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Knopf
January 2011
On Sale: January 18, 2011
272 pages
ISBN: 0307594203
EAN: 9780307594204
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
From the acclaimed musician comes a tender, surprising, and
often uproarious memoir about his dirt-poor southeast Texas
boyhood. The only child of a hard-drinking father and a Holy Roller
mother, Rodney Crowell was no stranger to bombast from an
early age, whether knock-down-drag-outs at a local dive bar
or fire-and-brimstone sermons at Pentecostal tent revivals.
He was an expert at reading his father’s mercurial moods and
gauging exactly when his mother was likely to erupt, and
even before he learned to ride a bike, he was often forced
to take matters into his own hands. He broke up his parents’
raucous New Year’s Eve party with gunfire and ended their
slugfest at the local drive-in (actual restaurants weren’t
on the Crowells’ menu) by smashing a glass pop bottle over
his own head. Despite the violent undercurrents always threatening to
burst to the surface, he fiercely loved his epilepsy-racked
mother, who scorned boring preachers and improvised wildly
when the bills went unpaid. And he idolized his blustering
father, a honky-tonk man who took his boy to see Hank
Williams, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash
perform live, and bought him a drum set so he could join his
band at age eleven. Shot through with raggedy friends and their neighborhood
capers, hilariously awkward adolescent angst, and an
indelible depiction of the bloodlines Crowell came from,
Chinaberry Sidewalks also vividly re-creates Houston in the
fifties: a rough frontier town where icehouses sold beer by
the gallon on paydays; teeming with musical venues from
standard roadhouses to the Magnolia Gardens, where
name-brand stars brought glamour to a place starved for it;
filling up with cheap subdivisions where blue-collar day
laborers could finally afford a house of their own; a place
where apocalyptic hurricanes and pest infestations were
nearly routine. But at its heart this is Crowell’s tribute to his parents
and an exploration of their troubled yet ultimately
redeeming romance. Wry, clear-eyed, and generous, it is,
like the very best memoirs, firmly rooted in time and place
and station, never dismissive, and truly fulfilling.
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