Today's Featured Book:

Round Here and Over Yonder: A Front Porch Travel Guide by Two Progressive Hillbillies (Yes, That's a Thing)

by Trae Crowder and Corey Ryan Forrester 

Harper Horizon

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Trae and Corey will take you from the smallest of small towns to major US metropolises (or is it metropoli? We haven't a fartin' clue!). They'll even cross the pond to sip tea in some of them fancy kings-and-castles places that PBS Viewers Like You can't stop yapping about. From Chickamauga to Cheyenne, New York to New Orleans, Seattle to Scotland—no matter where these two wandering jesters go, there's something to roast, something to toast, and something to learn about what ties us together as humans. Even the most outrageous of us.

In this book you'll find:

• Loads of eccentric things folks say.
• Seriously well-informed tips on exactly where to eat and what to order in each city.
• Anecdotes from Corey about everything from "German Mardi Gras" in Helen, Georgia, to eatin' over-priced rabbit in Napa, California.
• Travel bingo boards and ad-libs for your own adventures.
• And as many off-the-beaten-path jokes as can be packed into 256 pages!

Perfect for anyone who:

• Likes to travel.
• Loathes to travel.
• Any Southerner who's both a little proud and a little ashamed of the South (that's all the sane ones).
• Any Northerner, Midwesterner, or West Coaster who wants to know what two self-proclaimed rednecks have to say about their own hometown.
• Anyone from the UK who thinks us Yanks are the craziest folks on God's green earth (cause this book will likely confirm that stereotype, yup).

Today's Featured Book:

Night Train to Nashville:  The Greatest Untold Story of Music City

by Paula Blackman

Harper Horizon

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Set against the backdrop of Jim Crow, Night Train to Nashville takes readers behind the curtain of one of music’s greatest untold stories during the era of segregation and Civil Rights.

Backed by 15 years of research and interviews, Blackman shares the true story of how promotion of R&B music in the 1940’s by her grandfather, Edward “Gab” Blackman of WLAC radio, and William Sousa “Sou” Bridgeforth, owner of Nashville’s premier Black nightclub, inadvertently sparked a cultural revolution that ultimately led Music City to become the first in the south to desegregate.

In another time and place, Gab and Sou might have been as close as brothers, but in 1940s Nashville they remained separated by the color of their skin. Gab, a visionary yet opportunistic radio executive, saw something no one else did: a vast and untapped market with the R&B scene exploding in Black clubs across the city. He defied his industry, culture, government, and even his own family to broadcast Black music to a national audience.

Sou, the popular kingpin of Black Nashville and a grandson of enslaved persons, led this movement into the second half of the twentieth century as his New Era Club on the Black side of town exploded in the aftermath of this new radio airplay. As the popularity of Black R&B grew, integrated parties an underground concerts spread throughout the city, and this new scene faced a dangerous inflection point: Could a segregated society ever find true unity?

Taking place during one of the most tumultuous times in US history, Night Train to Nashville explores how one city, divided into two completely different and unequal communities, demonstrated the power of music to change the world.