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Title: Chinaberry Sidewalks
Author: Rodney Crowell
Narrator: Rodney Crowell
Format: Unabridged
Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
Language: English
Release date: 01-18-11
Publisher: Random House Audio
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 32 votes
Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Artists, Writers, & Musicians
Publisher's Summary:
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 Crowell's 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.
Editorial Reviews:
Chinaberry Sidewalks, a memoir by singer, songwriter, and producer Rodney Crowell, is as bittersweet as any honky-tonk ballad. Written with humor and painfully hard-won self-knowledge, it is also as wise as it is entertaining think Mary Karrs The Liars Club meets Tobias Wolffs This Boys Life. And Crowell reads his story wonderfully in a honeyed, musical twang, with plenty of chuckles, sighs, and even a little singing. The burnished timbre of his voice and his evocative prose immediately transport us to the world of his East Houston childhood in the 1950s and 60s.
Chinaberry trees provided the switches Crowell would be sent to pick for his own wallopings, and one tree in particular that he planted with his mother offered a bit of defiant hope when it flourished outside their shambling house. Inside, the drunken mayhem of his hapless parents J.W. and Cauzette drove him, at age five, to shoot his Daddys rifle into the wall. A few years later, hed break up one of their knock-down drag-outs by smashing a bottle over his own head. Searing though it was, Crowell never fails to see the irony and humor in their narcissistic neglect. Case in point: his parents and carousing neighbors at a Hurricane Watch party make sure the kids wear raingear when they send them out to play in the gathering storm.
After self-destructive years as an adult, Crowell sees the deep-seated sense of disenfranchisement J.W. and Cauzette brought to marriage and parenthood. Both suffered abusive upbringings.
