John Pritchard, author of the Junior Ray series, was amused to see himself listed as a “legend” among Mississippi authors on the website for the Mississippi Arts and Entertainment Experience, a cultural center set to open in 2017.

He noted, “There are some, in fact, who might insist that I have always been entirely fictitious!”

Pritchard is delighted that this recognition proves him to be an actual, living author, and one placed in the company of Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, and John Grisham, among many other greats. Long live Junior Ray!

The Junior Ray series — Junior Ray, The Yazoo Blues, and Sailing to Alluvium — is available from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.

Leland Shaw, the shell-shocked World War II veteran featured in the novels Junior Ray, The Yazoo Blues, and Sailing to Alluvium by John Pritchard, “never hesitates to warp and work a word to his uses” according to Pritchard, who claims — in Sailing to Alluvium — that the word “smiteful” just fell out of Shaw’s mouth as he, Pritchard, was transcribing the character’s journals.

Editors of Wiktionary, the “lexical companion to Wikipedia,” took note and included the Sailing to Alluvium reference in the dictionary’s entry for the word “smiteful.”

When Pritchard was asked what Leland Shaw might think about the Wiktionary citation, Pritchard quoted a “telepathogram” he received from Shaw that said, “The entry’s value is predicated entirely upon the notion that we shall always have electricity.”

Sailing to Alluvium is available from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookseller.

John Pritchard, author of three novels in the “Junior Ray” series, sent this remembrance of journalist and writer John Seigenthaler, who died in July 2014. (Pictured, Ricky Skaggs, Doris Kearns Goodwin, John Seigenthaler, John Pritchard.)

New South’s Randall Williams said it well about John Seigenthaler. Randall put it superbly, simply, and originally: “He was a good man who gave white Southerners a good name during our dark period of massive resistance, obstruction, and violence against civil rights.” As any Southerner with a lick of sense and an ounce of perspective would agree, that is a mammoth and most difficult achievement. Thus from a national as well as a regional perspective, Randall’s encapsulation gives high honor to a great person an awful lot of people regard as one of history’s finest.

John Seigenthaler was perhaps the most central and admirable personality that defined the Nashville I lived in during the 1970s. He was the apotheosis of integrity and of all that was serious and good. Anybody who knew him, even if they were his political opposites, held him in lofty esteem for the serious, smart, and incredibly intelligent human being he was. Indeed, John’s personal and professional record was well known.

He and I were by no means close friends, but we each had close friends who were close friends of us both. To John I was merely a familiar face and a good acquaintance, while he, in the geist and gestalt of that time and place, was a major figure in Nashville’s overall environment, and I was bumbling about in the thick of it there in my thirties and early forties. I lived in Nashville from the summer of 1970 until February of 1981. Like Memphis, Nashville was, in a social sense, a very small community. Everyone knew or knew about everyone else in all the odd and colorful corners of the city’s make-up — its politics, Music Row, Nashville’s huge academic community, downtown’s exceedingly high finance, dinner at Sperry’s Restaurant and late-night parties on Belle Meade Boulevard — it didn’t matter, anyone could be everywhere . . . plus, everyone was connected or outright related, either on purpose or accidentally. I loved it all, and for a long time, life there then was electric.

I taught school. I waited tables. I lucked up and landed a momentary part as an on-camera-double for James Hampton, in a Burt Reynolds film, W.W. and The Dixie Dance Kings, and I failed an audition at Opryland. They asked me if I could sing and dance, and I said, “No, but I will.” Yet most of all I learned how to write songs on Music Row, primarily in and around Ray Stevens’ Ahab Music, on Grand Avenue, and later over on 17th as a member of Tree International’s stable of close to ninety or a hundred other writers. Tree was the largest music publishing house in the world, and I think it is now Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, or some such, and, I am certain, has very little recollection of my existence. In any case I learned more on Music Row about a writer’s craft in general, by writing lyrics for pop and country songs, than at any other time or in any other place. All the principles involved in putting together a country song are exactly the same principles one applies in writing a short story or a novel. In any case, back then I was struggling to make a living.

