Jerry Clower
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Howard Gerald Clower
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Liberty, Mississippi USA
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Sep 28 1926 – Aug 24 1998 age 71
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He
served as an assistant county agent in Oxford,
Mississippi, for a couple of years. Then, maintaining his
close ties with the soil, he took a job in Yazoo City as
a fertilizer salesman for the Mississippi Chemical
Corporation, a manufacturer of chemical plant foods,
where he stayed for 18 years and eventually rose to the position
of director of field services. In the process of making sales,
he began telling prospective customers humorous stories
about his childhood to improve sales. Eventually, a
friend taped one of his talks and sent it to MCA Records
in Nashville. The result was his first comedy album in
1970, Jerry Clower from Yazoo City, Mississippi Talkin’. Within a month, the album had achieved gold status, selling more than 500,000 copies.
He
first appeared on the Grand Ole Opry in 1973 and
continued to tour extensively and record. A staple of his
comedy is the Ledbetter clan, a fictional family whose
humorous antics are more than funny; they chronicle life in the
rural South of the 20th century. Undergirding his comedy is
Clower’s strong religious beliefs. A Southern Baptist,
Clower has served as a lay minister and as a deacon in
his hometown church, and he has hosted a Christian radio
show and syndicated television show. He is married to the
former Homerline Wells, his childhood sweetheart, and
they have four children.
In addition to his live performances, Clower has also published four best-selling books. Ain’t God Good
came out in 1975 and was the basis and title for a documentary
film which won an award from the New York International Film
Festival in the category of Ethics and Religion. It was
followed by Let the Hammer Down! in 1979 and Life Everlaughter in 1987. In 1992, the University Press of Mississippi published his most recent book, Stories from Home, a collection of his best tales and a serious look at the man behind the persona.
In the foreword to Stories from Home, fellow Mississippi writer Willie Morris
wrote that Clower’s comic art demonstrates the richness
of the spoken language of the South “in all its inwardness
and nuance and sweep — the extravagant country talk, as lyrical
as much of southern literature, and in the lineal ancestry of
southern writing.” He concludes that Jerry Clower’s humor
is “rooted in a region, but is not regional.” Laughter
is the force that connects people from all regions in his
work of art.
Clower
died in Jackson, Mississippi, on August 24, 1998, five
days after undergoing heart bypass surgery. He was 71
years old. Source: Mississippi Writers Page
01 Coon Huntin' Story
02 Bully Has Done Flung a Cravin' on Me
03 Baby Goes to College
04 Homecomin' Steaks!
05 Graduate Returns
06 Marcell's Talkin' Chain Saw
07 Chauffeur and the Professor
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Country Storytellin' Humor
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MCA-33
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Thanks Bob H!
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His other albums on this blog are "tagged" at the bottom of this post
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