Anita Garner - Birthday Revisions

Birthday Revisions

A play with music

Written by: Anita Garner
Directed by: Greg North Zerkle

This picture is from a run-through before a staged reading at the Hayworth Theatre, Los Angeles.

L-R Matt Grey Phairas, Lisa Marinacci, Brent Schindele on piano, Curtis Jackson

I don't know how other writers deal with this but I approach birthdays with introspection before celebration. I fidget about which projects should move to the top of the list. The bigger the birthday numbers get, the more fidgeting goes on around this keyboard. There's nothing like making part of my to-do list public right here to nudge me closer to completing it.

Priority: Refresh/revise the script for the stage play, "The Glory Road." This story was a play before it became a book. Director, Greg North Zerkle and I agree it's wise to incorporate scenes from the book into the play, with a slight shift in dynamics and more music. After staged readings in Los Angeles years ago, one thing audiences asked for was more music. That's the easy part. I love the music in this show and could go on choosing songs all day. Now it's time to open the scene list from our last version and talk with Greg about changes.

Another story that jumped out of the In-Progress File

Once in a while I visit other stories in progress and ask them, What are you waiting for? What do you need? Sometimes one of them responds, "I'm ready. Get me out of here." I was recently introduced to a beautiful online literary magazine called "Salvation South" and shared a story there. "The Only Lie" recalls a defining event that altered the course of my family's work in the Deep South during the 1950s. "Salvation South" named it their favorite prose of the year. Thank you for the honor.

sal

You can read it here.

https://www.salvationsouth.com/the-only-lie-anita-garner/

I'm headed back to work now "with intention." The brief blog post linked below explains what that phrase meant to a fancy-talking Southern preacher

https://theagingofaquarius.com/ag_blog/good-intentions-southern-style/

If you're browsing around looking for other short pieces to read, I've been posting for years over here at a website I share with a broadcast buddy.

Stop by anytime. This link gets you to whatever is newest.

https://theagingofaquarius.com/ag_blog/

Available everywhere

Hardcover and e-book from

University of Alabama Press

Audio book from Blackstone Audiobooks

Order from your favorite bookstore or Amazon.

- Rosanne Cash -

"This is a story so central to the origins of country music: the marriage of Saturday night and Sunday morning, and the literal marriage of two musicians, sometimes at odds with each other creatively and personally. The song written by Fern Jones, "I Was There When It Happened" was performed around the world by my dad and the Tennessee Three, became the title of the memoir of Marshall Grant (the bass player in the Tennessee Three), and was revived yet again when I performed it every night on a recent tour I did with Ry Cooder. Anita Garner was 'there when it happened', and her book tells us what we ought to know."

- Dayton Duncan -

Writer/Producer of Ken Burns' Country Music

"The Glory Road" takes us to an important cultural crossroad of America––where gospel met rockabilly, and Saturday night collided with Sunday morning in the late 1950s in the Deep South. It's also a very personal family story of a deeply religious preacher, Raymond Jones, whose wife, Fern, had a big voice and even bigger musical ambitions. Anita Garner's recounting of her parents' lives––their tensions and travails on the "gypsy road" of tent revivals and recording studios––echoes one of her mother's most famous songs: "I Was There When It Happened."

—Michael T. Bertrand -

Author of "Race, Rock, and Elvis"

"The Glory Road" touches several bases: southern culture, family life, the evangelical ethos, commercial music, migration, and spousal relations. It will appeal to both a general and specialized audience."

—Burgin Mathews -

Co-Author of "Doc: The Story of a Birmingham Jazz Man"

"I'll admit I didn't know the music of Sister Fern and The Joneses until now. So, "The Glory Road" has introduced me to some exciting and important music. But, even more than that, the story itself will stick with me. I don't expect to forget these characters."

- From Numero Group on the re-issue of Fern Jones' 1950s Nashville recording sessions -

"Her voice was all Saturday night, delivered on a Sunday morning. Patsy on Jesus. Elvis without the pelvis. Fern Jones' only album, released by Dot Records in 1959, captured 36-year-old Sister Fern as she anointed church music with the same untamed energy that younger white Southerners were bringing to their rock 'n' roll. Produced by Mac Wiseman and showcasing crack Nashville session players Hank "Sugarfoot" Garland, Floyd Cramer, Joe Zinkan, and Buddy Harman fresh off their June 1958 session with Elvis, 'Singing A Happy Song' should've taken Jones from dusty canvas big tops to the Opry's storied stage. But with no 45 to flog, Jones instead sold nary a record and never did hear herself on the radio. Her fiery rockabilly gospel was a few shades too radical for the conservative, traditional, near puritanical public she played to anyway. 'Fern Jones: The Glory Road' collects her 'Singing A Happy Song' LP and cuts including 'Didn't It Rain,' from her 'The Joneses Sing' album, into one rousing package, rich with the details and imagery of a brief career spent tethered to the hard ground and gazing skyward. 'The Glory Road's' sound gnaws at the bit and stands in reverence, a runaway rockabilly tent show without a single drop of rain on the horizon."