Somehow John Seigenthaler was aware of my efforts, and one day in the summer of 1972 when I was waiting tables down on Elliston Place at the Ritz Cafe, John, who was eating lunch there with several others, called me aside and offered me a part-time job as a copy editor at the Tennessean. I had recently written and sold two feature pieces to the Tennessean, but I don’t think that had anything to do with John’s momentary life-saving offer, which I gratefully accepted.

I lasted less than a month on the rim, but produced what I have always thought was a dynamite headline — Smyrna Mayor Steers State Auto Group. However, because I was not adept in the math of making heads fit their space, my masterpiece broke and did not run. Nevertheless, even today I consider myself quite the clever headline-ist.

A few years later I had two full-time jobs — one as an English instructor and another as a full-time Metropolitan Deputy Sheriff for Nashville and Davidson County. As an English instructor I was employed by the Dominicans who adored John, and as a deputy I worked for John’s boyhood friend, fellow Democrat and Irish Catholic, Nashville’s High Sheriff, “Fate” Thomas. I didn’t get hired by either of those two entities because of John; I mention him only to illustrate my claim that everything there was in fact linked in what might accurately seem an infinite number of hooks and eyes. Anyhow, there I was, flanked by two enormous archetypes: Working for Mother Superior one one hand and on the other . . . for Father “Fate”!

The most direct reason I got the job as deputy was that Sheriff “Fate” Thomas decided he wanted to go to college to at least earn an associate’s degree, and he was my student. He often did not show up but would send one of his deputies to sit in class with a recorder and take notes. “Fate” performed remarkably well in Sophomore Lit. It was only later I discovered that everyone downtown in the Sheriff’s Office had had a role to play in writing “Fate’s” papers. But it was during that time that “Fate” told me he knew I needed extra employment and wondered if I would like to work for him as a deputy.

“Will I have a badge?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

I couldn’t wait to report for duty. I got the badge and was, like all my fellow deputies, forbidden to arrest anyone, ever, under any circumstances no matter what. That sort of enforcement was the job of the Nashville Police. As Sheriff’s deputies we did a thousand other things, and most of us, me included, only “went armed” when one or more of our county inmates escaped, which could mean they simply walked away with the visitors and went home. Whenever “an escape” happened, we deputies would “surround the house.” Bear in mind most of us were teachers, coaches, recently unemployed young people, and one of our number was the drummer in the band on Hee Haw. But in those days there in Nashville, if you were a Catholic or a Democrat — or even knew any Catholics and Democrats — you could be a deputy. And I was fortunate beyond words and in every direction.

Suddenly it was 2005, twenty-four years after I was long gone from the days of those experiences I’ve described, and I found myself sitting with John in a studio at Nashville Public Television, taping a segment for his long-running program, A Word on Words. He was asking me about my first novel, Junior Ray, and saying wonderful things about the book, which was dubbed “hilariously tasteless” by Publishers Weekly and called, in the Mobile Press Register, “perhaps” the most profane literary work in recent history (both of those comments, I must add, were first-rate accolades). John, however, was the first of only a very few individuals who have taken notice of the non-profane parts of Junior Ray, specifically the poetry that makes up much of “The Notes of Leland Shaw.” I have to say, not as hyperbole but as fact, that if John Seigenthaler had been the only one who ever asked me anything at all about my book, that would have been sufficient for the rest of my life.

Then, in less than an Augenblick and thirty-two years after those Nashville “salad” days of “cakes and ale,” last December I was once again with John for A Word on Words at NPT — and I got my picture taken with Doris Kearns Goodwin and Ricky Skaggs . . . talk about covering the proverbial waterfront! This time John would be interviewing me about my third novel, Sailing to Alluvium. [A Word on Words audio available online.] I was almost 76, and John was ten years older. And on that crepuscular occasion and a long time before the cameras rolled, he and I spoke together about those far-away days and especially about “Fate.” We laughed a lot — particularly over a moment one night in Sperry’s. I saw John at a table and I went across the room to speak to him. He was smiling and said: “I was in Washington, and the FBI told me they think ‘Fate’ is involved in organized crime. Do you think ‘Fate’ is involved in organized crime?”

“Well, if he is,” I said, “it’s the end of organized crime.” The humor was automatic and explosive, and I shall remember the exchange even if my brain should shrink to the size of a Chiclet.

