Michael Amos Cody
“Voters knew he believed in nothing, which meant he could conceivably do anything, making him the perfect candidate upon whom to pin their wildest dreams. . . . The problem with running as the candidate of people’s dreams is that, eventually, they wake up.” — Yair Rosenberg
Here’s another political collection of memes of note. . . .
Okay, one more . . .
Ezra MacRae has moved from the North Carolina mountains to Nashville’s Music Row with the dream of becoming part of that songwriting world.
“An elegantly written, mysterious and electric crime novel.”
—Alex Kenna, author of What Meets the Eye and Burn This Night
In what were originally the first scenes written for Streets of Nashville (eventually folded into chapter six), songwriter Ezra MacRae is more than a little bit drunk and walking on Music Row just before midnight. He has been celebrating his first songwriting successes after five fruitless years of struggling to be heard. Little does he know that the next couple of hours will rock his world. He’ll witness devastating violence that threatens to overwhelm his joy, but he also experiences an encounter that will gift him with a friendship and his first hit song.
Keeping an eye on an approaching storm, Ezra heads for the Hall of Fame Motel’s Sound Track Restaurant & Lounge, some place “dry but not dry,” where he can keep drinking while he waits out the rain.
Ezra and Benny Jack talk for a little. Then the rain is on the verge of beginning, and Benny Jack gets lost somewhere inside his mind.
Sometime later, after the storm has passed, Ezra resumes his walk home in the wee hours of Easter Sunday morning. As he walks, his songwriter’s mind revs up for a few ideas.
With those words, Ezra walks into a storm of a very different and deadly kind.
Chapter Twenty-Two finds him locked in songwriting mode and writing the two main verses. He writes the bridge in Chapter Thirty-Three.
Here I am “covering” Ezra’s song during a recent visit Read Spotted Newt bookstore in Hazard, Kentucky.
I recently stumbled upon a new podcast called Murder on Music Row from journalist Keith Sharon from Nashville’s The Tennessean newspaper. Every episode begins—more or less—with a nod to the song “Murder on Music Row” (written by Larry Cordle and Larry Shell). Over eight episodes, Sharon investigates the terrible March 1989 murder of Kevin Hughes. The journalist’s narration is by turns touching and funny, and he’s gathered a number of interviews with people involved and or adjacent to the murder and subsequent investigation, along with investigative recordings from police files. It’s a rich and heartbreaking story done really well. And well worth a listen. (I finished it in just three days after discovering it.)
In March 1989, I remember being sad at the loss of a young, promising life and at the blemish his murder put on the dazzle of Music Row, a place that still has a hook in my heart, even though it’s vastly changed. I was in the last few months of my life in Nashville that March. Leesa and I had rediscovered each other the previous fall, and in July 1989, my brother Jerry came to Music City and helped me move back home to the western North Carolina mountains so that I could help prepare for a beautiful September 2nd wedding.
But the memory of the murder stayed with me. The story as it plays out in the podcast is certainly worthy of a novel or a true crime book. Whenever I thought of the event, I thought of writing about it but never did so. What I did write, however, was a brief fictionalization of the event and used it to set the tone for Streets of Nashville, coming from Madville Publishing on April 15. I hope that my adaptation of it works as I want it to and that it isn’t disrespectful to the Hughes family.
The podcast made me nostalgic for those Nashville days in the 1980s. You might have read my first novel, Gabriel’s Songbook, published by Pisgah Press in 2017, which fictionalizes my own Nashville experiences through most of the 1980s. I often say that the novel is autobiography in its bones and fiction in its flesh and blood. A number of details in Murder on Music Row jolted me so that a number of connections surfaced.
Here’s an excerpted image from an email I sent to Keith Sharon when I was about halfway through the series:
As I listened, I began to wonder how close I came to being caught up in the dangerous scams operating on the underbelly of Music Row. I never lost any money paying for radio plays or record promotion for “Fiesta” (1983), my only released record (a 45 rpm, for any who remember those). But I’ve never been sure how closely my producer/publisher Earl Richards swerved in that direction, and I’m still torn as to whether or not my five years under his direction was good or bad for me, legit or illegit.
So, the forty-two years mentioned in the title of this post? I know that March 9, 2025, will be the thirty-sixth anniversary of Kevin Hughes’s horrible death. My math isn’t that bad. No, the forty-two years takes me back to 1983, when the 45 of “Fiesta” was released to radio and retail. Listening to Keith Sharon’s podcast, as I said, made me nostalgic, and I went to my scrapbook for those Nashville years. Here are some photos from that mid-to-late spring of 1983.
The memo below is from a couple of years later, 1985, when Kin Vassy called from California to say Kenny Rogers was interested in my song “Real Love.” Nothing ever came of that interest, but it was an exciting possibility for a while!
Heady days for a young man from Walnut, NC
. . . the return of Trump, especially those claiming Christianity, I point to . . .
. . . this from John Pavlovitz: “Dear Carrie Underwood”
. . . this from Ben Cremer regarding a bishop’s prayer for mercy:
An appeal to mercy for demonized groups challenges the narratives that demonize them.
