Paul Hemphill is dead. Whether he was writing newspaper features or later, novels and nonfiction books, he showed us that a minor leaguer aiming for the Bigs is more than a small town boy making good, and that the soul of country music – real country music, not this pseudo-pop crap they pass off on your country stations today – is only found in the dark space between what is and what should be.

Paul Hemphill’s voice is lost. With his passing, like the passing of Larry Brown, we have lost something in Southern literature, a distinctly of-their-time perspective that’s hanging on by a thread in writers such as Harry Crews and Rick Bragg.

I, like many writers, have a “Quotes” file. This one, by Paul Hemphill, is near the top of a very long list:

The years following the Second World War represent the golden age of country music, written and performed by southern boys and girls not a day’s bus ride from the cotton fields or Appalachian hollows whence they had come. Except for the complicated rhythms of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, a cowboy’s version of the danceable swing of the time, there was nothing fancy about it. All you needed was a stand-up bass and a rhythm guitar to set the beat, a jaunty fiddle, a crying steel guitar, and a singer with an ache in his voice. The lyrics dealt not with true love and harvest moons and life as it should be, but rather with the way it had turned out: broken hearts, dead mamas, whiskey, knife fights, prison, graveyards, unrequited love, loneliness.

Paul Hemphill, Lovesick Blues