Mix Tapes I Have Known #3: "M------," 1994

Ah, cassettes. They still seem fashionably retro to me, a spot I realize CDs in general probably occupy for everyone under the age of 30. The box of mix tapes dating from my pre-millennial youth still sits in the garage, a bit dusty and cobwebby, but full of strange memories. Here's another dive into the navel-gazing world of nostalgia:

The tape: "M------"

Year created: Spring 1994

Who it was for: Let's pretend the wife doesn't read my blog. This one was for an old girlfriend, who we shall call "M" here as frankly we're all old and married and have kids and stuff now. But once upon a time, I was a worldly college senior and she was a dimple-cheeked freshman, I was full of ego and she was extraordinarily kind, and we hooked up for a few short weeks. Time was the enemy, though - we got together about 6 weeks before the end of the school year, and I was off to New York City for a big fancy internship with "Billboard" magazine and she was off to New Orleans. Can you keep a relationship that's just started going when you spend an entire summer apart?

The answer, of course, was "no." Although I wrote her often (real letters, no email then!) and we tried, we drifted apart over those three months. When we all came back to school in the fall, she had another boyfriend and that was that. The summer of 1994 is an exceedingly strange time in my mind, even now -- all by myself in the biggest city in the world, the universe full of potential and every detail of sprawling Manhattan etched in my mind.

I sent her this tape as summer began, trying to hold on to things.

Track listing:

SIDE A

1. To Sir With Love (Michael Stipe and Natalie Merchant) 2. Swimming In Your Ocean (Crash Test Dummies) 3. May This Be Love (Jimi Hendrix) 4. Into My Life (Colin Hay Band) 5. All I Want (Toad The Wet Sprocket) 6. Gentleman Who Fell (Milla) 7. Bottle Of Fur (Urge Overkill) 8. The One I Love (R.E.M.) 9. Somebody (Depeche Mode) 10. Different Light (The Bangles) 11. When I'm 64 (The Beatles) 12. That's All (Genesis) 13. Stay (Amy Grant)

SIDE B

1. The Best Is Yet To Come (Frank Sinatra) 2. That Feel (Tom Waits) 3. I Would For You (Jane's Addiction) 4. Bent Out Of Shape (Replacements) 5. Tear In Your Hand (Tori Amos) 6. Do You Love Me Now? (Breeders) 7. Within You (David Bowie) 8. That Voice Again (Peter Gabriel) 9. Wink (Blue Mountain) 10. Luna (Smashing Pumpkins) 11. All Apologies (Nirvana)

What this says about my music tastes at the time: Actually, I'm not as embarrassed by this one as I am by some other mix tapes I made. Kurt Cobain was recently dead and so was grunge, and there's a nice mix of pop, alternative rock and out-of-nowhere clangers. I was getting to be a bit more eclectic in my tastes, I think.

What was I thinking? But then again, there's an Amy Grant song here. Amy freakin' Grant. I honestly don't even know how that got on there.

This song could totally be taken the wrong way: "This one goes out to the one I love / this one goes out to the one I've left behind / another prop has occupied my time." - R.E.M., The One I Love

Seriously, I think I overdid it: "Love" is in at least four song titles and most of the songs here are on that topic. Considering we were only dating a few weeks, I probably came on too strong.

Clever left-field choices: You can't go wrong with a dash of Tom Waits, and I love the jaunty feel of the Sinatra song kicking off side 2. I've always thought Crash Test Dummies were rather unfairly maligned as one-hit wonders, and "Swimming In Your Ocean" is a nice little gem off their "God Shuffled His Feet" album.

Totally obvious choice: I think I used "That's All" by Genesis on at least 75% of the mix tapes I ever made. I love that song, but yeah, kind of a cliche. And ending with "All Apologies" seemed quite poignant just weeks after Cobain's death, but might be a bit forced now. Still, overall, I rather like this tape and what it was about the wide-eyed boy from Mississippi I was then, off to New York City for a summer that - cliches be damned - kind of changed everything for me.

100 Years of The Daily Mississippian

An old boss of mine turned 100 years old this past weekend -- The Daily Mississippian, my college newspaper and the first place I earned my journalism "stripes," so to speak. Being on the other side of the world and all I couldn't exactly make the centennial events (but hopefully a drink or two was had on City Grocery's balcony on my behalf). But more than 15 years after I finished college, I've still got many a fond memory of the old DM, my training ground for a career that's been changing and shifting ever since. Since 1911, the DM has been the voice of debate and news at the University of Mississippi.

