A raw, firsthand account of feuds, fiddling, moonshining, and survival in a small Alabama town, told by its most colorful chronicler and shaped through careful historical insight.The Ballad of Fiddling Tom Freeman is a riveting portrait of a forgotten America, drawn from the handwritten memoirs of a bootlegger, fiddler, and chronicler of life in Bug Tussle, Alabama, in the first half of the twentieth century. Today, rural voices are often drowned ...

In 2015 University Press of Mississippi published Mississippi Fiddle Tunes and Songs from the 1930s by Harry Bolick and Stephen T. Austin to critical acclaim and commercial success. Roughly half of Mississippi’s rich, old-time fiddle tradition was documented in that volume and Harry Bolick has spent the intervening years working on this book, its sequel.Beginning with Tony Russell’s original mid-1970s fieldwork as a reference, and later working with Russell, Bolick located...

From years of recorded interviews with Bettye Kimbrell, an acclaimed Alabama quilter, Joyce Cauthen shaped an absorbing narrative of a woman--abandoned by her mother when she was 8 years old, married when she was 13, a mother at 14--whose sole aim in life was to create "out of whole cloth" a good life for the five children she had with her charming but unfaithful husband. Bettye, born in 1936, describes in vivid detail her life on tenant farms in rural Fayette County and her move as a youn...