John Seigenthaler led a life that gives current meaning to everything Benjamin Jowett saw when he translated that last line in the “The Death of Socrates” from Greek to English: “Such was the end, Echecrates, of our friend, whom I may truly call the wisest, and justest, and best of all the men whom I have ever known.”

John Pritchard is the author of Junior Ray, The Yazoo Blues, and Sailing to Alluvium. He resides in Memphis, Tennessee.

Junior Ray, the irrepressible narrator of John Pritchard’s Junior Ray novels, sent these thoughts about the royal princes’ recent visit to Memphis, Tennessee.

At first, because it was Meffis, I thought it had to be the bobbakew. Otherwise I couldn’t see no other reason for anybody to come to Meffis, TENNessee, all the way from England. Plus I seen the picture in the National Informer of them two boys, whose grandmama is the queena-England, high-steppin it into the Rendezvous Restaurant to get some ribs. But if it wuddn Meffis bobbakew that brung em, I figured the only other reason for em to come here woulda been to pay a visit to the Magic Pussy Cabaret & Club, only they was too late for that, cause the law closed it down. And I am sorry they missed it.

The whole thing about them princes bein just forty miles up road was pretty puzzlin — till it become clear: One of their England buddies was marryin the granddaughter of the Meffis man who invented the motel — the Holiday Inn! — which, as you might know, happened right up there in Meffis back around 1952. I mean, son, if the motel was gon’ be invented, Meffis was sure ‘nough the place for it. In fact the most surprise’n thing to me is that it took anybody around this part of the country so datgum long to come up with a better place to go do you-know-what besides in the backseat of a forty-nine Ford, ‘specially when you consider the mosquitoes and the heat.

Anyway, that was it — the queena-England’s two grandboys come here to whoop it up in a weddn at the Hunt and Polio Club way out in East Meffis, which is where a good many of our big shots live when they aint in Florida.

On the other hand, I reg’n them Princes can go to weddns anytime they please over in England, wherever the hootydoo that is, but — I’d say, as a bonus — Meffis is the only place I know of they can get the world’s best ‘kew — with all white meat, pulled, slaw, a pot o’beans . . . and sauce on the side.

Junior Ray appears in John Pritchard’s trilogy (and growing!) of “Junior Ray” novels, which Publishers Weekly called “hilariously tasteless”: Junior Ray, The Yazoo Blues, and Sailing to Alluvium.

Author John Pritchard’s newest “southern redneck tour-de-force,” Sailing to Alluvium, continues to entertain and maybe offend (just a little) with a bevy of great local and national reviews.

Chapter 16, the online publication of Humanities Tenneseee, writes that Sailing to Alluvium “is, in the end, a biting study of class differences, every bit as profane as the plays of Aristophanes” and “every gotdamn bit as funny,” as Pritchard’s inimitable narrator Junior Ray would say. Sailing to Alluvium follows Pritchard’s earlier books, Junior Ray and The Yazoo Blues, each of which explored deputy sheriff Junior Ray’s mis-adventures in the Mississippi Delta.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal highlighted John Pritchard’s significant book tour in celebration of Sailing to Alluvium, which continues is 2014 with appearances in Texas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Louisiana, Missouri, and Kentucky (see full schedule). (About his book tour, Pritchard quipped to the Memphis Flyer‘s Leonard Gill, “I can’t say enough wonderful things about [my publisher]. They work like I don’t know what. But, God, this book tour … they’ve got a list longer than a night in jail!”)

The Appeal‘s Peggy Burch interviewed Pritchard, who happily proclaimed that “his new book is ‘just a beautiful book, just a whangdoodle of a book. … I slept with it last night.'” Burch calls Pritchard “the kind of raconteur who makes easy reference in conversation to characters such as his late Aunt Peekyboo. Thursday he remembered that this aunt once heard from her friend Estelle, who was married to William Faulkner, that,” Pritchard said, “Bill wanted to write a book that he could get banned in Boston. That’s what I want.”

