“As Jerome Washington wrote, 'The blues is our antidote.’ So I listen. Blues doctors like Neal Pattman inspire something in a writer’s blood. Anyone who can play harmonica like he can, with one arm no less, will get me going. And inevitably my sons will hear 'Momma Whoopin’ Blues’ and start asking questions. I show them the CD cover and they ask more questions and I explain how he lost his arm in a wagon wheel accident as a boy and they ask even more questions. Our give-and-take reveals my sons to be beautifully strange, loving, and profound little fellows, even if they are six years old and younger. The blues is my antidote. The mind of a child is everything else.”
—Glenn Taylor, author of The Marrowbone Marble Company (Ecco, 2010)
Photo credit: Margaret Hanshaw Taylor