It's stunning to look back at my DM term - roughly 1992-1995 or so - and see how much has changed. The "Internet" was barely a notion then, the idea of computer layout of our pages was a shocking novelty (just a year or so before I came along, the paper was still using an ancient pre-desktop publishing system of pagination). The job I have today -- production editor for a major metropolitan newspaper website -- simply didn't exist then.

The DM was a terrific place to hang out in college, in the basement of Farley Hall and just across the hall from the hip campus radio station. Putting out a five-day-a-week newspaper felt like being in a club, where a variety of raconteurs, oddballs and iconoclasts were shoved together out of their shared love of the journalism dream. I held a variety of semi-official "titles" there -- opinion page editor, features writer, assistant entertainment editor or something like that, columnist, cartoonist -- and while I didn't live down there 24-7 in the basement like a lot of the staff, I felt the first tinglings of the familiar newsroom buzz that is still an intoxicant to any newshound. We alumni still fondly speak of "The Ice Storm of 1994" which closed down the campus and we scrambled to create an 8-page "EXTRA" edition to cover.

An awful lot of the newspaper's controversy revolved around Ole Miss' evolving place in the post-integration world -- this was a campus which was integrated by the government forcibly in 1962, just 30 years before I arrived, and the wounds were raw -- bullet marks still speckled the administration building columns. When I was there one of the editors was the great Jesse Holland, only the second African-American editor of the paper. I still remember the day some local redneck rang up and got Jesse on the phone and then angrily said, "I wanna speak to the WHITE editor!" Sorry, Mr. Cracker, the times have a-changed and Jesse's since gone on to be the Associated Press's US Supreme Court correspondent. Folks who haven't lived in Mississippi still give it a lot of scorn today, but I tell you, I was there to watch the world ever-so-gradually changing. I'd love to know how that redneck's mind was blown by President Obama.

I learned an awful lot at the DM -- I interviewed California's ex-governor (and once again governor today) Jerry Brown, I met Henry Kissinger, hung out with local writer-made-big John Grisham, and wrote vaguely pretentious newspaper columns about my first loves and the music I was listening to -- the kind of columns every 22-year-old writes and thinks nobody else has ever done.

But the biggest charge I ever got at the DM was doing my very own daily newspaper strip for a year or so -- "Jip," a kind of goofy pastiche of Martin Wagner's "Hepcats" with "Bloom County," "Peanuts" and "Doonesbury" that was like flying by the seat of my pants every day as I sat at the drawing board trying to come up with gags and one-liners and characters that seemed at least slightly real to me. It was a real stretch of the creative muscles and an utter blast to do.

These days I work in a "digitally active newsroom" where I do things like live-blog the Royal Wedding, a sentence which would've been half-incomprehensible in 1994. Unlike many of my old pals from the DM, I'm still hanging on in the journalism industry despite its many seismic changes and cutbacks -- and I'm always grateful to the ol' DM for helping get it all started for me. Happy birthday.

No shirt, no shoes, who cares?

Pass the cheesecake -- I just recently found out about this grand online documentary by Joe York on Oxford, Mississippi's late great Hoka Theatre, "Sorry We're Open." For anybody who ever passed through Oxpatch in the halcyon daze of the 1980s and 1990s, the Hoka was one of the best places in town to pull in for a spell; a highly ramshackle former cotton warehouse-turned-alternative movie theatre/hangout and restaurant, run in a charmingly relaxed fashion. Like many Oxonians I spent many a night there, eating cheesecake and checking out "Pulp Fiction" and "The Piano" for the first time, watching cowpunk bands and dealing with the er, temperamental projectionist Barton. York has made a swell short documentary that features many familiar Oxford faces and a salute to a now-closed, now-demolished piece of Oxford history. (It's hilarious to see my old editor/boss Chico interviewed credited as a "Hoka Archivist/Conservationist!") I've lived many a place and many a country, but in my memories Oxford is the friendliest place I ever called home. The Hoka was a big part of it. "I never felt bad at the Hoka," as Ole Miss's Sparky Reardon says.

• A wonderfully-written piece by Stephen Rodrick in New York magazine about Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle and his extremely devoted fans, one of the best pieces of music writing I've seen in a while.

• Another excellent magazine article, this one about the late writer David Foster Wallace and the work he left behind. As good an answer we may get to the question of why he killed himself last year and a requiem for an extraordinary talent (plus welcome news of his final unfinished work "The Pale King," which will be released next year).

