Q&A: Author Michael Amos Cody’s New Book Takes Us to the Streets of Nashville and Beyond
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Michael Amos Cody is something of a renaissance man. He’s a musician, songwriter, teacher and writer whose latest novel Streets of Nashville is set for April 15 publication. From Johnson City, Tennessee – more specifically, the town of Jonesborough – Cody moves easily between his vocations and avocations.
When I met him, we were both attending the 2024 Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in Nashville and, between panel discussions, Cody was getting ready to set up a sound system for an off-site reading by authors of their works. Of course, Cody just happened to have a sound system with him.
His work touches on music and murder in Tennessee and North Carolina over a 30-year-plus period. With his shaved head, full beard and piercings, he looks a little like a punk-rock, down-home Santa.
We had the following email exchange, edited for length and clarity.
Keith Roysdon, The Daily Yonder: I’m really enjoying, from the book and from knowing you, how two major elements fit into your fiction: music and small-town life. Did you always know you’d infuse the two into your work?
Michael Amos Cody: Maybe “know” is too strong a word. The infusion of music and small-town life into my fiction writing feels like a natural part of becoming who I am – a living example, perhaps, of “write what you know.” I remember being twelve years old or thereabouts when Glen Campbell’s Greatest Hits (1971) appeared in our house. I wanted to be a drummer back then, so I set up anything that might be considered drum-like – the bottom of a laundry basket, a milk bucket, etc. – and played them with pencils for drumsticks. While I’ve blocked the memory of my limited skills as a drummer, what I easily recall is my fascination with the words and music together, especially the great Jimmy Webb songs on Campbell’s album: “Wichita Lineman,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Galveston,” and “Where’s the Playground Susie.”
As for rural life and small towns, they’re what I’ve always known. I grew up on a North Carolina mountain farm that was no longer farmed, on the edge of a village called Walnut, a community of some few hundred people, a school (grades 1-8 in my time), a couple of stores (one including the post office), and four churches (Freewill Baptist, Missionary Baptist, Presbyterian and Methodist). The nearest town was Marshall; the nearest city was Asheville. Even when I moved to Nashville in the early ’80s, the city at that time didn’t feel much bigger than Asheville even though it was ten times bigger.
DY: What about the small-town and rural experience has inspired generations of writers and music-makers (including but not limited to you)?
MAC: My take on it is that the rural and small-town experience offers a level of familiarity not available – or not available in the same way – in more urban settings. Although I frequently failed my mom’s pop quizzes about who lives where and who their folks are, that familiar knowledge of immediate surroundings and the histories of these seems more readily available to writers emerging from such settings. Urban settings can allow access to a greater variety of human nature via the warrens of the inner city. While rural and small-town existence allows access to less variety in human nature, this, to me, is made up for in readier access to the non-human nature of wild woods and water and their inhabitants.
DY: You identify as a writer and a songwriter. If you had to choose one for someone to know you as, which would it be?
MAC: In my younger days, I identified as a songwriter. Even though I also sang, I resisted the label of singer-songwriter. I was all about the song in those days. I identify more as a writer of fiction now that I’m older. Even though songs can take anywhere from minutes to months to write, writing a song still feels like a heat-of-the-moment activity. Writing fiction feels like a steamy simmer as opposed to a boil. Even at my age, however, nothing thrills me more than picking up a guitar and playing a song that I wrote and feel like I really nailed.
DY: Tell me about your teaching career, giving me some idea of where you’ve taught and what that’s meant to you.
MAC: When I finally faced the fact that Rock Star! wasn’t to be my future, I went back to school (at thirty-two years old), initially, I told myself, to finish the undergraduate degree my parents always wanted me to have. This was in January of 1991, and by August 2000, I had my PhD. Along the way, I began teaching during my MA program at Western Carolina University and continued in my doctoral program at the University of South Carolina. I then returned to WCU for the next couple of years and taught as a visiting lecturer while I completed my dissertation. The same month that I completed my PhD (August 2000), I began my first tenure-track teaching position at Murray State University in Kentucky. Murray is a small town, and my family and I quickly grew to love it there, but within a few months the opportunity came up to return to the mountains. I began teaching at East Tennessee State University (ETSU) in August 2001, and I’m now finishing my 24th year there.
