Nashville City Blues

“James Talley is an American artist. Putting on a Talley vinyl, I always feel as if I am getting a tour of John Steinbeck’s basement and Woody Guthrie’s garage and Dorothea Lange’s darkroom. There are nights when my wife and I go two-stepping around the dining room to a Talley tune. Now the world has this wonderful memoir, as honest and plainspoken and direct and American in its sentence rhythms as the beautiful songs themselves. I read it in a sitting and wanted even more.”—Paul Hendrickson, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and author of Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost

“An inspiring, yet harrowing memoir by an outstanding singer-songwriter who made a landmark album in 1975 in the populist, folk-country tradition of Woody Guthrie and Merle Haggard, only to spend decades in the nightmarish record business in hopes of getting his music the wide audience that it deserved. Like his songs, Talley’s text has a warm and resilient spirit.”—Robert Hilburn, author of Johnny Cash: The Life and Paul Simon: The Life

“A well-penned journey through the Nashville music business, told by someone who was positioned to become a keen observer of the Music Row scene ‘back in the day.’”—Robert K. Oermann, coauthor of Songteller (with Dolly Parton) and
Little Miss Dynamite (with Brenda Lee) “Talley’s book is unlike almost all others: it tells the hardest truths and captures the greatest achievements of someone who started with nothing, never flinches and is still doing his best to follow his dream.”—Americana Highways

"Nashville City Blues is as straightforward, understated and affecting as Mr. Talley’s true-life songs, which have been covered by performers from Johnny Cash to Moby. The book is also a field guide for any outsider without connections or prospects who wonders how to persevere despite long odds and plenty of bad luck and bad choices."—Wall Street Journal