Brooks Taylor of the Tunica Times makes the Faulkner comparison, too — “Undertaking a review of this third book in the series, Sailing to Alluvium, I have progressed to the very position in which William Faulkner’s critics must have found themselves: how to parse a work of literature and a body of work that seems destined to add the author to the pantheon of greats in Southern literature.” — as does Janine Stinson of ForeWord Reviews: “Those who enjoy dark humor, persnickety personality, and tales of human frailty should enjoy this novel. Pritchard has brought the Delta to life in the character of Junior Ray with a masterful, fluid, and experienced hand. William Faulkner would be proud.”

Book Page also chose Sailing to Alluvium for one of their “What We’re Reading” features, praising Pritchard’s “distinctive vernacular writing style.”

As Pritchard notes in the YouTube trailer for Sailing to Alluvium, “As my Uncle Jack would say, you can’t raise children in a small community without a copy of Junior Ray to point to as a horrible example.” All three books in the “Junior Ray” saga — Junior Ray, The Yazoo Blues, and Sailing to Alluvium — are now available in print and ebook formats from NewSouth Books.

With the news that John Pritchard’s novels Junior Ray and The Yazoo Blues were now available as ebooks, Pritchard hurried to tell his eponymous character, Junior Ray Loveblood. The results were as unpredictable as Junior Ray himself …

Shortly after I found out about the forthcoming “e”-editions of Junior Ray’s books, I sent word to him that I wanted to have a chat, and when I caught up with him I began innocuously enough by asking, “How are you, Junior Ray?”

To which he replied: “That’s personal, Pritchard. But I’m fine. What did you want to talk to me about? Am I in some kinda trouble?”

“No,” I said, “you are not in trouble. I just thought you’d be delighted to learn that both of your books will soon be on Kindle . . . and I wanted to hear what you thought of it.”

“Kindle?” He asked.

“That’s right,”  I said. “Kindle.”

“Both books?

“Yes.”

“On Kindle?”

“Correct,” I said.

“Da-um!” he said. “They gon’ set em on fire?!!”

Before I could respond, he took off like Miss Ruth McGrew, back in 1952, when she found a three-foot water moccasin coiled up in her mother’s yellow Buttercup-Spode serving platter in the kitchen cabinet above the sink: “I knew it!” he shouted. “Bygod I knew it! I knew sure as shootn that sooner or later them Baptists — and all the rest of them Bible-Bangers was gon’ get around to burnin up my books!”

At this point Junior Ray was at ramming speed. “In fact,” he went on, “I had a datgum dream the other night. Yassuh. I dreamt I was out in front of the Baptist church, and almost everybody in the town, not just them Baptists but the whole Jesus-jumpin crew — Methodists, Presbyterians, one or two of them Piscobuls and about half-a-Cath’lic, plus a whole truck-load of Holy Rollers — all of em, was just a’minglin and a’dinglin, boppin and a’hoppin around a’ e-normous barn-fire [sic], havin theysevs a big ol’ churchy time chunkin Junior Ray and The Yazoo Blues into the roarin flames. But . . . I heard a voice that spoke to me in both my ears, and the voice said: ‘Don’t worry, Sumbich; it’s just the special charcoal edition.'”

Though Junior Ray might be considered strong, he is most certainly not the silent type, thus it came as no surprise that he continued to continue — “The voice,” he said, “made me feel better, but I wuddn just watchin. I was standin on the sidelines handin out free copies of my books for all the hymn-hummers to th’ow in fire. I guess I figured that was the only way any of em would voluntarily request a copy. Plus, for all I knew, some good might come of it. As you know, my philosophy is that movin around and doin sumpm, even if it don’t make no sense, is better than setn down and not doin nothin even if that does makes sense — like if you was huntn turkeys. But stayin-still makes me feel like I got cooties, and that’s why I do all my turkey huntn at the Kroger store. Anyway, unless I’m watchin Law & Order, I got to be movin.”

A pause emerged. Angels passed, and I was able to explain to our Mr. Loveblood that “Kindle” — a Kindle — was one of several electronic devices through which people all over the world would be able to receive his message and that it didn’t have anything to do, except perhaps metaphorically, with starting a fire. Also I told him that I should have said his work would be coming out on e-books, which meant electronic books, and I apologized to him for my having used the word “Kindle” as a generic term and getting him all upset.

