Comin’ right at ya

I am immensely pleased to report that my next book is not only finished and ready to go, it also has a fantastic cover. And here it is, another first-rate job by University of Texas Press designer Lindsay Starr (who also did the wonderful cover for “Losering”).

I co-wrote this with Ray Benson, founder/guiding light of Asleep at the Wheel. Below is a shot of the two of us last week at South By Southwest (which was the usual insanely fun madhouse), right before the Wheel took the stage. Ray is a man with a million tales to tell and we worked in as many of those anecdotes as we could, but I’d say we ran out of room before Ray ran out of stories. Note the testimonial blurb in the lower left corner from Dolly Parton, who figures into some of those stories. By the time this comes out, there will probably be a blurb from some other famous person in that space up at the top left, too.

As for the cover photo, it goes back to 1975 and shows the first time Ray was trying on a pair of boots he’d custom-ordered from the illustrious country-western tailor Nudie Cohn; I guess he was feeling a little flush from Asleep at the Wheel’s big breakthrough single, the top-10 country hit “The Letter That Johnny Walker Read.” As for the book’s main title, Comin’ Right at Ya was what Asleep at the Wheel called their first album way back in 1973.

Look for “Comin’ Right at Ya: How a Jewish Yankee Hippie Went Country, or, the Often Outrageous History of Asleep at the Wheel” in October. In the meantime, Asleep at the Wheel is playing in my neck of the woods on Wednesday, April 1 — no fooling, they’ll be at Durham’s Carolina Theatre that night; and hell yes, I’ll be there to watch.