last night. For me, I thought that would be a good opening for the book, that sort of kicks in the door for it, it sort of explains a lot about the book and me. My intention in writing was to shine


the light on these heroes that worked with these household names. I mean, Paul Hemphill, that guy was the biggest writer south of Washington DC. He was huge That Nashville Sound, I mean, that book. . . the guy was nominated for a Pulitzer, He wrote probably the best baseball novel ever called Long Gone.


Oh yeah. That one is on order too.(Laughs) He wrote about 17 books. But he was a big in- fluence. I had read his work or at least half of it before I ever met him. Those guys were re- ally there, Paul Hemphill, there's a book called Too Old to Cry, it was kinda like The Local Stranger, it was all his articles that had appeared in newspapers or where ever, some of the stories went from Valdosta, Georgia to San Fransisco to Nashville of course, Viet- nam. So yeah, I was lucky to come across those two guys.


Like I said I ordered that Stones book and in the same day I ordered the Nashville Sound and when the Nashville Sound book came I was blown away by it. It was written in 1970 and during that period my father was a huge fan of honest to God country music and turned me onto it, and here is Paul Hemphill talking about the real deal - Kitty Wells, Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb, all these people my dad loved.I am loving it. I still have about a 3rd of that to go and about a ¼ of the Stones book to go. They are both planets to be explored.


And totally different, but alike in the way that these writers, are so detailed.


You can feel like you are there and Tootsies or the Opry, or backstage with the Rolling Stones. Yeah, the other, I guess the trifecta in Insured is Harry Crews. You know what’s funny is, be- cause they are both gone now, I remember telling Paul Hemphill that I was going to meet up with Harry Crews and Paul said, “Well man, just watch out for his damn dogs, ‘cause they mean as shit.” But these guys were not a disappointment.They were not these hermits who they were totally different people than what you were reading, it wasn’t an act.


Yeah honest. What you see is what you get. Yeah, with all three of those guys Harry Crews, Paul Hemphill and Stanley Booth, those three guys lead me to discover and later interview and write about Jim Dickenson or Steve Cropper or James Burton or Charlie Louvin, who were all musical luminaries and through those guys you’d be a liner note freak. You’d open up the album and you’d say “Oh man, this guy Mike Utley, oh God, he's a bass player, he played for Rita Coolidge and in the Dixie Flyers, he played on all kinds of records that everybody has heard but they don't know who the players are.” It's like, if you are like you and I are, and you are a total fanatic, they are all indeed Insured Beyond the Grave (laughing). Through the literature and then the music it leads to a lot of these stories in Insured Beyond The Grave. There’s Blood Kin and The Music


Maker Relief Foundation and Dust to Digital and Hunter Thompson. The other writer who's in the book and is no longer with us is Hunter S. Thompson. I had been in touch with his agent and he said two times in about a years time that Hunter wasn’t in any condi- tion and he wasn’t up for doing any inter- views, and so please call back. I just about gave up and I had a friend say “Man, just try one more time.” So I got in touch with the agent, and he said James, it’s funny that you


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