About this item
An intimate account of country music, social change, and a vanishing way of life as a Shenandoah town collides with the twenty-first century Winchester, Virginia is an emblematic American town. When John Lingan first traveled there, it was to seek out Jim McCoy: local honky-tonk owner and the DJ who first gave airtime to a brassy-voiced singer known as Patsy Cline, setting her on a course for fame that outlasted her tragically short life. What Lingan found was a town in the midst of an identity crisis. As the U.S. economy and American culture have transformed in recent decades, the ground under centuries-old social codes has shifted, throwing old folkways into chaos. Homeplace teases apart the tangle of class, race, and family origin that still defines the town, and illuminates questions that now dominate our national conversation - about how we move into the future without pretending our past doesn't exist, about what we salvage and what we leave behind. Lingan writes in "penetrating, soulful ways about the intersection between place and personality, individual and collective, spirit and song."* * Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
About the Author
I'm a writer and author who lives in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. I have written for The New York Times Magazine, The Oxford American, Washington Post, The Ringer, Pitchfork, and many other publications. In 2022 my book "A Song for Everyone: The Story of Creedence Clearwater Revival" was published by Hachette Books. It's a biography of a great American rock band, from their inception as junior high students in 1958 through their enormous global fame in the late 1960s and their stunning, sudden dissolution in 1972. Based on interview with band members and compatriots, as well as unpublished and rare memoirs from their inner circle, it has been praised in the New Yorker and Wall St. Journal among other places. My first book, "Homeplace: A Southern Town, a Country Legend, and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk," was published in 2018 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It tells the story of Joltin' Jim McCoy, a country music impresario from West Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, and the relationship between his work and his community, which included a pre-fame Patsy Cline.
