Front-Porch Rocking Chairs

Written by Kathryn Tucker Windham

Narrated by Kathryn Tucker Windham

Close your eyes, and you can almost feel the rocking of the chair as you listen. Kathryn Tucker Windham's gentle Southern accent winds its way through these childhood and adult recollections, while her traditional wisdom and sharp sense of humor spin the spell she casts like a blanket over her listeners. Exploring the idea that being with and understanding your family is perhaps the most important lesson of all, Ms. Windham takes us out to her front porch in the morning, to the little Methodist church, across the Alabama River, all the way to Washington, D.C., and then back home to rock and admire the purple martins. The little town of Thomasville, Alabama, blooms on the ridge between the rivers, and it is brought into focus by a truly Southern storyteller.

• Language: English
• Publisher: August House
• Release date: Jan 1, 2001
• ISBN: 9781467611428

Kathryn Tucker Windham

KATHRYN TUCKER WINDHAM (1918-2011) grew up in Thomasville, Alabama. She graduated from Huntingdon College in 1939, married Amasa Benjamin Windham in 1946, and had three children before being widowed in 1956. A newspaper reporter by profession, her career spanned four decades, beginning in the shadow of the Great Depression and continuing through the Civil Rights Movement, which she observed at ground level in her adopted home town of Selma. In the 1970s, she left journalism and worked as a coordinator for a federally funded agency for programs for the elderly. She continued to write, take photographs, and tell stories. The storytelling was an outgrowth of her 1969 book, 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey. More volumes of ghost stories, folklore, recipes, and essays followed; she has now published more than twenty books. Her reputation as a storyteller led to thirty-three appearances over an eighteen-month period on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, which introduced her to an even larger audience. She has written, produced, and acted in a one-woman play, My Name Is Julia, about pioneering social reformer Julia Tutwiler, has narrated several television documentaries, and is a regular interviewee for national and international journalists visiting Alabama in search of the Old or the New South. It is a testament to the good humor, keen intelligence, and life-long curiosity of one of the region’s best known public citizens that she can guide visitors unerringly to either mythical place.