Homeplace: A Southern Town, a Country Legend, and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk

Written by John Lingan

Narrated by Andrew Eiden

Winchester, Virginia is an emblematic American town. When John Lingan first traveled there, it was to seek out Jim McCoy: local honky-tonk owner and the DJ who first gave airtime to a brassy-voiced singer known as Patsy Cline, setting her on a course for fame that outlasted her tragically short life. What Lingan found was a town in the midst of an identity crisis.



As the U.S. economy and American culture have transformed in recent decades, the ground under centuries-old social codes has shifted, throwing old folkways into chaos. Homeplace teases apart the tangle of class, race, and family origin that still defines the town, and illuminates questions that now dominate our national conversation—about how we move into the future without pretending our past doesn't exist, about what we salvage and what we leave behind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: Aug 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781684411931

John Lingan

John Lingan is the author of Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers; Homeplace: A Southern Town, a Country Legend, and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk; and A Song for Everyone: The Story of Creedence Clearwater Revival, named one of the Best Music Books of 2022 by Variety. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Nation, and The Oxford American, among many other publications. He lives in Maryland.