2020-06-18
48 分钟My guest today, James McBride, grew up in Brooklyn, the 8th of twelve kids, really immersed in community, church, music, and books, eventually heading off to school.
He would find himself at Columbia Journalism school and then in the career as a journalist for the better part of a decade, working for places like the Boston Globe people and the Washington Post, before leaving journalism behind to turn music into a full time profession, where he would then spend the better part of the next decade touring and playing sax with jazz legend Jimmy Scott and so many others, and also writing songs for people like Anita Baker, Grover Washington Junior, and even for the PBS television character Barney.
But here's the thing.
While he was on the road, he kept writing and he kept looking back at his life, and especially his mom's life, with curiosity.
And that would eventually become his landmark memoir, the Color of Water, that sat on the New York Times bestseller list for two years and led him back into a more blended career, writing and playing music.
The color of Water is now considered an american classic and is read in schools and universities across the United States.
His debut novel, Miracle at St.
Anna, was translated into a major motion picture directed by Spike Lee.
And his novel the Good Lord Bird, really about the american revolutionary.
John Brown, won the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction.
And McBride's newest novel, Deacon King Kong.
It drops you into this sort of fictional world of church and community, set in 1969, Brooklyn, which is rich with these incredible stories, deeply flawed yet lovable characters, and this fierce interplay between social commentary and humor that ultimately lands in the form of awakening and redemption and love.
We explore all of this along with his lens on the interplay between music and writing and life and teaching, and also, really, the power of the moment that we are all in together right now and the hope that it's creating.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
It doesn't matter what you study in college.
This matters that you learn how to think, you know?
Yeah, tell me about it.
I mean, but it's interesting because you, I mean, you at Oberlin, you studied music.
Music comp.