Tell Me a Story, Sing Me a Song: A Texas Chronicle - Softcover

"The life of William Owens as he tells it appeals by its rugged qualities of mind and narrative prose. In the present instalment, two new sources of interest are added which I particularly value the life of the mingled populations of the southwest and their remarkable stories and songs. The book is a classic, like This Stubborn Soil, because it enshrines a time and place unsurpassably." Jacques Barzun

Texas, the 1930s-the years of the Great Depression. It was the Texas of great men: Dobie, Bedichek, Webb, the young Americo Paredes. And it was the Texas of May McCord and "Cocky" Thompson, the Reverend I. B. Loud, the Cajun Marcelle Comeaux, the black man they called "Grey Ghost," and all the other extraordinary "ordinary" people whom William A. Owens met in his travels. "Up and down and sideways" across Texas, Owens traveled. His goal: to learn for himself what the diverse peoples of the state "believed in, yearned for, laughed at, fought over, as revealed in story and song." Tell me a story, sing me a song brings together both the songs he gathered-many accompanied by music-and Owens' warm reminiscences of his travels in the Texas of the Thirties and early Forties.