Testimonials

                                        

In this fine memoir, Telling Dixie Goodbye, a burning life force propels Scott Oglesby away from his constrained Southern roots. Plagued by anxiety and self-doubt, he barrels through numerous states, girlfriends, wives, risky hustles and creative endeavors, taking us on a wildly entertaining and acutely observed romp of characters, landing finally on solid ground and sobered by heartbreaking loss. With an unsparing gaze, his odyssey addresses the racism, sexism, and machismo of the South in the fifties, Left Coast counterculture in the seventies, and New York’s scrappy milieu of the eighties and current casino-ed incarnation. Along the way––with his showbizzy sister a frequent companion––he explores the meaning of family, his “confused Dixie nostalgia,” and the folks he left behind. Oglesby’s journey is an authentic, often laugh-out-loud, dramatic, rewarding trip.

—Suzanne McConnell, author of Kurt Vonnegut: Pity the Reader

Telling Dixie Goodbye is a sneakily moving, rollicking story of decades in America that are gone for good—and oh, do we miss them. Oglesby evokes the life of a boy in Arkansas, then an itinerant actor/writer/counter-culture entrepreneur moving to California and New York with a kind of dazed innocence, winning the love of a few good women, including his trail-blazing older sister. If you lived through those years, he will remind you of what you may have forgotten; if you didn’t, perhaps you will understand what it was like for the not-famous, not crazy, offbeat and hopeful multitude.

—Margaret Diehl, editor, novelist; three NYT Notable
Books, and a National Endowment Arts Fellowship

Telling Dixie Goodbye is a hilarious and heartbreaking memoir. Scott’s intimate narrative becomes a honest examination of himself as well as of the world he came from—the Deep South—and the world where he has landed—Greenwich Village. Madcap scenes with famous jazz singers, soap queens and infamous rednecks mix with deeply personal stories and family tragedies, all of which he navigates with effortless ease. Oglesby is a total charmer, his prose flowing like a conversation while stirring deep feelings about life and death and the times in between. Reading it feels like sitting around a campfire or on a bar stool and hearing tall tales that are true and small tales that become large with meaning.

—Terrence Ross, novelist, writer/director
of award-winning film EL Padrino.

In Telling Dixie Goodbye, Scott Oglesby takes us on a journey through the troubled region of his birth, warts and all, as he winds his way through adolescence and beyond in this funny and insightful memoir. With a fearsome beauty queen of a sister as a role model, Oglesby is determined to forge a life on his own far from the prejudices and restrictions of Dixie, in the theater, as a pot dealer and as a writer. Despite the title, however, he never really leaves the best of the South behind, reminding us that home is not a place outside ourselves, but lies within our hearts.

—Margo Hammond, co-organizer of the Dalí Museum
Literary Salon in St. Petersburg, Florida

Scott Oglesby is a gifted (white) Southern American writer, one in a long line which includes Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Mark Twain and others. These folks are special in their authentic rootedness and understanding of the deep South, its cultures and history almost as if another country. But Scott is especially special in that San Francisco and NYC have been his historical homes for 50 years, his writing echoing the great and hilarious Sixties and Seventies, his Arkie childhood and Big Apple wildness. His chapter, ‘Beauty Queen Blowout’ takes us to old-school South, while ‘Riding High’ takes us into weed-happy Greenwich Village. As a whole, Telling Dixie Goodbye is a hopeful work that explores a new America at work on itself, a place whose evolving language defies international translation. I believe Americans black, white and brown will get it.

—Carman Moore, world-renowned composer, conductor,
author, music critic and dedicated educator.

Book Coming Soon

It was June 1956, and we had just moved into a brand-new frame house in the middle of Arkansas. The house was odd-looking and ugly, and painted a horrendous color. Red. Fire-engine red, an absurd color for a house. More absurd was the fact that my father had rented it as our new home for him and my mother, my older sister and me. I would be known as “the skinny kid who lives in the red house.”
We had migrated from a small mill town in Louisiana, a long three-hour drive south. We showed up in a Buick, not a turnip truck—although my father had packed a bushel of my mamaw’s butter beans with our suitcases in the trunk. Conservative in every way, both of my folks were children of sharecroppers, as country as the Red River dirt they came from. But at least we were from Louisiana. Even at my age I’d learned the local hick hierarchies. “Thank God for Arkansas,” people joked back home. In Arkansas, it was “Thank God for Mississippi.

Our new house was in an old river town called Pine Bluff, named after a stand of pines that commanded a high bank over the adjacent Arkansas River. The trees were gone now, replaced by a new parking lot and the hundred-year-old Jefferson County courthouse. A prominent bronze plaque commanded the entrance. From this bluff, it proclaimed, a mortar shell lobbed at a federal gunboat in 1861 was the first shot of the Civil War.

My father was there to build the new mill—an International Paper Mill, a booming southern-born corporation. He had been promoted to assistant purchasing agent, a job too good to turn down, my mother told me, and that’s why we were there. But not me. I was there to be miserable. I had threatened them with my misery if we moved and I was following through. I left behind my best and only friend, Larry, my mamaw and the only home I’d ever known. I was ten years old.

In an odd way our garish new home was ideal. Red was the perfect color for my anger. The loud hue of my sulky pout. I would punish them forever for this move, for ignoring my wishes. For making me live in a red house.

