Billy Blackman

To make good on a birthday promise, I took the wife backwater fishing last weekend near Wewahitchka, Florida, my hometown. We fished in the roadside ditches between the Dead Lakes and the mighty Apalachicola River. During high water, those ditches can be a good place to fish. We baptized about $30 worth of worms and caught a few fish. There is no better way to learn how to … [Read more...] about Backwater Fishing and Carrot Trees

Frost sprinkled our shoes like sugar on a brogan honeybun as we stood in the warm sun under a bluebird sky and talked cowology. Actually, Bill Parramore and I talked about other things, too. Like our arthritic knuckles and how painless, free-moving mornings that didn’t smell like liniment were now just a distant memory, and we remembered fast cars with V-8s measured in … [Read more...] about Cowology

I lay in bed with the window open, wondering how all these unholy skeeters keep finding the weak spots in the holy window screen. The August night was hot and melted the darkness into a syrupy, melodic mixture of locus, crickets, and tree frogs, all complaining about the heat while singing a common song. It’s Saturday night, and most 12-year-olds are asleep by now. Not me. … [Read more...] about How to Make a Guitar Picker

I opened my guitar case, and the little church in Jefferson County, Florida, filled with the smell of a thousand honky-tonks.You know the smell I’m talking about. It’s a unique marriage of stale smoke from unfiltered Camels and menthol Newports, woven in with splashes of old merriment still staining and scenting the guitar case liner with its aromatic memory. Inside the case … [Read more...] about “They Paid Me in Fried Chicken”

I am a Southerner!Not because of where I live but because I see, feel, taste, and understand things in a certain way. And despite what some people north of Nashville might think, it has nothing to do with bad schooling but more to do with good genes and good luck.If you’re from the South, you understand certain things. You don’t know why; you just do. Just like your mama and … [Read more...] about I Am a Southerner