When you worship power, things like mercy, empathy, and compassion will begin to sound like a compromise or a weakness, or even worse, they will sound like sins. When you worship power, the structures and people who maintain that power must prioritize authority, not mercy, forgiveness, or compassion. When you worship power, the more ruthless you are towards those you’ve already chosen to see as your ‘enemies,’ the more righteous you become. When you worship power, you see power as synonymous with the truth, and the truth should never be questioned or criticized. The worship of power has no room for mercy. This worship of power is why authoritarianism has become so appealing to far too many Christians. This worship of power is why the appeal to mercy is treated like a threat.
. . . [Y]ou will see certain politicians and pastors alike being supported by many Christians for high positions of power, no matter their crimes or abuses towards others, because as long as they are willing to use their power in order to protect and enforce what they believe to be “Christian values,” their moral character doesn’t matter. Securing and maintaining power is all that matters in this belief system.
. . . [O]ne of the most blatant forms of Christian hypocrisy in our time right now is Christians holding all the ordinary people we share this country with accountable to the most rigid moral standards while simultaneously holding their preferred politicians accountable to no standards at all. The greater the power one has, the less they will be held accountable to any moral standard. That’s what worshiping power looks like.
. . . Evangelical Christian leader Russell Moore said that multiple pastors had told him disturbing stories about their congregants being upset when they read from the ” Sermon on the Mount” in which Jesus espoused the principles of forgiveness and mercy that are central to Christian doctrine. “Multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount – [and] to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?” Moore added: “And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ, the response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.”
. . . [N]owhere in the gospel accounts is Jesus seen checking someone’s legal status before welcoming them. Nowhere in the gospel accounts is Jesus seen making sure someone has a job before he “hands out” food to them. Nowhere in the gospel accounts is Jesus seen making sure someone was straight so could make sure he wasn’t “tolerating sin” by spending time with them.
As [a] powerful woman of God once said, “Jesus was not killed by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion – which is always a deadly mix. Beware those who claim to know the will of God and are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware those who cannot tell God’s will from their own.” (Rev. Dr. Barbara Brown Taylor)
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy.” (Jesus)
Rev. Cremer invites us to (re)visit John 3:16-17 (not just the 16th verse) and Romans 1:29-32.
In the days of I Samuel 8, the people demanded a king. Samuel took his distress over this to God, who told him that the people weren’t rejecting his leadership but instead were rejecting God—”forsaking me and serving other gods.” In the face of the people’s rejection of faith in God, Samuel was instructed to be sure the people knew what they were asking, to be sure they understood the choice they were making.
So Samuel told the people what God said:
“This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. 12 Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. 15 He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. 16 Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle[c] and donkeys he will take for his own use. 17 He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. 18 When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” (1 Samuel 8: 11-18)
And still they rejected God in favor of a king’s so-called leadership.
I’m not suggesting that previous administrations have been godlike in any way. But except for the 45th administration, the ones I’ve know haven’t been as mean and ignorant as this 47th will be. Except for the 45th, none have so greedily sought to be king. We look for our Samuel to the people, our David to Saul, our Nathan to David, our John the Baptist to Herod.
Every year between Christmas and Epiphany (January 6), I read James Joyce’s “The Dead,” widely regarded as one of the best short stories ever written in English and the final story in the classic collection Dubliners. The setting is the “Misses Morkan’s annual dance” and dinner party. The hostesses are elderly Miss Kate and Miss Julia Morkan and their niece Mary Jane. The main character is Gabriel Conroy, Julia and Kate’s nephew, whose mother was their late sister.
The party breaks up late, and Gabriel and his wife Gretta make their way through cold and snow to a Dublin hotel for the night. But before they leave the Morkan house, Joyce creates a beautiful scene in which Gretta is standing on the first landing of the stairs, where she is listening so somebody up above playing the piano and a man singing. Gabriel stands at the foot of the stairs looking up at his wife:
He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. DISTANT MUSIC he would call the picture if he were a painter.
Later, in their hotel room lit only by streetlights, he asks her about the song she heard, and she tells him it was “The Lass of Aughrim.” When he asks why the song made her cry, she tells him the story from her girlhood, when she was loved by a boy named Michael Furey, who used to sing that song to her. When Gabriel breaks out in peevish anger – just before, he was lusting to get her into bed – and says something cutting about her wanting to visit her native region to rekindle her young love of this Furey boy. That’s when she tells him that Michael Furey is dead. Joyce writes, “Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks.” He becomes even more flustered when he learns that the boy died of a lung condition and overexposure to the weather when he visited her on a cold and rainy night out of a desire to see her one last time before she left for school.
Gretta cries herself to sleep and leaves Gabriel standing by the window and looking out on the night. He feels tenderly for her having spent all their years together, even their most intimate moments, with this secret “locked in her heart.” He feels sad for himself and for her as he realizes that he perhaps has never loved anybody – not even Gretta: “He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love.”
Joyce’s great story “The Dead” ends, appropriately, with what I consider to be one of the most beautiful paragraphs ever written in English:
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely in the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
I find this so moving that a few years ago, when I was somewhere – Gatlinburg maybe – on a writing weekend away, I attempted to capture some hint of the emotions this conclusion of “The Dead” inspires in me. Below is what I came up with.
