2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An abundance of funny stuff from a storytelling master, June 7, 2002
This review is from: Stories from Home (Audio Cassette)
After retiring in the mid-1970s from The Dillards, a trailblazing bluegrass/folk-rock band that should have made it bigger (but that's another story), bass player/lyricist/emcee Mitch Jayne returned to his first love: writing. In his thirties, Jayne published two novels ("The Forest in the Wind" and "Old Fish Hawk") while he was still a Dillard, but it would be his twilight career, as a humor columnist celebrating Missouri's rugged Ozarks region and its endearingly quaint inhabitants, that would allow Jayne to find his true voice.
Jayne's conversational prose, charming essays on the human condition from the point of view of a well-read and well-travelled man who had the good sense to realize Oz was just outside his screen door, is the work of a master storyteller. On "Stories From Home," Jayne himself reads some of his best columns, bringing to vivid life the Ozarks' proudly bucolic people and their eminently quotable colloquialisms. He's the right man for the job. Jayne's voice, a finely aged instrument combining the ringing clarity of a Lloyd Loar mandolin and the woody timbre of a vintage Martin D-28 guitar, is easy on the ears.
Wryly holding forth on subjects ranging from politics and weather (of which the Ozarks has an "abundance") to neighbors and yard sales (the tale of his obsessive quest to find an old-timey bacon press is priceless) to his own profound hearing loss, Jayne has a knack for making his personal foibles, experiences and annoyances sound like a funny letter from home. You'll catch yourself smiling - and often laughing out loud - in recognition of yourself or someone you know among Jayne's characters. I especially enjoyed the story of Jayne's Uncle William, who religiously referred to a diagram on the dashboard of his car before shifting gears, while his wife issued crisp instructions ("Stop sign, William") from the back seat. One of the shortest stories, it manages the very neat trick of being sweet, funny and poignant.
The knee-slappingest stories feature Booger County's Zeke Dooley, a truth-stretching ne'er-do-well Jayne invented in his radio days as a mouthpiece for spouting outrageous comments, Ozark style. In a piece about Zeke's wife Perletta taking up selling Pearl Dew beauty products, Zeke muses: "She claims she's found her true calling bringing beauty plunder to the neglected housekeeper... Why, she's done surprising good. Lord knows they are women up and down this crick that could use a whole mess of salvage work on their faces...If she thinks they's a homely woman within twenty miles needs construction work, she's gone." In an amazing transformation, Jayne voices the loveable mush-mouth himself with hilarious authenticity.
My favorite story is the one I consider the most well-written one in the collection. It's also the only really serious one, and Jayne tells it with a sizeable lump in his throat. (You'll get one too, I promise.) Jayne tells about the one-room Ozark school with no electricity where he once taught and his frustration one skimpy Christmas at being unable to play Santa Claus properly for his dirt-poor pupils. Inspired by the loving descriptions he had written of the bright kids in his charge, Jayne's sister in California comes to the rescue, sending the children a magical box of well-chosen presents just in time for the school's Christmas play. "Some people," writes Jayne, "think Santa Claus is a bunch of foolishness. My sister, she thinks better of the old man. She thinks he's just a fine old white-haired state of mind."
Rewind it for me, would you, and pass the Kleenex.
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