California's gold runs out before Bo Jenkins finds his share. His last chance is the Blackjack mine, and it buries him alive. Things couldn't get worse-then he meets Billy Shay, a kid with a troubled past and an impossible future. Billy's nose for gold leads them to wealth, and his knack for exploitation puts them on the path to ruin. Bo's journey back to wholeness depends on the townspeople of this busted boomtown who are as lost and lonely as he is. As for Billy Shay . . .
Being the only child of a single mother, Sergio was raised by his maternal grandparents in a South Texas region better known as the Rio Grande Valley. This memoir details his upbringing as a poor migrant worker of Mexican descent having to pick crops for a living since the age of seven. As a way to break from the family cycle of picking crops and depending on government welfare programs, Sergio joined the United States Army and served ten years on active duty. He was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina shortly after the Bosnian War only to find and deal with the aftermath of the genocide that took place there and be caught in the middle of several attacks. His experiences in Bosnia ultimately led to experiencing signs and symptoms related to PTSD. After completing ten years of military service, Sergio joined the U.S. Border Patrol. Being of Mexican descent and having family in South Texas and in Mexico gave way to new issues of having to counter threats against his family and ill-willed opinions of him for arresting and deporting "his own kind."
A basic reference book for anyone interested in musical films, it contains over 1600 entries covering not only the most important actors, composers, lyricists, directors, choreographers, and producers but also the most memorable songs and films.
When a car of inebriated guests from Carmen's wedding hits and kills a girl on a country road, Carmen and the people involved in the accident connect, disconnect, and reconnect throughout twenty-five subsequent years of marriage, parenthood, holidays, and tragedies.
Silent short films practically vanished from the movie screen with the advent of sound. Despite their relatively short existence, an enormous number of them were made, and on a very wide range of topics. Presented in this book, reorganized, are the extensive working papers of Richard E. Braff (at the time of his death in 2001) detailing split-reel and one, two, and three reel films produced or released in the United States between 1903 and 1929--over 25,000 films in all. It lists (in alphabetical order) short silent films that have cast or production credits. Each entry includes to the extent possible the following elements: title, release date, producing company, director, script writer, author of story, length of film in reels, and cast credits.
Billy Joe Shaver wrote nine of the ten songs included on Waylon Jennings’s landmark album Honky Tonk Heroes and played a dominant role in the origins and development of the Outlaw Country movement of the 1970s. He has been named by Ray Wylie Hubbard, alongside Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, as a member of the “holy trinity” of Texas songwriters. He has exerted a Texas-sized influence on Texas music and especially Texas singer-songwriters, and is cited as a chief inspiration by at least two generations of artists. But although his influence has been profound, Shaver has the dubious honor of becoming, according to author Courtney S. Lennon, “country music’s unsung hero.” In Live Forever: The Songwriting Legacy of Billy Joe Shaver, Lennon seeks to give Shaver the recognition his prolific output deserves. She unfolds for readers the complexity and the simplicity of the artist who wrote the songs that Brian T. Atkinson, in his foreword, calls “peaceful and pure, complex and convoluted, mad and merciful”—the musician who wrote “You Just Can’t Beat Jesus Christ” and “That’s What She Said Last Night,” “Honky Tonk Heroes,” and “Get Thee Behind Me Satan.” Based on in-depth interviews with a host of notable singer-songwriters, this book reveals and celebrates the saint and the sinner, the earthy intellectual and the hard-drinking commoner, the poet and the cowboy.
