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A Word on Words
The Best of John Seigenthaler's Interviews
Edited by Pat Toomay and Frye Gaillard
Epilogue by Andrew Maraniss
Featuring interviews with:
Arna Bontemps • Marshall Chapman • Pat Conroy • Rodney Crowell • John Egerton • Jesse Hill Ford • Charles Fountain • William Price Fox • Kinky Friedman • Frye Gaillard • Nikki Giovanni • Doris Kearns Goodwin • David Halberstam • Waylon Jennings • John Lewis • David Maraniss • William Marshall • Jon Meacham • Ann Patchett • Alice Randall • Dori Sanders • John Seigenthaler Sr. • Marty Stuart • Pat Toomay
Frye Gaillard
Civil Rights
Introduction
1. Arna Bontemps: Free at Last: The Life of Frederick Douglas. Great Slave Narratives.
2. John Egerton: Speak Now against the Day.
3. John Lewis: Walking with the Wind.
4. David Halberstam: The Children.
5. Frye Gaillard: Cradle of Freedom.
Literature
Introduction
1. Jesse Hill Ford: The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones.
2. Pat Conroy: The Death of Santini.
3. Ann Patchett: The Patron Saint of Liars.
4. Dori Sanders: Clover.
5. Alice Randall: The Wind Done Gone.
6. Nikki Giovanni: Chasing Utopia.
Music
Introduction
1. Marshall Chapman: Goodbye Little Rock and Roller.
2. Marty Stuart: Country Music: The Masters.
3. Rodney Crowell: Chinaberry Sidewalks.
4. Waylon Jennings: Waylon: An Autobiography.
5. Kinky Friedman: The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover.
Sports
Introduction
1. Charles Fountain: Sportswriter: The Life and Times of Grantland Rice.
2. William Marshall: Baseball’s Pivotal Era, 1945-1951.
3. William Price Fox: Satchel Paige’s America.
4. Pat Toomay: On Any Given Sunday.
The Presidency
Introduction
1. Jon Meacham. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.
2. Doris Kearns Goodwin: Team of Rivals.
3. David Maraniss: Barack Obama: The Story.
4. John Seigenthaler Sr.: James K. Polk.
Epilogue
Andrew Maraniss
Books Featured in This Volume
John Seigenthaler (1927–2014) was born in Nashville, Tennessee. He attended Peabody College and worked as a reporter for the Tennessean. In 1960, he went to work for Attorney General Robert Kennedy and, in that capacity, was attacked by an angry mob in Montgomery, Alabama. He returned to the Tennessean, where he spent the rest of his career. He hosted the television program A Word on Words for four decades.
Pat Toomay attended Vanderbilt University and played in the NFL for ten years. He has written a number of books, including On Any Given Sunday.
Frye Gaillard is the author-in-residence at the University of South Alabama. He has written more than twenty books, including With Music and Justice for All: Some Southerners and Their Passions (Vanderbilt, 2008). He is an alumnus of Vanderbilt University.
"Only Seigenthaler could get these esteemed writers to open up and loosen up to discuss writing, art, and their life experiences."
—Beverly Keel, Dean of the College of Media and Entertainment, Middle Tennessee State University
“This book captures my father’s passion for literature and highlights his interviews with some of the most famous authors of our time. He used A Word on Words to encourage his viewers to ‘keep reading,’ a message that is as important today as it was when he started the program more than four decades ago.”
—John M. Seigenthaler
(from the introduction to the Civil Rights section)
John Seigenthaler was a young reporter in Nashville when the Civil Rights movement began in that city. Partly because of that, and partly because of his experience with the movement as a member of Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department, the Black experience became a recurring theme in A Word on Words.
These five interviews are grouped chronologically according to the subjects they cover. We begin with Arna Bontemps, a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and one of the most prolific African American scholars of the 20th century. At the time of his interview with Seigenthaler, Bontemps was head librarian at Fisk University, and had released two books that year: Free at Last: The Biography of Frederick Douglass and Great Slave Narratives.
John Egerton, a renowned journalist/historian living in Nashville, won the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for his book Speak Now Against the Day, telling the story of a generation of Southerners who worked for racial progress before the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. As Egerton explains, these were men and women, black and white, who looked at the racial order in the South and said, “This won’t work.”
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