Background
Hemphill was born in 1936 in Birmingham, Alabama, where his father was a truck driver. He grew up Birmingham"s Woodlawn neighborhood and attended Woodlawn High School there.
( In this lively and fascinating book, noted writer and A...)
In this lively and fascinating book, noted writer and Auburn alum Paul Hemphill tells the story of the progress of Auburn from that first game coached by Auburn legend George Petrie through the team’s growth and development into the national force it is today. Hemphill records the many highs and occasional lows, and the heartbreak and jubilation each caused, noting the standouts great and small on the way. A Tiger Walk through History contains 172 photographs, many of them rare and surprising. The text and photos capture the many great players and coaches in the Auburn football experience: Auburn’s first bowl appearance in 1936; coaching eras of innovative football genius John Heisman, after whom the Heisman trophy is named; “Iron Mike” Donahue; Ralph “Shug” Jordan, who brought Auburn its first national championship in 1957; Pat Dye, Terry Bowden, and present coach Tommy Tuberville; Auburn’s two Heisman trophy winners Pat Sullivan and Bo Jackson; and victories over rivals Alabama and Georgia. The 2007-2008 season is highlighted, including the sixth straight win over Alabama and a bowl victory over Clemson. As the game has grown, Auburn and its team have grown with it, and Auburn now ranks as a perennial power both in its conference and in the nation. Vince Dooley states in his foreword that “beyond the famous coaches and players and their heroics on behalf of the Orange and Blue, A Tiger Walk through History is also about time-honored traditions—rallying cries like ‘Sullivan-to-Beasley’ and ‘Punt Bama Punt’ and ‘Rolling Toomer’s Corner’—that echo in resounding fashion from the pages of Paul Hemphill’s remarkable book.” No fan, whether casual or devoted, can afford to miss this riveting account of the Plainsmen’s journey from the very beginning to today, which is the record of a great university as well as the story of the development of a great football team.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0817315454/?tag=2022091-20
(Hank Williams, the quintessential country music singer an...)
Hank Williams, the quintessential country music singer and songwriter, lived a life as lonesome, desolate, and filled with sorrow as his timeless songs. From Williams's dirt- poor beginnings as a sickly child to his emergence as a star of the Grand Ole Opry, Lovesick Blues is the definitive biography of the man and his music.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143037714/?tag=2022091-20
( P>Birmingham's history of racial violence and bigotry i...)
P>Birmingham's history of racial violence and bigotry is the centerpiece of this intense and affecting memoir about family, society, and politics in a city still haunted by its notorious past. In 1963, Birmingham was the scene of some of the worst racial violence of the civil rights era. Police commissioner "Bull" Connor loosed dogs and turned fire hoses on black demonstrators; four young girls at Sunday school were killed when a bomb exploded in a black church; and Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote his famous letter from the Birmingham jail, defending his activism to fellow ministers. Birmingham native Paul Hemphill, disillusioned with his hometown, had left home to pursue a journalistic career, so he witnessed these historic events with the rest of the world through newspaper and television reports. "That grim old steel town," he writes, "was the most blatantly segregated city of its size in the United States of America, and most of us regarded it with the same morbid fascination that causes us to slow down and gawk at a bloody wreck on the highway." Thirty years later, Hemphill returned to Birmingham to explore the depths of change that had taken place in the decades since the violence. In this powerful memoir, he interweaves his own autobiography with the history of the city and the stories of two very different Birmingham residents: a wealthy white matron and the pastor of the city's largest black church. As he struggles to come to terms with his own conflicting feelings toward his father's attitudes, Hemphill finds ironic justice in the integration of his childhood neighborhood and a visit with the black family who moved into his family's former home.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0817310223/?tag=2022091-20
( While on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, journalist and...)
While on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, journalist and novelist Paul Hemphill wrote of that pivotal moment in the late sixties when traditional defenders of the hillbilly roots of country music were confronted by the new influences and business realities of pop music. The demimonde of the traditional Nashville venues (Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, Robert’s Western World, and the Ryman Auditorium) and first-wave artists (Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, and Lefty Frizzell) are shown coming into first contact, if not conflict, with a new wave of pop-influenced and business savvy country performers (Jeannie C. “Harper Valley PTA” Riley, Johnny Ryles, and Glen Campbell) and rock performers (Bob Dylan, Gram Parsons, the Byrds, and the Grateful Dead) as they took the form well beyond Music City. Originally published in 1970, The Nashville Sound shows the resulting identity crisis as a fascinating, even poignant, moment in country music and entertainment history.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0820348570/?tag=2022091-20
( A veteran journalist's exploration of a church-burning ...)
A veteran journalist's exploration of a church-burning in south Alabama becomes a richly rewarding evocation of the Deep South--its land, its people, and its sweat--popping summers. More than an anatomy of a church arson, The Ballad of Little River is a poignant but hard-hitting biography of one of the poorest areas in the United States--where deer outnumber people. A cauldron of unresolved racial and familial conflict, of heat, boredom, gossip, and grudges, Little River, Alabama, gained notoriety in 1997 as the site of the U.S. government's first conviction under a new hate-crimes law intended to stop a rash of fires set at black churches around the country. When journalist Paul Hemphill, son of an Alabama truck driver and veteran writer on the blue-collar South, moved into the area, he discovered a world that time had virtually forgotten--an obscure, isolated community in the swampy woodlands far from the mainstream of American life, a forlorn cluster of poverty and ignorance and dead-end jobs. He met a stew of heroes and villains right out of fiction--"Peanut" Ferguson, "Doll" Boone, "Hoss" Mack, Joe Dees, Murray January, a Klansman named "Brother Phil," and his stripper wife known as "Wild Child"--all swirling in a maelstrom of history and heat. Originally published in cloth by Free Press, The Ballad of Little River is Hemphill's gripping look at the southern backwoods, a chilling cautionary tale filled with both kindness and cruelty, told in the steady voice of a master storyteller and one who knows the human heart.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0817311106/?tag=2022091-20
(A story with a heart of gold about love and the loss of i...)
