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Title: Home Grown Stories & Home Fried Lies by Mitch Jayne ISBN: 1-882467-30-2 Publisher: Wildstone Media Pub. Date: 30 May, 2000 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: If you've worn out your Twain, try Jayne
Comment: Sure, Mark Twain was pretty good, but what's he done lately? The Greatest Living American Humorist (take that, Garrison Keillor!) you've never heard of is Mitch Jayne who, like Twain before him, is a Missourian and a storyteller par excellence. As a founding member of The Dillards, Jayne regaled bluegrass audiences with his country store brand of whimsy before "retiring" to a second career as a humor columnist for newspapers and magazines. The bedrock of Jayne's humor has always been his adopted home, the Ozarks, a region apparently supernaturally fertile for producing bushels of funny stuff. "Home Grown Stories..." is Jayne's autumnal harvest of a lifetime spent soaking up the peculiar language of a peculiar people in a peculiar land and his magician's trick of making you homesick for a place you've never been.
Jayne commences with his personal definition of the Ozarks in a brilliant passage that is as compact and elegantly pastoral as the lyrics he wrote for The Dillards' song catalog. It's the only serious prose in the book, after which Jayne whisks the reader to the funny stuff. The book's loose structure as a sort of reluctant autobiography allows Jayne to go off on as many storytelling detours as he is wont, and he is very, very wont. Just about EVERYTHING reminds Jayne of a funny story, and it's to his everlasting credit how seamlessly he works his bottomless pickle barrel of them into the narrative. Most of the stories are about real Ozarkians Jayne has known and, because they're an earthy people, he's occasionally obliged for authenticity's sake to use words never uttered in Floyd's Barber Shop. For the most part, though, Jayne keeps the ribaldry on a PG-13 level that won't do anyone any lasting harm.
Jayne describes Ozarkians as "...people who had little commerce with modern speech and liked their own better" and his love affair with Ozark English - surely an oxymoron - is writ large on every page. Ozarkians speak "Mother Tongue" (inherited language), which abounds in quaint, majestic words (countenance, blackguard) that have a distinctly Shakespearian ring to them and homemade sayings so rustic, they'd bewilder Snuffy Smith. Knowing how daunting the dialect is, Jayne has kindly included an Ozark dictionary to help readers decipher sentences like, "Some eats boughten vittles, but I always take a bait of dinner in a poke." Say what??
A raconteur as freewheeling as Jayne needs an illustrator of equal passion and versatility. In Diana Jayne, his wife and "other, wiser half," he has exactly that. Working in a variety of styles and mediums, Ms. Jayne's black and white drawings of everything from Andy Griffith and the Darling Boys to a killer ostrich (really!) and a hearing aid from hell (Jayne writes candidly about being "as deaf as a snake") are charming, funny and, sometimes, downright striking. Her portrait of Zeke Dooley, an uproariously colorful hillbilly character Jayne created for his wildly inventive "Hickory Holler Time" radio program (my favorite chapter), is a masterpiece truly worth a thousand words.
"Home Grown Stories..." is too dang much fun and contains too much plain-spoken wisdom to read just once "to beguile the time," as an Ozarker would put it. It's a book worthy of revisiting whenever you want to laugh or whenever you need to be reminded that, in this vale of dross and tears, "even a blind hog finds an acorn sometimes." Not to mention, it'd come in real handy if you ever got lost in the jillikins and benastied yourself.
Rating: 5
Summary: All True, All Lies
Comment: I have read this book and all the reviews of it. Both the book and the reviews are entirely true. How any educated or uneducated person can live without it is beyond my understanding except that most of the Ozarks now has indoor plumbing. Mitch Jayne and his wife, Diana, have written a wonderful book that combines verbal and visual humor. Diana has given us sketches that are funny and real and honest. Mitch has given us stories with bark on them that remind us why people love the Ozarks as tears roll down their face from laughter. But lest you think this is a book of jokes, be warned. It is also book written in a graceful style about life in and out of the Ozarks and the English language that separates the Ozarker from Americans. Only Donald Harington and Vance Randolph have been able make such a combination work. Add Mitchell F. Jayne of the Dillards and Darling Boys to that list.
Rating: 5
Summary: A piece of Home in my pocket
Comment: I took HOME GROWN STORIES with me on vacation. The characterss are so true and the images so vivid, it was as if I carried a piece of home in my pocket. Jayne's literary canvas is large, the quiet Missouri hills, the folk music road, Hollywood and TV; but he paints his stories with such attention to detail that the reader is totally drawn in. I especially loved the one-room school stories, they are both nostalgic and timely as we watch so many unique folkways disappear. Jayne's gentle, but unshakable respect for the human spirit teaches us in a way that no anthropological observor or firey evangelist ever could. This collection will entertain and enlighten all those fortunate enough to get there hands on it. Absolutely enjoyable!
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Title: Everybody on the Truck!: The Story of the Dillards (The Life and Times of the Dillards) by Lee Grant, Denver Pyle ISBN: 1886371113 Publisher: Eggman Publishing Pub. Date: 01 June, 1995 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title:There Is a Time (1963-70) ASIN: B000000ECZ Publisher: Vanguard Records Pub. Date: 27 November, 1991 List Price(USD): $16.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $14.99 |
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Title: The South Beach Diet: The Delicious, Doctor-Designed, Foolproof Plan for Fast and Healthy Weight Loss by Arthur Agatston ISBN: 1579546463 Publisher: Rodale Books Pub. Date: 05 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Old Fish Hawk by Mitch Jayne ISBN: 0787104175 Publisher: Audio Literature Pub. Date: 01 May, 1995 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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