Our new neighborhood was shabby—small lots with cheap clapboard houses and crumbling asphalt roads with ditches on both sides. A hundred feet behind our house was an over-grown strip of brambles. It concealed a boggy slew that our landlord called a brook. He lived next door to us. His house was a normal color, a forgettable color. Ben Pearson was his name, and he was a world-famous archer. He owned a bow and arrow factory on the outskirts of town, as well as several rental houses on our block. He was a wide-bodied man with a sweet nature and wore short-sleeve shirts year-round.

Shortly after we moved in, Mr. Pearson put on a demonstration for us in his backyard. His wife tossed cardboard rings in front of a big straw target papered with a bright red, yellow and blue bullseye. He shot arrows at the rings, pinning them to the target with violent thumps. We clapped at each one, prompted by his teenage daughter, Rena. We were awkwardly silent at the few rings he missed. Eventually, passing cars pulled over and people got out and watched, applauding when we did. I hated them for intruding on our private show.

Before long, my father presented me with my own bow and arrow set. I began shooting at straw targets, but soon I was aiming at birds in the trees behind our house. To my amazement, one day my aim was true, and I hit a brown thrush perched high in a large dead oak tree. With my arrow stuck in its side, it toppled from a limb and fluttered to the ground at my feet. I marveled at what I had done. But soon its fluttering stopped, and I discovered death at my hands. I burst into tears. I scooped up its warm body, ran into the brambles and buried it in a shallow grave. I never told a soul.

A week later, “colored” workmen carrying thick cords of rope came to our house. Mr. Pearson was with them. He told my father he was worried that the dead oak tree might fall on our house in a storm. His fleeting glance convinced me that he was somehow privy to my misdeed. I knew better than to shoot songbirds or anything I didn’t eat. Now I would pay. The workmen looped their ropes around the tree’s limbs and tied it down like a wild animal. With huge chainsaws that screamed and belched blue oily smoke, they cut into the trunk.

Neighbors gathered in the front yard as the men tightened the ropes. Finally, the old oak tottered and crashed to the ground with a thunderous roar, its limbs crackling and gouging the earth. Skipper, our cocker spaniel, charged away on his leash, nearly yanking me off my feet. Miraculously, the tree didn’t mash me into a pulp. I blinked back thankful tears. But I recovered quickly and got mad that it didn’t smash our red house.

By mid-summer, I had graduated to more modern weaponry, a pump action BB-gun. I was prowling in the brambles with it one day, when a policeman appeared on the trail. Guns were illegal in town, so I hastily tossed it into the brush. Neighbors reported someone in the woods with a gun, the officer informed me. Did I know anything about it? I lied with the conviction that stark fear brings. After he left, I sneaked back and retrieved my gun. I was one wily outlaw.

But I wasn’t a tough outlaw. The following day I was cornered in the brambles by an orange hornet the size of a hummingbird. With loud, deft aerial maneuvers, it trapped me on the trail, preventing my passage or retreat. In seconds, I went from the hunter to the hunted. “Mama…Mama!” I howled in terror, and for twenty minutes I yelled for her. When she finally came out for me, the critter had flown away. I refused to explain.

My mama was lean of limb and spare with speech. She was known for silent looks that graded and controlled your behavior. She could shut you up with a raised eyebrow, disarm you with a smile, or with a breathy sigh, shame you into a puddle of guilt. Most of the time I was desperate for her attention of any kind.

I wouldn’t understand until years later when my sister told me about the child-rearing pact my parents had made. With simple farm-folk logic, spawned by my sister’s puberty, they agreed that Mama would raise her, and my dad, me. Centuries of gender knowledge felled by a nod of their heads.

A few blocks away a sprawling new building housed the First Baptist Church, and on the same road, a block north, was a grocery store called the Mad Butcher. It sat at the edge of the railroad tracks that separated the white part of town from the colored part, known locally as “N—–town.” Racist slang was used without thought or obvious malice by everyone I knew, and in my youthful ignorance, so did I. Likewise, the fact that most of the houses on the colored side were unpainted and the roads unpaved, I accepted as just the way it was.

A large billboard stood just on the other side of the ten-foot embankment where the tracks ran. The sign’s placement assured that it would be spotlighted at night by every car crossing the tracks. It displayed a thirty-foot photo of Martin Luther King, sitting at a classroom desk with other adults of different races. In big block letters, a caption at the bottom explained: Martin Luther King in Communist Training School. The sign stood untouched by firebombs or graffiti, and for many years, I never thought twice about what the sign meant.

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Book Coming Soon

Title Song – Telling Dixie Goodbye

The title of this memoir, Telling Dixie Goodbye, I stole from a song written by my sister, Rhonda Coullet. The song, like my book, is an ambivalent and nostalgic homage to Southern heritage. Listen below to our “rough” work-tape duet recorded on a Sharp boombox in 1986 (see page 77).    

In 2026, Rhonda offers a scarily similar semiquincentennial prayer for all of America with her song “Old Glory Always Makes Me Cry.” Equally ambivalent and political, it can be streamed on: Spotify, Amazon and iTunes.

[Verse 1]

Old magnolias still bloom

Music lilts across the room

Like in days gone by

Nostalgia falling in the rain

The moon just magnifies the pain

[Refrain]

Telling Dixie Goodbye

Telling Dixie Goodbye

[Chorus]

Some forgive, some forget

The sun will rise, the sun will set

But in my heart

I’ll still return

To watch the bridges burn

[Verse 2]

It’s all hanging by a thread 

Written on a stanza in my head

Dixie learned her lesson well

Something lost and something gained

Her old ballgowns are all bloodstained

It’s a story she’s too proud to tell

[Refrain]

[Chorus]