Blue Mountain: Call it a comeback

All right, I'll just get this out of the way -- I can't quite be an objective reviewer about Blue Mountain. They were the soundtrack of my college years back in Oxford, Mississippi -- a local alt-country band who were by far the best local band around and one of the best in the American South during the mid-1990s. Frontman Cary Hudson had a husky voice and a mean hand with the guitar, his bass player and wife Laurie Stirratt kept the groove on and provided charming backup vocals, and rowdy drummer Frank Coutch could slam with the best of them. Blue Mountain were the pinnacle to me of a great local band, friendly and open and they could always be counted on for a fine old show.

And it's not too much of a stretch to say we all ended up friends -- Oxford isn't that big a town, after all -- we'd be in the front row at every gig, Cary would come over and jam on our front porch back in Oxford with our friend Noah, and I remember one time a bunch of us had a mighty fine meal of venison sausage after felling a few trees (!!) out on their backwoods Mississippi property. They're good guys, this band, and I'm proud to know 'em and sometimes pimp for them in my journalistic capacity. (One of my first "real" publications was a review of the band in Billboard magazine back in 1994, a quote from which the band kindly included on their gig posters.)

Blue Mountain never quite made it to the top level of the then-booming alternative country scene with bands like Uncle Tupelo, Whiskeytown or the Jayhawks, but carved out a comfortable niche for themselves. Most importantly, they had sincerity, and genuine love for what they were doing – lord knows I saw them live enough times to get an appreciation for pulling the hard yards and endless touring it takes a band to succeed. I even drove six hours round-trip to catch them in San Francisco one frigid night after I'd moved away from Mississippi. I was sorry to hear that Blue Mountain broke up around 2001, after a run of excellent albums on Roadrunner Records. But here it is just a few years later, and Blue Mountain is back together giving it another go with not just one but two albums, the all-new Midnight In Mississippi and the compilation Omnibus.

Midnight In Mississippi is a solid comeback, although it doesn't quite break any new ground for the band. It's a fine collection of open-hearted alt-country tunes, switching between rowdy hoedowns and gentle ballads. Lyrically, it feels like the music of an older rocker looking at his wild youth and coming to terms with what lies ahead. Lots of the songs look backwards – one sugary sweet, slightly tongue-in-cheek number is even titled "'70's Song" and its gorgeous harmonies brings to mind the Carpenters. But the best songs here are the loudest -- a rip-roaring "Midnight In Mississippi" name-checks all the old Oxford haunts of the band and is carried along by a tight harmonica-and-guitar riff. "Gentle Soul" has that jamming on the back porch feeling that Blue Mountain always excelled at, while "Skinny Dipping" mashes together cowpunk slash and folksy rhythm into a terrific bawdy romp. Some of the mellower numbers get a little drowsy, but overall, Midnight In Mississippi is a strong, mature effort.

The second "new" Blue Mountain disc of 2008, Omnibus, is a "sort of" greatest hits collection – the songs were re-recorded from a selection of the band's previous albums. These are songs that should have been hits in a better world – the road anthem "A Band Called Bud," the raucous "Bloody 98," the bittersweet gem "Soul Sister." When Cary breaks out with the guitar solo on "A Band Called Bud," and roars out, "I'm a rock and roll soldier / no time to think of getting older," the memory of a hundred fantastic live gigs comes back to me. As one nitpick, I'm frankly not nuts about some of the re-recordings -- both the lovely ballads "Myrna Lee" and "Pretty Please" are replaced by overly slick and polished and in my mind inferior takes from the haunting, spacious Sun Studios-evocative originals. But it's a solid primer, although I'm sad to see their classic populist anthem "Jimmy Carter" isn't included.

If you're an old fan of Blue Mountain, I'd like to think Midnight In Mississippi will seem like a welcome return home. But if you missed out on Blue Mountain the first time around, check out Omnibus and some of their back catalog too – it's full of treasures.

My three favorite bookstores

Peter is inching oh-so-close to learning to read, which I figure is pretty good for 3 1/2. He knows all his letters by heart and is constantly asking us to "read that story" and "tell me what that says," and the other day he sure seemed to be able to read some of his books (but he's got a very strong memory so not sure if he was just reeling it off by recall).

Proud papa is pretty darned happy because next to P and the wife, books have always been just about the most important thing in the world to me. Books are my crack, basically, and there's nothing quite like the smell of an old bookstore filled to the gills with mysterious old tomes. Given an afternoon to myself, there's nothing I like so much as browsing in bookstores, wild man that I have become.