He told me he felt much better knowing that a Kindle didn’t have anything to do with kindling, “Cause,” he said, “suddenly I thought all the good I had done was gon’ go up in smoke and I wouldn have nothin to say for my life but ashes!”

Visibly relieved by the truth, Junior Ray declared he thinks making his books “electrical” is a good idea and that he’d bet the “EN-tire hist’ry of the whole f-n world woulda been a lot different if old Jehovah, hissef, hadda put the Ten Commandments on a’ e-book.”

And in the spirit of his well-known propensity for inconsistency with regard to religion, Junior Ray tossed a weenie to the notion that the early distribution of Western theology might also have been more efficiently accomplished “if all them old Apostles’ud had some Kindles to help em spread the Word without havin to hike out through the desert in sandals and ride around on jackasses.”

“However,” he said, “They was Democrats.” Ever the master of the bon mot, Mr. Loveblood’s perceptive wires were hot.

“I guess,” he continued, “when it comes to electricity, Benjamin Franklin never ‘magined sumpm electrical like me would come from flyin a kite in a rainstorm. But that’s how things always is. They start out one way and, on down the road, they wind up unimaginable. Anyhow, just like old Ben, all you need is a spark and a door-key. Plus, they shoulda put him on a bigger bill.”

In the end, Junior Ray’s conclusion was predictably unpredictable: “I am not surprised,” he said, “that it takes a whole lot more’n a buncha paper to handle all the important stuff I want to tell people about the (!@#$%^&*) Miss’ssippi Delta. And now that I know my books is gon’ be electrified and out there everywhere, just a’sparklin in the air, any place and no place all at the same time — from us right here clear to China! — it makes me realize, as a historian, as a philosopher, and as a law-enforcement professional . . . that my mission to give readers the real picture of the Yazoo Basin, also known as THE Miss’ssippi Delta, will no longer be carried out just with words on paper which you could wrap your pork chop in. Nossuh. Things is different — because now if you was to have my electrical books in one hand and that same pork chop in the other . . . you could cook it.”

Junior Ray and The Yazoo Blues are available in print and for all major ebook platforms from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite book or ebook retailer. Barnes and Noble named Junior Ray a 2005 Sensational Debut Novel, calling it “beautifully crafted … deserves shelf space beside the best southern literature.”

Memphis Magazine has named John Pritchard’s Junior Ray to their list of thirty-two “finest literary works with a Memphis flavor,” in honor of their thirty-second year of publication. Quipped Pritchard, “Junior Ray made the cut. It’s on the list with Faulkner and Foote, John Grisham and Jay MacInerny, and, of course, also with others less luminous . . . and, to be sure, less numinous.”

In his review of Junior Ray, Memphis Magazine staffer Bruce VanWyngarden writes:

Pritchard, who grew up in the Mississippi Delta and now teaches college English in Memphis, wrote this provocative novella about a racist “good ole boy” sheriff from Mississippi a couple of years back. In his first work of fiction, he lets Junior Ray Loveblood tell his story in his own profane voice. It’s a Southern redneck tour de force — a dark and telling comedy, not for the squeamish.

Pritchard’s next book starring Junior Ray Loveblood, The Yazoo Blues, is forthcoming from NewSouth Books in Fall 2008. Read an excerpt now from The Yazoo Blues at the NewSouth Books website.

Junior Ray is available directly from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your local book retailer.

From Junior Ray author John Pritchard:

I, like fourteen billion other people, was distressed when the New York Herald Tribune folded. Even then, in 1966, I think we knew “The Blob” was moving in our direction. More accurately, my hero Thomas Wolfe would have called it an “inexorable” Blob, but, just as descriptively, it is an unstoppable, cheapening wave of lesserness in our ‚Äòbrave new world‚Äô of more.‚Äù

Indeed, the change ‚Äì The Blob ‚Äì is no longer just at the city limits; it is on our doorsteps, and now we may begin to see ourselves as inhabitants of a world in which the familiar is vanishing — newspapers turning into billboards or simply going under, mom and pop businesses smothered, and on a larger scale: the flora and fauna of the planet not showing up for work on a daily basis. The horror is not one of collapse; it‚Äôs an inundation by shallowness. And, finally, when there are no more newspapers, no more books and magazines, and everything is entirely electronic . . . the lights will go out. Then, just as it was in A.D. 476 when the last ineffectual Roman Emperor — Romulus Augustulus — bit the historic dust . . . the barbarian kingdoms will arise.

