Robert Hicks
I was born and raised in South Florida. My parents filled
our home with
books. When I was sick and stayed home from school, my dad
would give me volumes of
the Encyclopedia Britannica or Bartlett's
Familiar Quotations to cuddle up in
bed with, instead of a diet of TV. Books were held to be
sacred and
precious. Christmases and birthdays were always times of
book-giving and
book-receiving. One of the first books to have a lasting
impact on me (beyond the Bible,
which seems to have anchored every Southern home of my
generation) was Richard
Halliburton's Complete Book of Marvels. I still
attribute my passion for travel
and adventure to the nights I fell asleep reading of
Halliburton's world-wide
adventures. Many of my lifelong favorites can be found on any
seventh or eighth grade
reading list of my time: C. S. Lewis' SPACE TRILOGY, TO
KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and
ALL THE KING'S MEN taught me about the value of
goodness and truth. MOBY DICK
and LORD OF THE FLIES, taught me to read. Ayn Rand's
ANTHEM made me think about
what it meant to be an individual. All these were to impact
my life forever. In high school I discovered biography, reading books
about Robert E. Lee,
NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDER and the CONFESSIONS by
St. Augustine to name a few. This
passion for biography has continued through the years with
books like Peter
Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis; to a
recent read, SURVIVING THE
CONFEDERACY, about Roger and Sarah Pryor. James Webb's FIELDS OF FIRE had a profound impact
on me, since it brought me
closer to the idea that I might be a writer someday myself.
His most recent
book, BORN FIGHTING, has taught me a bit more about
myself through my culture
heritage. I struggled through William Faulkner's THE
SOUND AND THE FURY in
college, but once I was done, I was hooked on Faulkner
forever. While my taste ranges from Smith's VITRUVIUS ON
ARCHITECTURE to John
Ruskin's THE STONES OF VENICE, I can get hooked on
poplar culture like anyone else
and was absorbed enough after reading John Berendt's
MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF
GOOD AND EVIL to make the mandatory pilgrimage to
Savannah. Point is, my reading interests remain as encyclopedic as
the books my dad
left on bedside table so many years ago. In 1974 I moved to Williamson County, Tennessee.
Then in 1979 I moved to 'Labor in Vain,' a late-eighteenth-
century log cabin
on the edge of the woods, in a hollow near Leiper's Fork,
Tennessee. Working as a music publisher and in artist management in
both country and
rock music, my interests remain broad and varied. A
partner in the B. B. King's
Blues Clubs in Nashville, Memphis and Los Angeles, I
serve as 'Curator of Vibe' of the corporation. Born out of my passion for this life -- throughout all
the ages, I'm a
collector, by nature. I've collected since I was a kid. It
began with fossilized
shells from our driveway to rocks and leaves and baseball
cards to books, 18th
century maps of Tennessee, Tennesseana in general, Southern
decorative arts and
material culture, to Outsider Art. I am surrounded by
collections. A friend
says the next thing I bring home must come with a crow bar
to get it into my
cabin. My older brother once said that I'd "inherited more
of the
'hunter-gatherer' genes than most other kids." I served as co-curator (with Ben Caldwell and Mark
Scala) on the exhibition,
Art of Tennessee, at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts
in Nashville. The
exhibition was a seven-year endeavor from conception at my
kitchen table to its
opening in September 2003. I was co-editor of the
exhibition's award-winning
catalog, Art of Tennessee (UT Press, September 2003). In the field of historic preservation, I have served on
the Boards of
Historic Carnton Plantation, the Tennessee State Museum,
The
Williamson County Historical Society, and the Museum of
Early Southern Decorative
Arts. In December 1997, after a third term as President of the
Carnton board, and
in light of my work at Carnton, I was honored by my fellow-
board members with a
resolution calling me "the driving force in the restoration
and preservation
of Historic Carnton Plantation." For the past two years, I've headed up Franklin's
Charge: A Vision and
Campaign for the Preservation of Historic Open Space in the
fight to secure and preserve both battlefield and other
historic open space in Williamson County. Franklin's
Charge has taken on the massive mission of saving what
remains of the eastern flank of the battlefield at
Franklin -- the largest remaining undeveloped fragment of
the battlefield -- and turning it into public battlefield
park which will, in my dreams, eventually run from the Lotz
and Carter Houses [www.carter-house.org] on Columbia Avenue
to Ft. Granger and Carnton Plantation, with significant
holdings around Breezy and Winstead Hills.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC's, April 2005 issue has an
article entitled 'Civil War Then and Now' that speaks of
Franklin's Charge's work in battlefield reclamation,
calling Franklin the "most unjustly forgotten" of "all the
Civil war's major engagements."
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Series
Books:The Widow Of The South, September 2009
Paperback / e-Book (reprint)
The Widow of the South, August 2005
Hardcover
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