A sunset view over the Alabama River along the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail: Glynn Wilson

Tales From the MoJo Road –
By Glynn Wilson –

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – You know me. It’s not my way to just blow smoke, make shit up and sensationalize the facts with pretension to get attention and traffic. There’s clearly no money in that anyway, in contradiction to what everyone thought about the internet in the early days. So why not just tell it like it is and let the chips fall where they may?

Those who know me say I’m “honest as the day is long in summertime,” to turn a cliche into a metaphor.

These days there may not be any money in this either, and soon, the bots will be blowing all the smoke as real writers are left no choice but to retire to the mountain woods. So let’s be real for a minute while we still have your attention, there’s a little coffee left in the pot, ice water in the cooler and one blue berry muffin and yogurt left for breakfast.

I honestly never thought I would see this place again. And I almost wish I hadn’t. I knew the Alabama state capital was in for a long-term shit show 15 years ago when the Republicans took over all three branches of government with a Super Majority in the legislature.

Mad because a Black man was honestly elected by a majority of the American people as president in 2008, and who cruised to reelection again without so much as a scandal in 2012, the racist robber plantation barons who controlled Alabama’s government even through all the so-called populist years of George Wallace convinced the poor, uneducated people here to keep them in power a little while longer.

Now with Trump their hero back playing golf at the helm, letting Apartheid hacker Elon Musk run the car show from the White House, they are still laughing all the way to the bank at the Montgomery County Club, where George Bush’s picture still hangs on the wall. Although it’s been downgraded to one below heir Trump.

The Old Cloverdale Grill, where Bush used to regale Republican campaign workers in 1972 with tales of drunken nights at Yale and chase Huntingdon College debutantes with lines of cocaine, is no more. The only restaurant still open in that former fancy neighborhood is a chain Mo’s BBQ.

Let’s see the bots investigate and write this, registered with a copyright certificate in the Library of Congress.

George W. Bush’s Lost Year in 1972 Alabama

The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa now claims to be where “Legends Are Made.” Of course they are mostly talking about those made on the football field, not the science labs or the journalism school, where the only legend hanging around teaching there these days is a writer from Possum Trot who never attended the university.

Rick Bragg is still a friend of mine, forged when we worked together out of New Orleans for The New York Times. Since I’m now working on a book about the life and times of rock legend Wayne Perkins, I finally got around to looking up the Times review of Bragg’s book on Jerry Lee Lewis.

It was written by a guy named Stephen King, no not that one. This guy plays rhythm guitar for a band you’ve never heard of, the Rock Bottom Remainders, and authored a book you’ve never heard of, a novel called “Revival.”

Not enthralled with Bragg’s prose, even though he compares it to Robert Penn Warren, in the end he says it’s “worth reading,” although he belabors the point by calling it “overlong.”

“Bragg,” he says, calling him “a former reporter for The New York Times (another unnecessary knock, since he was not just a reporter, but a staff writer and correspondent for about 10 years who also won a Pulitzer), “hits all the legendary moments, both high and low. There was the rock revue where Lewis, infuriated that Chuck Berry had been chosen to close the show, set the piano on fire after his own set and swaggered offstage.”

“First time I ever saw a colored guy turn white,” he tells Bragg.

“There was the night Janis Joplin slapped his face and Lewis slapped hers right back. The night he crashed into the gates at Graceland, drunk on champagne and with a loaded derringer floating around somewhere in his Lincoln Continental. His reaction to Elvis’s death not long after is chilling in its offhandedness: ‘Just another one out of the way’.”

Well, he was, although it was surely a sad day for all his fans who flocked to Graceland.

Bragg told me his publisher, Harper Collins, was “exacting,” so the book took six years to finish. “I think I made about minimum wage on that one,” he says.

Which is why he told me a long time ago you can’t just make a living authoring books. That’s why writers teach, or do something else, like play rock and roll in bars – or go camping in a media van and live cheap.

No, this was not my plan.

Remember, I was camping out in Western Missouri right after Election Night in 2024 and could nearly see the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas calling me out to California. But snow was already falling in Colorado, and I heard about a film premier on Wayne Perkins happening in Birmingham, so I turned the media van around and came back home to see what all the hubbub was about.

Now I’m in talks with LA lawyer Mickey Shapiro and New York agent David Vigliano about a three book deal, the one on Wayne Perkins, the third edition of my memoir Jump On the Bus, and a book on the life and times of Spider Martin.

They like to say God works in mysterious ways. If this deal comes through – and Vigliano is known for obtaining record seven figure advances for authors – I may start believing again. It’s been a long time.

You’ve heard me say on several occasions of late that this is not my plan. Here’s what I mean.

Back in September when my Dodge Roadtrek camper van broke down in Milton, West Virginia, I gave up. I was ready to die right there and be done with it. I did not want to live in a world and a country so stupid that people would elect a grifter like Donald Trump as president again anyway.

So I said a prayer. If there is some reason in the heavens for me to keep on going, to keep on fighting for survival and my country, I said, show me the way. “I give up.”

People from all over started sending me money on GoFundMe, and the redneck RV mechanic who burned up the motor in the Dodge van just gave me his Ford van. So I said OK, I’ll keep on going, to see where this new plan leads.

While surviving the winter outside of Birmingham in a huge log cabin in Argo near Trussville, and working on the Perkins book, I also spent three weeks in Muscle Shoals doing research. The day Elon Musk took over the Treasury Department and started accessing our Social Security private information, his team of DOGE hackers somehow got my bank account frozen for a solid week. Then the account I had for 20 years and used all over the country was simply closed without my consent. I thought I was done for again.

But it was not to be. Out of the blue sky and Facebook, a news director with Alabama Public Radio recruited me to do some stories out of the new Digital Media Lab in Bryant-Denny Stadium, and the first one turned out to be about my old friend Spider Martin and his amazing and historic photographs, restored and on exhibit on the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.

Spider Martin Photography Exhibit Opens on the 60th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965

Just the other day, I was offered a campground hosting gig by the Corp of Engineers in the Prairie Creek Park Campground near Selma, a beautiful spot on the Alabama River with Spanish moss hanging from the trees by the dam, with a free washer and dryer. They want me here from April through October. Not sure I can take the summer here.

“Let me think about it,” I said.

But there is something at work here in this part of the world that I cannot control all by myself. I even survived in a van down by the river as tornados and thunderstorms crashed through the region on Saturday night.

All I can do at this point is to say, “Thank you Jesus,” and keep on rolling down the road.

I’m sure you all are as curious as I am about where this new plan will lead. See you down the dusty trail.

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