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Homeplace: A Southern Town, a Country Legend, and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk Hardcover – July 17, 2018
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Winchester, Virginia is an emblematic American town. When John Lingan first traveled there, it was to seek out Jim McCoy: local honky-tonk owner and the DJ who first gave airtime to a brassy-voiced singer known as Patsy Cline, setting her on a course for fame that outlasted her tragically short life. What Lingan found was a town in the midst of an identity crisis.
As the U.S. economy and American culture have transformed in recent decades, the ground under centuries-old social codes has shifted, throwing old folkways into chaos. Homeplace teases apart the tangle of class, race, and family origin that still defines the town, and illuminates questions that now dominate our national conversation—about how we move into the future without pretending our past doesn't exist, about what we salvage and what we leave behind. Lingan writes in “penetrating, soulful ways about the intersection between place and personality, individual and collective, spirit and song.”*
* Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
- Print length272 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper
- Publication dateJuly 17, 2018
- Dimensions6 x 0.98 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100544932536
- ISBN-13978-0544932531
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“You end Homeplace thinking that every American town could use a book like this one written about it; every town could afford to be this lovingly but critically seen. Like many of the best country songs, the book is sentimental in a way that makes you wonder why sentiment is such a dirty word.” —New York Times Book Review "Those who pick up Homeplace will find a means to escape the ugly partisan drone of their TV programs, to take refuge in something quieter and more measured on the page. In these times when we learn about the Other more often through derogatory memes than through in-depth reporting, an immersive experience like Homeplace feels exponentially more revelatory than any nonfiction you're likely to have read since the dawn of Twitter. It's a refreshing shift in intellectual gears, and the details about rural American living that Lingan spotlights, even when they depict this society as substantially less than perfect, combine to make for a poignant but satisfying whole: a trip through Winchester, at least as seen, heard, smelled and felt through Lingan's pen, is just plain good for the soul...By searching with an open heart, and writing with a frank honesty, Lingan manages an impossible feat: to make Homeplace an antidote to the divisive anger of today's America and to the unrealistic nostalgia that our current despairs inspire."-- PopMatters “John Lingan writes in penetrating, soulful ways about the intersection between place and personality, individual and collective, spirit and song.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering “Homeplace is a magnificent work, new school journalism with old school heart. The combination of intellectual integrity and human curiosity, human compassion, is as intoxicating as it is educational. This is a book in service of place and time, which is to say, literature.” —Rick Bass, author of The Traveling Feast “Some of the best histories of America are those told in miniature: a forgotten landmark, a local celebrity, a small town in transition. John Lingan's Homeplace is all of that and more: a perfectly rendered elegy for an iconic music venue that tells a much larger story: how our dreams, desperation and hope become transcribed in the landscape that surrounds us and embedded in the songs we pass down as our legacy.” —Colin Dickey, author of Ghostland “John Lingan writes movingly about places that are just up the road yet seem impossibly distant to many. Homeplace offers a vivid portrait of a disappearing America, and a hope that the barriers that divide us can be breached by listening to other people's stories.” —Peter Manseau, author of The Apparitionists “John Lingan is an old-school storyteller, wringing humor and heart out of every little interaction. But Homeplace is so much more than a good yarn. Lingan looks into every crack in the American myth, turning the story of one town over until the beauty, tragedy and contradictions of a huge chunk of national identity become clear. The reporting here is indefatigable, the prose full of music. Lingan achieves that highest, hardest goal of writing: he makes us see the world fresh.” —Lucas Mann, author of Captive Audience “Brimming with humanity, here is a lyrical elegy to a declining Shenandoah honky-tonk, to the country singer who drove us "Crazy" and broke our hearts, and to the slow, inexorable erosions of modernity in one little mountaintop town. J —
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Harper; Illustrated edition (July 17, 2018)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0544932536
- ISBN-13 : 978-0544932531
- Item Weight : 1.04 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.98 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #655,373 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #155 in General Southern US Travel Guides
- #431 in Country Music (Books)
- #670 in Human Geography (Books)
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The author gives little insight to the complex dynamics of an old town coping with changing times and demographics. Rather than really describing the forces of change and the efforts of townspeople to honor the past while creating a viable present, he spends bits of time in town, writes with mild disdain for what the people are doing, and races back up to the honky-tonk to spend more time with the old country music performer (etc.) who owns it, Jim McCoy. Lingan writes almost lovingly about McCoy and some of his friends, which is fine, but he gives no such love to anyone else. For example, I felt that his treatment of the Patsy Cline Historic House & Museum and of the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley were subtly and unnecessarily negative. These are nonprofit cultural organizations, working hard to fulfill their missions, engaging many volunteers and donors, and he dares to laugh behind their backs and criticize them for raising money. (But, sure, it's fine for McCoy's friends to ask for donations for his medical bills.)
And -- am I the only one who felt this? -- Lingan seems to smirk at nearly all the women he describes while admiringly writing about the hard-drinking, smoking men on the mountain. Even Patsy Cline, while treated better than most of the women by the author, still feels remote -- an accessory to JIm McCoy's life rather than a real person of her own. It all just got to be a bit too much man-crush for me.
Sorry I wasted my time. I won't loan this to anyone. Straight to the donation pile.
This is really a series of essays/profiles of people and events in and around Winchester, VA. In the beginning we are introduced to saloon keeper Jim McCoy, a charming local who apparently has led a full and interesting life as a musician, record producer, and now innkeeper. I expected the book to take us on Jim's journey and to center around the bar (and the local community).
However, the book lurches straight into a long chapter about Patsy Cline, then another chapter about a water tasting in nearby West Virgina, then a chapter about a local political pundit... none of it ties together?
What was most annoying however, was the author's smug sense of millennial superiority. I don't know why he chose rural communities in Virginia and West Virginia as his subject if he disdains their historical (and current) cultural mores so much?
I bought this book because I thought it was going to be similar to Wendy Bounds' "Little Chapel on the River" or Tim Sultan's "Sunny's Nights," but it was something else entirely.