I've been in bookstores from Australia to Alaska, from Montana to Mississippi, and here are three of my favorite bookstores. Just missing the list were stores like my "hometown shop" of Ames Bookstore, Grass Valley, Calif.,; Hard to Find Books right here in Auckland; City Lights Books in San Francisco; Burke's Books in Memphis, and probably a dozen more I'm forgetting.

The Strand, New York City
When I lived in Noo Yawk for three months in the summer of '94, I had little or no income, but that didn't stop me spending it on used books. The Strand boasts of itself as "18 miles of books," and it's a sprawling labryinth right outside the Village, the kind of store that wanders in and out of itself and you might find yourself in a strange alcove that hasn't been seen by other people in 10 years. Cluttered and dusty and cobwebby but full of glamourous Manhattanites, it's an ideal New York City bookstore. My poverty didn't stop me spending many a lazy Sunday there in my summer in New York. And get this – they rent books by the foot: "Interior decorators, film/television set decorators and homeowners, give us your specifications and we'll select just the right books to fit your shelf, all priced by linear foot." That's extremely New York, ain't it?

Powell's Bookstore, Portland, Oregon
If this list were numerical, Powell's would be crouched at the top, the mastodon of bookstores. It's the largest independent book store in the world – an entire Portland city block, or about seven or eight regular bookstores put together, not counting several annex stores around town. And it's justly world-famous. I remember my Dad went there in the 1980s and came back with fantastic tales of this unimaginably huge bookstore he'd been to; it took me more than a decade to make it up to Portland myself, and I was not let down. While it's not the cheapest bookstore in the world the selection is unfathomably huge (entire sections devoted to arcana like Arctic history, giant microbes, rock history or Lewis and Clark) and you can easily spend entire days browsing there until you get that glazed, what-was-I-looking-for-anyways expression on your face and have to stop for some coffee. A sure sign of its status is that this book store is one of Portland's biggest tourist attractions. Bring your wallet.

Square Books, Oxford, Mississippi
Not just a literary icon, but an honest-to-gosh center of the community, Oxford's Square Books is easily the best bookstore in the state, cozy and amiable, not gigantic, but perched right in the old-fashioned town square and with an amazing selection of Southern literature (and a used books annex right down the road when I lived there). Such a good bookstore that the owner recently became mayor of Oxford, which had to be connected; the kind of place you can recline on the balcony overlooking the town square with a cup of coffee and while the day away discussing Bukowski while you feed a secret crush on the comely girl behind the counter. Until she files a restraining order, anyway.

MUSIC: Dick Waterman's secret blues archive

MUSIC: Dick Waterman's secret blues archive

When I lived in Mississippi, one of my favorite things was learning more about the blues … the down-dirty, Delta blues born and bred in Mississippi. During my time as an editor at the weekly newspaper Oxford Town in Oxford, Mississippi, from roughly 1994-1997, one of my tutors was Dick Waterman, a columnist for us with a powerful history in the blues. Took me until a few months ago to find out that Dick has a book out. (So it goes when you move away from the South and don't keep in touch like you should.) But when I learned about his 2003 book "Between Midnight And Day: The Last Unpublished Blues Archive," I rushed to find a copy.

Dick was a columnist for Oxford Town before I got there, and continued for a year or two after I left. He'd write about whatever struck his mind, many weeks, but a recurring theme was his days as a manager and promoter of blues musicians. He helped "rediscover" many of the great artists in the 1960s, such as Son House and Booker White, and also managed Bonnie Raitt for 15 years. I didn't really figure out for a good long while that Dick was at the center of a ton of great music, but in hindsight the man was like the Zelig of the '60s blues scene, everywhere, not always heralded, but quite pivotal. And he was also one hell of a photographer on the side.

Dick's photos were often included with his music columns, and I don't think at the time I realized just how priceless a resource they were of a rapidly vanishing age of music. As the old folks die off, few other than B.B. King are around to evoke that classic Mississippi Delta blues. But Dick knew them all, and his archives were filled with candid, remarkable shots of blues legends like Skip James, Junior Wells, Otis Rush, John Hurt, Arthur Crudup, as well as '60s rock legends like Jagger, Joplin, Clapton and more. One of my personal favorites is this one of Mississippi John Hurt, sitting in a station somewhere with his guitar, looking old as the hills.

Dick's photo albums are the record of an age, when blues met rock and forever influenced it. Yet the photos were kind of forgotten down there in Oxford, Mississippi, where we'd use them as art to spruce up our tiny alt-weekly. Crisp and sharp black-and-white, they showed Dick Waterman's eye for the moment. Have to admit, we kind of took 'em for granted (I did get to borrow a really fine image of B.B. King by Dick for one of our "Oxford Town" t-shirts, though).

