ascent to musical stardom.

Crowell's introduction to the world of country music began early in small-town Texas, when banjo chords and Hank Williams records sweetened a childhood embittered by familial discord. Raised in a house without a bedroom of his own, the author was relegated to sleeping in the family home's creepy front room, where he became an unwilling witness to his parents' shouting matches and the violence borne from his father's drinking binges. Frequently frustrated with the inescapable drama, Crowell recalls disrupting his parents' raucous New Year's Eve party in 1955; at age five, he frightened guests away by brandishing the rifle hidden in the hall closet. Years later, the family moved to a ramshackle, "post–World War II housing project" in central Texas that was soon decimated by Hurricane Carla. Crowell lovingly and often drolly describes a gassy grandmother, a banjo-playing grandfather, feuding uncles and Cauzette, his strident, God-fearing mother crippled with double dyslexia, epilepsy and a string of heartbreaking miscarriages. In this same tone, the author also discusses life with his boozy father and the distress of a tough childhood. His mother's hysterically seething religious convictions and frequent nonchalant requests to fetch feminine-hygiene products tempered their embarrassing public "prizefights." Yet these rough spots are interspersed with summery recollections of a boyhood spent chumming around and banding together with neighborhood mischief makers, and of his father's drumming lessons, prepping him to play in his band at age 11, then on to higher heights as a budding musician. While Crowell's narrative becomes a viscerally powerful diary of a boyhood hobbled by a dysfunctional family, his burgeoning love of music and the fruits of that talent get left behind. Could a follow-up be in the works?

An unbalanced, frequently depressive autobiography that primarily focuses on the past, leaving little room for the author's resoundingly successful present.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from September 15, 2010

A Grammy Award winner, ASCAP Lifetime Achievement Award winner, and member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Crowell was a leader of both the new traditionalist movement in country music in the 1980s and the alternative country movement. His memoir does not, however, focus on his marriage to and songwriting and production work for Rosanne Cash, his own formidable work as a solo singer-songwriter, or his numerous songs that prominent country and pop artists have recorded. Crowell here concentrates on the role of family in his life. He describes his father as hard drinking and his mother as an epileptic Holy Roller. He writes of growing up in poverty in the Houston, TX, area in the 1950s and 1960s, family dysfunction, childhood play and mischief, and music bringing a father and son together. Yet his memoir is primarily about a hard-to-define love between parents and a growing boy who survives it all. VERDICT Crowell seems deliberately to avoid talking about his great successes, so his account has a universal feel. This touching, sometimes rough, and vivid chronicle of mid-20th-century Southern life is highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 8/10; national, 25-city tour; ebook ISBN 9780307594204.]--James E. Perone, Univ. of Mount Union, Alliance, OH

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 1, 2010
Crowell is among the best storytellers to emerge from Nashville. Up to now, he told his stories in song, but with this heartfelt memoir, he can now be called a writer of the first order. Houston, where Crowell grew up in the 1950s and early 1960s, was a city full of characters found in stereotypical country songs: hard-drinking fathers and long-suffering mothers singing along to the beer-soaked ballads of Hank Williams. But this is not fiction; Crowell actually lived the life, soaking up its exhilarating and disturbing atmosphere. Crowell is unsparingly honest, yet there is an admirable restraint here, too. He clearly loves his family, accepting their bountiful deficiencies even when he criticizes them or wishes them harm. He can now see the kind of lives his parents wanted to live, and how they fell woefully short. He calls his father an enigma and savant; he admires his mother, who suffered from double dyslexia and epilepsy, for her towering instinct for survival. But he also discusses lighter topics, such as his early days in a rock n roll band, making for an exceptional memoir.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)

October 15, 2010

A Grammy-winning singer/songwriter reveals the early genesis of his family, predating a marriage to Rosanne Cash (whose 2010 memoir, Composed, is a can't-miss) and the ascent to musical stardom.

Crowell's introduction to the world of country music began early in small-town Texas, when banjo chords and Hank Williams records sweetened a childhood embittered by familial discord. Raised in a house without a bedroom of his own, the author was relegated to sleeping in the family home's creepy front room, where he became an unwilling witness to his parents' shouting matches and the violence borne from his father's drinking binges. Frequently frustrated with the inescapable drama, Crowell recalls disrupting his parents' raucous New Year's Eve party in 1955; at age five, he frightened guests away by brandishing the rifle hidden in the hall closet. Years later, the family moved to a ramshackle, "post-World War II housing project" in central Texas that was soon decimated by Hurricane Carla. Crowell lovingly and often drolly describes a gassy grandmother, a banjo-playing grandfather, feuding uncles and Cauzette, his strident, God-fearing mother crippled with double dyslexia, epilepsy and a string of heartbreaking miscarriages. In this same tone, the author also discusses life with his boozy father and the distress of a tough childhood. His mother's hysterically seething religious convictions and frequent nonchalant requests to fetch feminine-hygiene products tempered their embarrassing public "prizefights." Yet these rough spots are interspersed with summery recollections of a boyhood spent chumming around and banding together with neighborhood mischief makers, and of his father's drumming lessons, prepping him to play in his band at age 11, then on to higher heights as a budding musician. While Crowell's narrative becomes a viscerally powerful diary of a boyhood hobbled by a dysfunctional family, his burgeoning love of music and the fruits of that talent get left behind. Could a follow-up be in the works?

An unbalanced, frequently depressive autobiography that primarily focuses on the past, leaving little room for the author's resoundingly successful present.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)