Anita Garner -

I'm grateful for anticipation. It's the only thing I can control. It's the looking-forward-to part of life and I get to decide when it starts and what it means. It's a year-round necessity that puts the shine on everyday things if there's any shine to be found.

Anticipation is head and shoulders above expectations, which can break your heart. It's even more friendly than optimism. Optimism is still an option, though I carry around memories of times when optimism stepped back and did nothing while I took my eye off the prize. No offense, optimism, but sometimes you're unreliable.

Anticipation isn't just for holidays, though I'm writing this on the cusp of a season that includes lights and music and champagne and good coffee and pie. Looking-forward-to is a practice I was admonished against in childhood. The adults in my house cautioned "Don't get your hopes up." They missed the point. I'd already decided that anticipation isn't hope, though it can be hope-adjacent.

Anticipation certainly isn't the same as expectation. Expectations come with too much pressure and require depending on others. I'm not brave enough anymore for a steady diet of that. Dodging expectations is a survival tool I'm sticking with.

I've always felt safest choosing my own level of enthusiasm. It helps create an interior life that I knew early on I'd be needing. Today if I mention something I've decided to look forward to and someone responds with "Isn't it a bit early…" I flip the listening switch to the off position before the rest of that sentence is finished. The best part about embracing anticipation is, it's mine and it begins whenever I need it.

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I'm working on a new project and often return to posts at the website I've shared with a dear friend for well over a decade. Radio buddy, Dave Williams and I began The Aging Of Aquarius for blogs and pictures about our travels from young rock and roll disc jockeys - Summer of Love era - to becoming grandparents. Click this link to visit. I hope you'll stop by and say hello. We keep comments open.

Available everywhere

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University of Alabama Press

Audio book from Blackstone Audiobooks

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- Rosanne Cash -

"This is a story so central to the origins of country music: the marriage of Saturday night and Sunday morning, and the literal marriage of two musicians, sometimes at odds with each other creatively and personally. The song written by Fern Jones, "I Was There When It Happened" was performed around the world by my dad and the Tennessee Three, became the title of the memoir of Marshall Grant (the bass player in the Tennessee Three), and was revived yet again when I performed it every night on a recent tour I did with Ry Cooder. Anita Garner was 'there when it happened', and her book tells us what we ought to know."

- Dayton Duncan -

Writer/Producer of Ken Burns' Country Music

"The Glory Road" takes us to an important cultural crossroad of America––where gospel met rockabilly, and Saturday night collided with Sunday morning in the late 1950s in the Deep South. It's also a very personal family story of a deeply religious preacher, Raymond Jones, whose wife, Fern, had a big voice and even bigger musical ambitions. Anita Garner's recounting of her parents' lives––their tensions and travails on the "gypsy road" of tent revivals and recording studios––echoes one of her mother's most famous songs: "I Was There When It Happened."

—Michael T. Bertrand -

Author of "Race, Rock, and Elvis"

"The Glory Road" touches several bases: southern culture, family life, the evangelical ethos, commercial music, migration, and spousal relations. It will appeal to both a general and specialized audience."

—Burgin Mathews -

Co-Author of "Doc: The Story of a Birmingham Jazz Man"

"I'll admit I didn't know the music of Sister Fern and The Joneses until now. So, "The Glory Road" has introduced me to some exciting and important music. But, even more than that, the story itself will stick with me. I don't expect to forget these characters."

- From Numero Group on the re-issue of Fern Jones' 1950s Nashville recording sessions -

"Her voice was all Saturday night, delivered on a Sunday morning. Patsy on Jesus. Elvis without the pelvis. Fern Jones' only album, released by Dot Records in 1959, captured 36-year-old Sister Fern as she anointed church music with the same untamed energy that younger white Southerners were bringing to their rock 'n' roll. Produced by Mac Wiseman and showcasing crack Nashville session players Hank "Sugarfoot" Garland, Floyd Cramer, Joe Zinkan, and Buddy Harman fresh off their June 1958 session with Elvis, 'Singing A Happy Song' should've taken Jones from dusty canvas big tops to the Opry's storied stage. But with no 45 to flog, Jones instead sold nary a record and never did hear herself on the radio. Her fiery rockabilly gospel was a few shades too radical for the conservative, traditional, near puritanical public she played to anyway. 'Fern Jones: The Glory Road' collects her 'Singing A Happy Song' LP and cuts including 'Didn't It Rain,' from her 'The Joneses Sing' album, into one rousing package, rich with the details and imagery of a brief career spent tethered to the hard ground and gazing skyward. 'The Glory Road's' sound gnaws at the bit and stands in reverence, a runaway rockabilly tent show without a single drop of rain on the horizon."