My primary scholarly focus since my MA program has been early American literature, centered on the long period from the Puritan invasion of what they would name New England to the end of the 19th century. Soon after arriving at ETSU, I developed a course in Native American literature, which I’ve offered for many years now. Teaching early American and Indigenous literatures was gratifying from the start, but it has taken on more importance to me and has become a more urgent practice over the past few years as the powers that be would have us forget that the U.S. exists on stolen land and that for years much economic production (especially agricultural) depended on the work of stolen people. For now, at least, I can still teach these things, and I find it sadly rewarding to engage with young people who know little about the Indigenous peoples of this land (beginning with the fact that they still exist) and little about the institution of African slavery.
Teaching has exposed me to literature that ranges widely across time, geographies, and cultures. I hope that has made me a better person and a better writer.
DY: Did you always want to teach? Did you have an inspiring teacher when you were young who inspired you in teaching, writing or songwriting?
MAC: I remember being a student of 18-years-old in my music and other classes at Mars Hill College, listening to and watching my professors teach and thinking that seemed like a pretty good gig. During my years in Nashville, I went through periods when little seemed to be happening with my songwriting aspirations (apart from the songwriting itself). I would begin to think of going back to school, but then something would happen to hint that my big break was just around the corner. So, I would put away thoughts of degrees and teaching. But I remember thinking that my Rock Star! life would probably be over by the time I was forty. I had it in mind that then I would return to school and eventually spend the rest of my working life as a teacher and writer.
DY: I read the piece about Runion [North Carolina] that you wrote for your blog. Is there much left there? When’s the last time you were there?
MAC: I last visited the Runion area in December 2019. Only a few bits of the town remain from its life at the confluence of the French Broad and Laurel Rivers like concrete foundations of the sawmill; the concrete paymaster’s vault that stands in the woods; the chimneys and foundations of two owners’ houses; a double line of jonquils that once must have lined the walkway to the front or back door of one of these residences. In spots during the summer, you can see grass that must have once been in the yards of workers’ shacks along streets now no longer there. Until a few years ago, a pile of wood that was the one-room schoolhouse was still there, but it has rotted away now.
DY: What about Runion inspired you to write – and include the town in your work? How’s the reaction been?
MAC: During my school years of reading and study, I came across literary places like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and James Joyce’s Dublin. I saw Runion as a real place with a real history that had, in the present, become something of a blank slate. I realized that I could recreate it as anything I wanted. I could take the best (and worst?) of the small towns I grew up with and make a place where a variety of stories could happen and lives could be lived. At the same time, it could be surrounded by the very real geography and history of Madison County, just as Marshall, Mars Hill, Hot Springs, and my Walnut, are. Runion became my ideal small-town of both past and present.
The reaction has been good, I think. Those who read A Twilight Reel, my collection of short stories set in Runion, have gotten a good feel for the place and its people. My cousin who lives in Australia and hasn’t been in the North Carolina mountains in over half a century texted me a few nights ago to say the book makes him feel like he is in Runion and its environs. [This short story collection was published in 2021. The book won the Short Story/Anthology category of Feathered Quill Book Awards 2022.]
DY: Nashville is such a strong element of your work and obviously Nashville has changed, pretty regularly, over the decades. Tell me a little about your time there and how it relates to what you’re doing now.
MAC: I lived in Nashville through my twenties (the 1980s), which seem to have been really formative years for me. I had a lot of good friends and did the majority of my songwriting there. My first introduction to Nashville was in January 1980, when I abandoned my music major (flute) at Mars Hill College and transferred to become a music business major at Nashville’s Belmont College. That lasted only a semester (too much business, not enough music), and I was home in Walnut by June.
Not long after this, however, I returned to Nashville with a $500-month songwriting contract and an added production contract that put me in the recording studio to record – between 1981 and 1984 – two unreleased albums of my songs. (You can read all about this in my first novel Gabriel’s Songbook, which I like to say is autobiographical in its bones and fiction in its flesh and blood.) When my first staff writing gig ended, I worked at Cat’s Records (a record/video store) and cleaned swimming pools. Another staff writing gig came along in 1986 or 1987, and I did that for a couple of years, during which I put together a band and made a go at that Rock Star! life.
The 1980s in Nashville became the last decade of more or less traditional music business. The digital revolution was on the horizon, and the systems of song publishing and recording would begin to change drastically as the early ’90s arrived. The changing character of the music business in turn changed, for me, Nashville as a place. I left in the last months of 1989 and returned home to the North Carolina mountains, married, began a family, and started back to school.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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