Best Selling Books by Paul Hemphill

These stories, often bittersweet, emotional, and mythic are a veteran journalist''s collection of sportswriting on the blue-collar South.

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.

Follows the fortunes of three generations of Clays, a North Carolina mountain family, as they move from Sixkiller Gap, to the Grand Ole Opry''s center stage, to Nashville, to Harvard, and back to their valley.

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.

The acclaimed author of "The Heart of the Game" portrays the sport of stock car racing with the compelling style of a novelist in this exciting account of a year spent on NASCAR''s Winston Cup circuit. of photos.

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.

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.

Speaks of coming of age at mid-life; of chasing down fading rainbows; of reckonings and renewal, and, always, of hope.

A novel that lovingly evokes the dusty wonder of life on the road the the irrepressible characters who consider the highway their home.

Twenty years after Billy Ray Hunsinger signed with the Green Bay Packers and thought he was destined for greatness, Billy finds himself is a down-on-his-luck radio host who regrets letting opportunity slip through his fingers.

Hiram Williams, a frail boy born to an angry mother and an absentee father, reinvented himself as Hank WIlliams and fell in love with booze by age 14. Learning music on his own, with help from a black street performer knows as Tee-Tot, Hank''s only joy was his music. It touched millions and has lasted generations. His whirlwind career ended just as it began--Hank died drunk and alone at the age of 29.

How to Build Lasting Character Raising strong kids doesn''t require perfection. It requires steadiness. In the age of AI--when influence is constant and standards often feel negotiable--many parents and mentors aren''t sure how to correct without shaming, guide without controlling, or protect what matters without power struggles. Lead With Values gives you a clear, practical framework for building character that lasts. Inside you''ll learn how to: Hold standards without damaging trust Use consequences that teach instead of threaten Return responsibility instead of rescuing Repair mistakes without weakening authority Make respect the norm at home This isn''t behavior control. It''s formation. If you want honesty, responsibility, courage, integrity--and respect that holds under pressure--this book shows you how to build it, one steady decision at a time.