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RIP Blues legend Bobby “Blue” Bland, who died Sunday at age 83. From The Washington Post: GRENADA, Miss. — Bobby “Blue” Bland, a distinguished singer who blended Southern blues and soul in songs such as “Turn on Your Love Light” and “Further On Up the Road,” died Sunday. He was 83. Rodd Bland said his father died due to complications from an ongoing illness at his Memphis, Tenn., home. He was surrounded by relatives. Bland was known as the “the Sinatra of the blues” and was heavily influenced by Nat King Cole, often recording with lavish arrangements to accompany his smooth vocals. He even openly imitated Frank Sinatra on the “Two Steps From the Blues” album cover, standing in front of a…

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  Or, why does Charlie Sherman think Pulaski, Tennessee sits atop the mouth of Hell? Check out this excerpt from Brambleman, winner of the 2013 Benjamin Franklin Award for popular fiction. It it, Charlie Sherman discovers the root of some evil. From Chapter Thirteen of Brambleman, a novel by Jonathan Grant (all rights reserved): * * * Isaac Cutchins’s parents had come to Forsyth County from Pulaski, Tennessee. This Charlie knew because Susan’s Bible told him so, and being a border-state Yankee, Charlie never forgot it, since Pulaski was the birthplace of the original Ku Klux Klan—the terrorist arm of the Southern Democratic Party during Reconstruction. When Charlie thought of Momo’s monster truck, Nathan Bedford Forrest, he realized that it was only…

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An old friend posted his review of Brambleman on my facebook timeline, and I wanted to memorialize it on Brambleman’s website before it was carried down the river and disappeared.  Dr. Louie Crew is an emeritus professor of English Literature at Rutgers University. A prominent voice for reform in the Episcopal Church, Louie was and is a crusader for LGBT rights—from back in the days of Easy Rider in the Deep South! The Review I just finished Jonathan Grant’s novel, Brambleman and thoroughly enjoyed it. It is a sustained, up-close, and dramatic look at racists, especially those in Forsyth County, Georgia, as well as a look at a few community organizers in greater Atlanta and their difficulties in opposing it. Narrator Charlie Sherman…

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Here’s a link to a wire-service version of the Jim Auchmutey article that ran in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in February 1994 about finishing Dad’s book. The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia went on to win Georgia’s “Book of the Year” award that year and was selected as Editor’s Choice at American Heritage magazine. If you want to know more about this remarkable and monumental achievement (80 percent of it Dad’s work), click here. Here’s a link to the magazine article I wrote on the same subject a few months later for the University of Georgia Alumni Record: “Finishing Dad’s Book: Not just a job, it’s and Indenture.” I went on to raise a couple of kids and write a…

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At Kindle Fire Department. Check it out! Meanwhile, here’s the scoop on Brambleman, along with news about the major award it recently received.  

From the Tucker Patch: A book by author Jonathan Grant has won an award from the Independent Book Publishers Association. The 2013 Benjamin Franklin Award for popular fiction was bestowed on Brambleman at IBPA’s annual meeting in New York City on May 29. The novel is about a mob that expelled 1,000 African-Americans from Forsyth County, Georgia early last century and is a sequel to The Way It Was in the South. “Winning meant a lot because I put so much into that book,” Grant told Patch. “It took ten years to write, and from conception to awards ceremony, nearly two decades. When my category came up and they announced that the winner was Brambleman, I kind of froze. Then I told…

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