In drafting the brief response above last week to the May 2, 2007 New York Times article “Are Book Reviewers Out of Print?” by Motoko Rich, that first pop was so dark I scared myself until I remembered my persona — namely, that I always behave as though I am Don Quixote, the noble fool who will, with a smile and cup of coffee, face Tsunamis with an inner tube. I am certain this terrible change, bad as it is, cannot entirely snuff out the love and rush of the printed word. However, the currently accelerated crumpling of journals is the shape of a future, and, as such, it is what James Joyce could have meant — if he had known to mean it — when he wrote that wonderful phrase: “the ineluctable modality of the visible.”

I loved Richard Ford‚Äôs comment in the sixth graph of the article: That reviews could be continued in some newspapers [e.g., the Atlanta Journal-Constitution] “as a public service, and the fact of the matter is they are unwilling to.” Apart from a mere denunciation, his observation largely articulates the shallow, profit-driven nature of this so-called change, this ‚Äúcultural lessening‚Äù that may signify the second End of Western Civilization — I have to give credit for the idea of that dark hyperbole to Memphis‚Äôs Fredric Koeppel (of the Commercial Appeal) because he said, once, nearly twenty years ago, in the grocery store: “First the comma, then Western Civilization!”

Also, Ford’s thoughts concerning newspapers as opposed to blogs, in the last graph of the piece, were excellent as well. He may be becoming a giant.

What Melissa Faye Greene has to say is powerful, too. In graph twenty she declares: “With the removal of the cultural critics, Atlanta is surrendering again . . . We all lose, you know, not just Atlantans, with the disappearance from the scene of a literate intelligence.”

FACED WITH THIS THREATENING INEVITABILITY, we, you and I and those of our tribe — the writers and publishers — will of course try to make bouillabaisse out of the seemingly unstoppable “Blob” and not let it make hash out of us.

The most wretched aspect of some changes is that we may know they are not good, but we also know that, later on, those-not-us will begin to admire the destruction, and after a while the changes that were indeed never good in the first place will somehow, over time, become regarded as the way things ought to be — Was it in Brave New World that a young man dreamed of being a jingle writer? A composer of slogans? I‚Äôve been that, too, but I didn‚Äôt dream of it.

The fact is that all things are not relative. Some ideas and conditions are punk from the beginning, and no infinite curve, no E’s or squared MC’s can ever make them anything other than that.

THERE’S JUST ONE THING TO DO. I told Junior Ray about the article and about what was happening, and he just said: “Fukkum, Pritchard. Get your inner tube, and let’s face the gotdam Sue Nommy.”

NewSouth novelist John Pritchard, who made Barnes & Noble’s 2005 Top Ten Sensational Debut Novels list with his book Junior Ray, is a featured author at the Tennessee Williams Festival in New Orleans this coming weekend. He’ll read from The Yazoo Blues, his hilarious next book due out from NewSouth next spring. Read an excerpt from The Yazoo Blues here.

In The Yazoo Blues, our antihero leaves law enforcement and becomes a historian. It‚Äôs all gotdam curious, if Junior Ray does say so hisself. John Pritchard’s first novel, Junior Ray, is available directly from NewSouth Books, at Amazon.com, or from your local book retailer.

Visit John Pritchard’s Amazon blog at the following link.

If you’ll be attending the Southern Festival of Books this weekend in Memphis, Tennessee, don’t miss our wonderful NewSouth authors, including Tony Dunbar (Tubby Meets Katrina), John Egerton (premiering Ali Dubyiah and the Forty Thieves), C. S. Fuqua (Music Fell on Alabama), Frye Gaillard (Watermelon Wine), Jennifer Horne (Working the Dirt), John Pritchard (Junior Ray), Carroll Dale Short (Turbo’s Very Life), and Sue Walker (In the Realm of Rivers).

The festival, sponsored by Humanities Tennessee, takes place at the Cook Convention Center and Main Street Mall in downtown Memphis. For more information, visit the Southern Festival official website.