A story with a heart of gold about love and the loss of innocence at the bottom of the most minor league in baseball―the class D Alabama-Florida League in the 1950s, with a sour old maverick manager, a yearning teenage second baseman, and a black catcher masquerading as a Venezuelan. "A first-rate novel.”―Newsweek. "A sharp, unsentimental portrait of the minor league life...and Hemphill makes it all come to life, believably and memorably.”―Sports Illustrated. "So good, so true, so funny...”―New York Times Book Review.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0670437883/?tag=2022091-20
(Hemphill's absorbing traversal of the life of the single ...)
Hemphill's absorbing traversal of the life of the single greatest figure in country music is something less and something more than a biography. Hemphill traces the life of Hank (ne Hiram) Williams (1923-53) faithfully and factually and labels prominent myths as such, but he doesn't indulge modern biography mavens with sociological detail about Williams' world or with psychological insight about Williams and his family. In so doing, Hemphill discounts the fascination of the Depression era that produced Williams and of the dysfunctionality of his parents' and first wife's behavior, let alone his alcoholism from adolescence on. Compensating this avoidance of the potatoes of most biographies (the facts being the meat) is the book's style, which while hardly high-flown sounds eulogistic. In this respect, the book recalls some of the earliest written lives in European literature--Boccaccio's Life of Dante, for instance--which each intended, without mythologizing, to establish its subject's legend. Despite some poor word choices and hyperbole, this is the finest work of literature about Williams yet written. Ray Olson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0016GBPA6/?tag=2022091-20
( Except for a massacre of five hundred settlers by rene...)
Except for a massacre of five hundred settlers by renegade Creek Indians in the early 1800s, not much bad had happened during two centuries in Little River, Alabama, an obscure Lost Colony in the swampy woodlands of To Kill a Mockingbird country. "We're stuck down here being poor together" is how one native described the hamlet of about two hundred people, half black and half white. But in 1997, racial violence hit Little River like a thunderclap. A young black man was killed while trying to break into a white family's trailer at night, a beloved white store owner was nearly bludgeoned to death by a black ex-convict, and finally a marauding band of white kids torched a black church and vandalized another during a drunken wilding soon after a Ku Klux Klan rally. The Ballad of Little River is a narrative of that fateful year, an anatomy of one of the many church arsons across the South in the late 1990s. It is also much more -- a biography of a place that seemed, on the cusp of the millennium, stuck in another time. When veteran journalist Paul Hemphill, the son of an Alabama truck driver who has written extensively on the blue-collar South, moved into Little River, he discovered the flip side of what the natives like to call "God's country": a dot on the map far from the mainstream of American life, a forlorn cluster of poverty and ignorance and dead-end jobs in the dark, snake-infested forests, a world that time forgot. Living alongside the citizens of Little River, Hemphill discovered a stew of characters right out of fiction -- "Peanut" Ferguson, "Doll" Boone, "Hoss" Mack, Joe Dees, Murray January, a Klansman named "Brother Phil," and his stripper wife known as "Wild Child" -- swirling into a maelstrom of insufferable heat, malicious gossip, ancient grudges, and unresolved racial animosities. His story of how their lives intertwined serves, as well, as a chilling cautionary tale about the price that must be paid for living in virtual isolation during a time of unprecedented growth in America. God's country is in deep trouble.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684856824/?tag=2022091-20
Hemphill was born in 1936 in Birmingham, Alabama, where his father was a truck driver. He grew up Birmingham"s Woodlawn neighborhood and attended Woodlawn High School there.
He graduated from Alabama Polytechnic Institute (later renamed Auburn University), working on the school newspaper, The Plainsman, earning a bachelor"s degree in 1959.
He briefly played for the Class Doctorate minor league baseball Graceville Oilers of the Alabama–Florida League but was cut from the team at the start of spring training. Hemphill then played semi-pro baseball before switching to focus on college and writing. While in college, he worked as an intern at the Birmingham News, working his way up from covering little league to writing about high school sports.
He was a sports reporter for papers in Augusta, Georgia and Tampa, Florida before being hired in 1964 by the short-lived Atlanta Times.
His writing led to a spot as a featured columnist in the Atlanta Journal shortly thereafter, where he became a reader favorite for his reporting on people and places from the South. He resigned despite all his experiences and opportunities with the paper, having felt that "with the next column due by dawn, I had run out of gas".
Hemphill died at age 73 on July 11, 2009 from throat cancer that had metastasized to his lungs.
(A story with a heart of gold about love and the loss of i...)
( While on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, journalist and...)
( In this lively and fascinating book, noted writer and A...)
( Except for a massacre of five hundred settlers by rene...)
( P>Birmingham's history of racial violence and bigotry i...)
( A veteran journalist's exploration of a church-burning ...)
(Hank Williams, the quintessential country music singer an...)
(Hemphill's absorbing traversal of the life of the single ...)
(Mayor Allen and his influence on Atlanta.)
(Book by Paul hemphill)
(Used Book)
With United States Air Force, 1959-1962.
Married Susan Olive, September 1961 (divorced October 1975). Children: Lisa, David, Molly. Married Susan Farran Percy, November 6, 1976.
1 child, Martha.