It took their chance discovery by Chris Murray for folks to realize what a priceless music gold mine Dick's photos and stories are, and "Between Midnight And Day" was the result, along with a nice show up in Washington, D.C. Elegantly designed and presented, "Between Midnight And Day" is a fantastic keepsake of Dick's life and times, working both as portfolio and genial autobiography. Dozens of his photos are reprinted, broken down by personalities, and each photo feature includes a short essay by Dick reminiscing. Some are sad – the tale of ripped-off Willie Shade – some are awe-struck — the frightening Howling Wolf – while many are just observational, acute little portraits. Dick's Web site features an excellent selection of his photos to look over (the only shame is you can't see them at full size).

Dick never really felt like he was bragging in his writing; it was more that he was just telling stories. Sure, they'd feature appearances from everyone from Muddy Waters to Son House, and when he was talking about "Bonnie" it was Bonnie Raitt. I actually learned a nice bit about column-writing from Dick's easygoing, conversational style. It was great to see some of his gems, such as the tale of humble Arthur Crudup, re-worked into essays for this book. There's at least another book's worth of his columns to be had. (Dick apparently also has another book he's contributed to that just came out last fall which I haven't seen yet — "The B. B. King Treasures : Photos, Mementos & Music from B. B. King's Collection" —timed for B.B.'s 80th birthday.)

Dick, admittedly, was eccentric, a real character to deal with when I was his editor. In the pre-email days he'd fax his columns in to Oxford Town, often at the last possible minute, sometimes right around midnight when we were going to press a few hours later. Yet he was always friendly to deal with, and sometimes he'd even come in the office to hand-deliver the column in the middle of the night. I always looked forward to reading his latest, and was sorry to learn he gave it up eventually after I moved on myself. But with "Between Midnight and Day," he's given everyone a fine token of his life and times in the music scene. As legacies go, this is a pretty great one to have.

LIFE: In memory of Dan Phillips

LIFE: In memory of Dan Phillips

Working on a fairly slow Saturday night here and doing some aimless Internet surfing, I just belatedly discovered that one of my old bosses — really, one of my first bosses – died suddenly one month ago.

Dan Phillips was assistant publisher at The Oxford Eagle in Oxford, Mississippi, and he died Dec. 12 at age 47 due to complications after a kidney transplant. His brother, Tim, who I also worked with, had donated a kidney to try and save Dan's life in the face of failing health. I am just heartbroken and sick over this, and discovering it I felt like I'd been punched hard in the throat in the way that only truly awful news can do you.

The Eagle and its "alternative entertainment weekly," Oxford Town, was where I got my "training wheels" in journalism, the first real paper I ever worked for after my college days. I was hired as Oxford Town's assistant editor a month before graduation in 1994, and later, Dan hired me to take over as editor of that publication. He had faith in me, and always encouraged my education and inspirations, tolerated my flights of fancy and occasional blasphemy.

I always appreciated Dan giving me that chance, and that time I served as editor of Oxford Town, up until 1997, was both the hardest work of my journalism career and the most fun I've ever had at a paper. There were lots of 10-, 12-, even 15-hour nights, but there was a freewheeling kind of creativity and what-the-hell spirit at Oxford Town I've rarely recaptured quite the same way in my career. We were the "wacky younger sibling" of the more staid and respectable Oxford Eagle, our task to get the college-age readers and cover Oxford's surprisingly booming entertainment scene. It was an awesome job.

The Eagle is a pretty small paper - around 6,000, five days a week, but Dan was a player on the national newspaper scene regardless. He was the president of the National Newspaper Association in 1999, the first Mississippian in 50 years to head up the 3,600-member group. People who knew Dan liked Dan, simple as that, and the tributes flowed in after his death. The dean of Mississippi columnists, Sid Salter, wrote a fine ode to him.

Dan was the kind of person I've discovered is kind of rare in journalism — a fundamentally decent man, relaxed and rarely ruffled by the chaos of daily deadlines. He and his father, Jesse, and brother Tim helped shape my impression of journalism as a calling that can be harrowing, but one that's also humane. Dan left far too early and in far too tragic a fashion, and his passing is deeply unfair to everyone who ever knew him.

