Writing with Pride and Peter Cooper

Reviewing Johnny’s Cash and Charley’s Pride

Photo by Drew Hays on Unsplash

I’m ashamed to say that I wouldn’t have known about Nashville journalist Peter Cooper’s book, Johnny’s Cash and Charley’s Pride: Lasting Legends and Untold Adventures In Country Music (Blue Hills Press 2017), had I not found out about Cooper’s passing when I saw his image scroll across the “lost ones” segment of this year’s Grammy Awards. I wrote of that sad discovery here:

I Didn’t Know He Died

After writing, my first act was to order Cooper’s book and then dive on in once it arrived. I hope Peter was proud of this work, and surely even if he noticed, as I did, that his copy editor let him down toward the end in the Johnny Cash section, he still could shine because the great Peter Guralnick wrote the introduction to the book. Guralnick’s praise is deep and wide, kind of like the artists and genre Cooper chronicles:

“Peter’s new book, a chronicle of his peripatetic travels since arriving in Nashville in 2000 to cover the country music scene, is even more remarkable for its ongoing determination to perpetuate that same…