Saturday, July 05, 2025

Book Rieview: You Are My Sunshine: Jimmie Davis & the biography of a song

One of the speakers at the Louisiana Library Association (LLA) Conference this year was Robert (Bob) Mann. He is a a professor emeritus of mass communication at Louisiana State University. He held the Manship Endowed Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at LSU for 18 years. He is the author of ten books, including critically acclaimed political histories of the U.S. civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, American wartime dissent, Ronald Reagan, and the 1964 presidential election. {source: https://www.robertmannbooks.com/about-robert-mann} He worked as a journalist and then for several prominent Louisiana political figures.

This book is a combination of history of the song and its popularity, biography of Jimmie Davis, and commentary both on aspects of Louisiana politics and the societal issues from the 1920s to the present. It is exceedingly well written.

So many of us have sung or heard this song sung with no understanding of the origin story. I did not know very much about the two-time governor Jimmie Davis before I read this book. As I noted above, one of the foci of the book is his complicated story.

As part of the analysis of the song, Bob Mann includes discussion of the various "covers" of the song over time. Someone who is more musically astute than I could make a great web site linking to all the different versions which have been recorded over time. I would enjoy listening to some of these while reading the stories of how they came about.

It is a well researched work with 17 pages of footnotes (technically end notes), seven pages of bibliography, and an index. Anyone doing work on Jimmie Davis or the role of this song in the American pantheon would find this a seminal work. I am very glad that I read it!

P.S. I commend reading this article about his departure from LSU. It has some interesting, pointed perspectives including on the brain drain from the state: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/10/why-robert-mann-quit-lsu.html 

Friday, April 11, 2025

Books Read - 2024

Well, this list is really, really late! Without having gone to ALA's Midwinter event, I had sort of abandoned this blog. And, for whatever reasons, I have not been reading books -- lots of reading, but mostly email, newspapers, social media. Here's the 2024 list:
    Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
    The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford [Work topic]
     Dawn in the Dooryard: Reflections from the Jagged Edge of America by Timothy Cotton Author signed; family holiday grab bag
    Writing the Big Book: The creation of A. A. by William Schaberg
    A History of the Louisiana Library Association, 1925 - 2000 edited by Alma Dawson and Florence Jumonville @work
    At the Edge of the Orchard by Tracy Chevalier [Book discussion book from a sister-in-law]
    From Prison Cells to PhD: It is never too late to do good by Stanley Andrisse
    Red Harvest: A graphic novel of the Terror Famine in 1930s Soviet Ukraine by Michael Cherkas [GN=Graphic Non-fiction]; ARC @work
    Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng [Book discussion book from a sister-in-law]
    How Far the Light Reaches: A life in ten sea creatures by Sabrina Imbler
    Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender YA - LTRC
    First-Hand: A Memoir of Life in 1950's Mandeville LA by J. Vernon "Butch" Smith
    Let's Talk About It: The teen's guide to sex, relationships, and being a human by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan [GN=Graphic Non-fiction]
    Cheer Up! Love and Pompoms by Crystal Frasier, Val Wise, and Oscar O. Jupiter [GN=Graphic Novel; LYRTC @work]
    Museums & Women and other stories by John Updike
    Saint Juniper's Folly by Alex Crespo [YA, ARC]
    Glengarry Geln Ross: A play by David Mamet [@work]
    My Selma by Willie May Brown [ARC, YA - intro speaker at ALA LibLearnX 2023]
    Nothing Interesting Ever Happens to Ethan Fairmont by Nick Brooks [ARC, YA, signed by the author]
    Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson [@work]
    Jikji, light from the East III published by Cheongju Early Printing Museum

Note that prior year reading lists are linked from this page: