Singer-songwriter Allison Moorer explores her mother's murder at the hands of her father in a new memoir, 'Blood,' and companion album.
“Daddy” refers to Vernon Franklin Moorer, who showed up at the Frankville, Ala., home the girls shared with their mother, Laura Lynn Smith, after she had left her husband in 1986. Vernon shot his estranged wife to death on their front lawn before turning the rifle on himself while both girls hid inside the house.That 33-year-old tragedy is the focal point of Moorer’s new book, “Blood,” and the companion album of the same title she has just released.
A day earlier, over breakfast at a restaurant a short distance down Sunset Boulevard from Book Soup, Moorer, 47, elucidated the difference between her original motivation for writing “Blood” and what it came to represent for her, transcending her initial idea of creating a narrative she could share someday with her son, John Henry, who is 9.“This book is not a historical document,” she said in the gentle Alabama drawl she shares with her sister.
“I write these things down to simultaneously put us to rest and keep us alive,” she notes midway through the book. “I won’t solve anything by doing this job I’ve assigned myself. I can’t reverse time even if I count backward from four to the tempo of ‘Thirteen’ by Big Star,” name-checking Memphis’ great ‘70s rock group fronted by Alex Chilton.
In “Blood,” both the book and the album, Moorer conveys deep emotion, considerable wit and insight about herself as well as illumination about her parents’ strengths and weaknesses. At the heart of it all: her abiding bond with Lynne, with whom she realized a mutual long-held goal of recording a full album together two years ago,
. She said writing could serve as a creative outlet she could manage from home while focusing on being a mom and perhaps open the door to a career in teaching.“After I had John Henry, I got a call to be on [poet-author] Maya Angelou’s radio show,” she said. “We were having a conversation about my childhood, and she said, ‘Well, now you have John Henry. What are you going to tell him about it when he’s old enough to ask?’ And I didn’t know; I didn’t have an answer for that.
In the second of the book’s three main chapters, titled “Sissy,” Moorer describes her: “Sissy has always been brave. Primed and ready is an understatement — she, in some ways, searches out and craves the comfort of confrontation. We want what we know.
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