Living in the Present with John Prine, Tom Piazza’s poignant book about the late singer-songwriter, is full of colorful anecdotes about the time the two men spent together — a painfully short interlude of friendship that ended abruptly with Prine’s death in the spring of 2020. Tom Piazza will appear at the 2025 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 18-19.
In Tom Piazza’s novel The Auburn Conference, an idealistic scholar arranges a meeting of famous writers in 1883 to debate the meaning of America. Piazza will discuss the book at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on May 11.
October 1, 2015 In Tom Piazza’s new novel, A Free State, a runaway slave, Henry Sims, joins a troupe of minstrels in blackface, but for Henry the only possible freedom comes from the liberating power of music. Piazza will discuss A Free State at Crosstown Arts in Memphis on October 8, 2015, and at the Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 9-11, 2015.
In the day, country music characters like Grandpa Jones, Mel Tillis, and George Jones left a wake of hilarious, poignant, and bawdy tales that Music Row insiders passed around like baseball cards. Of these, none were more often repeated than those involving self-proclaimed “King of Bluegrass” Jimmy Martin, a notorious loose canon. In 1998 music writer Tom Piazza followed Martin on a harrowing visit to the Grand Ole Opry, during which the inebriated singer came close to fisticuffs with at least two members of that venerable institution. Ten years after appearing in The Oxford American, the resulting article, “True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass,” is now available in paperback.