Michael Furey Is Dead
She stands on the stair and listens
to the waltz floating down from above,
Her face half hidden in shadow
half in light.
The ghost of a sad smile trembles
on lips freshly colored with care,
And I tremble at the sight
and I wonder what she might be thinking.
She doesn’t know that I saw her
as we walk side by side on the street,
Both acting just like we didn’t feel
what we felt.
My tongue tripping over her mystery,
hers trying to cover it up.
Then I ask her if she’s well,
Then I beg for her to tell what she’s feeling.
Oo Oo Oo—Michael Furey is dead—Oo Oo Oo
Deep in the days of a cold and wet autumn,
they took waltzing walks in the wood.
A delicate boy and a handsome young woman
they were.
She was an orphan with her aunt until winter,
when she’d pack up and go back to school.
And he worked in the mines,
and he coughed all the time they were dancing.
[Waltz-rhythm interlude]
The weather turned black before she was to leave,
the rain fell without taking a breath.
Her dark-haired boy waited wet and alone
’neath the trees.
She’d been back to school for only one week
when the letter arrived from her aunt.
And it brought her to her knees
with its news of Michael Furey’s passing.
Oo Oo Oo—Michael Furey is dead—Oo Oo Oo
I stand by the window and listen
as her sobs subside into sleep
And look for the ghost of the boy who died
for love of my wife.
The stars hang in heaven like the caught breath of snow
or like sparkling rain in dark hair.
And I tremble at the sight,
and I wonder what she might be dreaming.
And I tremble deep inside,
and I’m afraid of what she might be dreaming.
Oo Oo Oo—Michael Furey is dead—Oo Oo Oo
I played this song live a few times soon after I wrote it, but I’ve never recorded it. I need to do some simple recording soon so that I don’t lose it. If I get the chance to record one last album, I’ll maybe close it with “Michael Furey Is Dead.”
We’ll see.
Images from
The Short Story Project
Stoney Road Press
From The Atlantic
SPECTRAL GEOFF: Did you know that giraffes are, like, 30 times more likely than people to get struck by lightning?
ME: Makes sense, I guess. They’re generally closer to the source. They always told us not to stand under a tree in a thunderstorm. Maybe the same should be said about giraffes—as in don’t stand under ’em.
SG: And did you know that with this Inauguration, Donald Trump has the unprecedented opportunity to become the two worst presidents in U.S. history?
M: I hadn’t thought of it that way. Quite an achievement if he can pull it off.
SG: And did you also know that a chicken once lived 18 months without a head?
M:
Spectral Geoff’s first and third facts from
“101 random fun facts that will blow your mind”
Merry Xmas to the Xians, the majority faithful to the American brand of Xianity
What is an Xian? Formerly known as Christian but now without considering Christ, his life and teachings, as part of their faith. In A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, the Ghost of Christmas Present describes what I call Xians to Scrooge in this way: “‘There are some upon this earth of yours . . . who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kiln, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”
The “us” referred to are the 2,000 and more Spirits of Christmas Present that have walked upon Earth since the birth of Christ.
A friend wrote just this week:
I’m looking forward to Streets of Nashville. I’m confident I’ll spend some time on a top-drawer Whiskey review for that one if it’s even in the ballpark of your previous work. I still recommend A Twilight Reel every chance I get.
This book of stories was more than twenty-five years in the making. I began it while working on my Master of Arts in English at Western Carolina University under the direction of Rick Boyer (before Ron Rash landed at WCU). Three stories–“The Wine of Astonishment,” “Overwinter,” and “A Poster of Marilyn Monroe”–appeared in my WCU master’s thesis in 1995. The work continued until I finished the final story–“Witness Tree”–in May 2019.
Many of the stories were published as stand-alones through the intervening years:
Thanks to Andy Reed, Pisgah Press, and all who have supported A Twilight Reel over it’s 1,039 days in the world through review, purchase, reading, and on and on. It means a lot.
It isn’t like The West Wing or Veep or Designated Survivor. So, what, you might ask, is The Kakistocracy about. Well, if you somehow missed Season One, you didn’t miss much . . . except some of the most royal screw ups ever pulled off at the highest levels of government! Season Two promises even more of the same. Some are expecting a catastrophic level of more of the same.
That first season of The Kakistocracy went by the simple tag: “Government by the worst people!” The second season’s tag makes promises:
More government by the worst people . . .
only more so!
So that it’s not just a remake of the first season, Season Two promises not even to pretend legitimacy or seriousness and start with the most unqualified buffoons available—from the cold opening! That’s a laugh riot, right there!
And in what industry insiders are calling something of a SPOILER ALERT, The Kakistocracy will be rolling out an extended tagline after the first 100 days:
Join us on a laughable, embarrassing, chaotic romp toward The Idiocracy!
We’ve been wondering when we would have a spinoff, and now it’s looking like we won’t have to wait more than four years to see what the “minds” behind The Kakistocracy have in “mind” for the former greatest nation on Earth.
Stay tuned!