MUSIC: Goin' down South - R.L. Burnside, 1926-2005

MUSIC: Goin' down South - R.L. Burnside, 1926-2005

As if there weren't enough rotten news from the South, just came across this: blues singer R.L. Burnside died today at age 78 in a Memphis hospital. The Fat Possum Records Web site in my old hometown of Oxford, Mississippi confirms it, and here's the obituary in Billboard.

Damn. Knew it was coming, of course - he was old and run-down when I first saw him, sometime in the early 1990s, doing his stripped-down gutbucket mournful Delta Blues in a bar in Oxford.


Photo by David Raccuglia

It took me a while to appreciate this cat, with a voice that echoed like a dirty empty grave and a pounding, propulsive style that was guitar, blood and sweat all the way. This was no beer commercial Chicago-style blues -- the Mississippi Delta blues practiced by Burnside and some of his predecessors like Robert Johnson, Junior Kimbrough and Son House was grimy, caked in heat and long days. Burnside was just about the last of that generation.

I saw him play many times in Oxford -- he lived just up the road in Holly Springs, and sometime in the mid-1990s he became cool again. He was just kind of buried away in the woods, forgotten, but was rediscovered -- collaborated with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, hooked up with Fat Possum records, got featured on soundtracks and even put out a CD with rap-styled remixes that oddly didn't suck. I was glad for the old man, that he got his 15 minutes while he was still around to enjoy it a bit.

But before that mini-renaissance, it was sad sometimes to see this guy from another world playing to an audience of drunk, inattentive frat boys and sorority girls who had no idea what they were watching. He was like a dinosaur, still walking around, something scraped from the past still doing his thing in the modern day; I found I only really started to appreciate him fully myself as I started to think about leaving Mississippi. His record "A Ass Pocket Of Whiskey," rhythmic, pounding and raw, played in my stereo constantly in the summer of 1997. Songs so ramshackle that they threatened to collapse, lewd lyrics and as far from polite as you can get. He was one of a kind, rude, crude and original, and they don't make that kind anymore.

Goin' down South, I'm going down South
The chilly wind don't blow

I'm going with you, babe, I'm going with you babe
I'm going with you, babe, I'm going with you babe
I don't care where you go

Goddammit all to hell. I can't believe I missed this and had to find out from The Oregonian's books page. One of my favorite Southern authors, and a hell of a nice guy to boot, Larry Brown of my old home-town of Oxford, Mississippi, dropped dead of a heart attack on Nov. 24, the day before Thanksgiving. He was only 53.

I'm mad, sad and irritated (I work at a freakin' newspaper, yet somehow never heard about this, good lord), to know that Larry's gone all too damned soon. I'm the least of the writers who would give him a tribute by a long chalk -- nice tributes were printed in The New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today recently, as well as a somewhat less eloquent one in my old paper, The Oxford Eagle.

Larry was pure Mississippi to me, one of the writers I think of when I think of the great place I spent seven kudzu-tangled years of my life. Oxford was a town loaded with great writers, packed to the gills with the likes of Brown, Barry Hannah, Cynthia Shearer, and of course the ghost of Faulkner hovering over it all. But while I liked a lot of these writers, it says something that Brown is the only one whose career I've tried to avidly follow ever since I moved out of Oxpatch in '97. His prose had stones.

Brown was a great, understated writer in the mold of Flannery O'Connor or Raymond Carver, with crisp, fierce sentences that told hard tales of dark lives. Through eight books, he wrote "Southern gothic" in a plainspoken, heartwrenching way. His novels "Father And Son," "Joe" and "Fay" are excellent places to start, although I've always had a soft spot for his great nonfiction book "On Fire," a unsparing, fascinating account of his days with the Oxford Fire Department, and the book that launched his career.

He was a nice fella, too, grizzled, down-to-earth and a man of few words, but his good friends -- which I'm sad to say I could never call myself -- would swear by him. I had a few beer-fueled conversations with him at City Grocery down in Oxpatch back in the day, and we featured him on one of my favorite "Oxford Town" covers of the newspaper I edited back in 1996-1997, in celebration of his novel "Father And Son."

Here's a great bit from USA Today's tribute: 'When 'Fay' was released in 2000, Booklist, published by the American Libraries Association, called it an "awful, beautiful work from the King of White Trash." That made Brown laugh. He told his daughter, LeAnne, "If I'm the King of White Trash, then you're the princess." His own label? "Aw, I'm just a common man who was real lucky to find out what I wanted to do with my life."'

Larry Brown managed to be pretty successful at his trade, but should've been hugely popular in a just cosmos. Larry had a handful of great books still in him, I know he did, and it saddens me beyond belief that I'll never get the chance to read them.