Readin’ & Rockin’ Featuring GRAMMY-Nominated Musician Paul Burch in Conversation with former NPR host Melissa Block.

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Burch Discusses his new Novel Meridian Rising about Country Music Legend Jimmie Rodgers and Sings a Few Songs Too!

“Jimmie Rodgers comes a-yodelin’ out of Paul Burch’s novel as if he were with us today. This is a tour de force of musical imagination.”
—Roy Blount Jr., author of Save Room for Pie

“Paul Burch has made up the truth of Jimmie Rodgers’s life better than any mere ‘facts’ could ever convey—even though you’d have to be in possession of a million biographical facts to pull off this kind of vernacular Huck Finn sleight-of-hand prose magic. I suspect the sleight-of-hand has something to do with the fact that Burch is a musician himself. He played his tune in the key of rollicky, mixed in with all the sadness. From start to end, I didn’t hear a false note on the page. From start to end, this felt like such an authentic American story, in sore need of a new telling.”
—Paul Hendrickson, author of Hemingway’s Boat

Known for “Blue Yodel (T for Texas),” “Waiting for a Train,” and “In the Jailhouse Now,” Jimmie Rodgers’s impact on American music is incalculable. Paul Burch’s bio-fictional tale of the short and poignant life of the “Father of Country Music” includes an imagined first-person memoir, accompanied by spirited, hilarious, and often conflicting recollections of Jimmie’s family and music colleagues, along with period black-and-white illustrations.

Born in 1897 in Meridian, Mississippi, Rodgers remains the only artist voted into the Rock & Roll, Country, Blues, and Songwriters Halls of Fame. Generations of fans from B. B. King and Johnny Cash to George Harrison and Dolly Parton recall a Rodgers record as the first music played in their home. But his fame extended far beyond America to Africa, Ireland, England, Australia, and Russia. His disciples include Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, John Prine, the Clash’s Joe Strummer, Jack White, and anyone over the last century who has picked up a guitar to sing about life and the world around it.

Meridian Rising is at once an immersive tale and a brilliant literary puzzle, deftly blending history and fiction to create a vibrant alternative life-tale of the entertainer Howling Wolf called “my man that I really dug.” Written with the knowledge and sensitivity of a touring musician who has traveled many of the same roads and stages, Meridian Rising engages the reader in a quest for truth while confronting the deceptions that live within our deepest relationships.

Paul Burch, a native of Washington, D.C., is a writer, composer, and recording artist. As a musician, Burch put out an album in 2016 about Rodgers that received widespread acclaim. Afterwards, he moved on to other projects, but Jimmie’s story had its hooks in him, revealing itself not as another album but in Jimmie’s voice in prose. The result is a rollicking story of the kind of figure that has become a cultural archetype as well as a hero to some of the best artists of our time: Bob Dylan, Howling Wolf, Dolly Parton, Jack White—the list goes on.  Burch has produced numerous albums with his band the WPA Ballclub, including Last of My Kind, a companion to Tony Earley’s best-selling novel Jim the Boy, as well as a musical version of Meridian Rising. In addition, Burch has produced recordings with Mark Knopfler, Ralph Stanley, Lambchop, and Charlie Louvin, which received a GRAMMY nomination. Learn more at paulburch.com.

Melissa Block is an American radio host and journalist. She co-hosted NPR‘s All Things Considered news program from 2003 until August 14, 2015. In August 2015 she became a Special Correspondent for NPR, responsible for detailed profiles of newsworthy figures, and long-form stories and series on topical issues.  She retired from NPR in 2023. Block began her NPR career in 1985 as an editorial assistant for All Things Considered and rose to become the show’s senior producer. From 1994 to 2002, she was a New York reporter and correspondent for NPR. Her reporting after the September 11 attacks helped earn NPR a Peabody Award in 2001.

In 2008, Block was recording an interview in Chengdu, China, when the area was struck by a 7.9 magnitude earthquake. Her earthquake coverage earned her a Peabody Award, a duPont-Columbia Award, a National Headliner Award, and the Society of Professional Journalists‘ Sigma Delta Chi Award. Her  reporting from Kosovo in 1999 for NPR won an Overseas Press Club Award.