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Renaissance Woman, Alice Randall

Alice Randall speaking while Christopher Burawa looks on
Alice Randall speaking while Christopher Burawa looks on

Chris Burawa, Director of the Austin Peay State University Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts (CECA) and conference director of the Sixth Annual Clarksville Writers’ Conference, consistently describes Alice Randall as a “Renaissance Woman.”

Introduced by Patricia Winn as the keynote speaker for the conference banquet held at the Clarksville Country Club, Alice Randall has credentials anyone can admire. She is the author of the controversial parady of Gone with the Wind, The Wind Done Gone (a winner of the 2001 Al Neuharth Free Spirit Award and on the best seller list for six weeks peaking at number nine). The Mitchell family had sued her publisher to block publication of the book; this resulted in a high profile lawsuit that created arguments concerning parody, freedom of speech, censorship and copyright law. An out-of-court settlement allowed the book to be published; the publisher, Houghton Mifflin, also made a financial donation to Morehouse College, long supported by the Mitchell estate.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVqJyO2eDjg[/youtube]

Alice Randall has been quoted as feeling that her own book “unites the nation” because of the way African-Americans are portrayed in Margaret Mitchell’s book. She believes that blacks are portrayed by Mitchell as intellectually inferior. Alice asserts that writing The Wind Done Gone is an act of love for her daughter, “so that she would not have to live her life with that text unanswered.”

Her central character, Cynara, is the mulatto child of Mammy and Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation-owner father. Cynara later becomes the mistress of Rhett Butler, who teaches her to write; she chronicles her life as a slave and concubine in a diary.

Alice’s second book, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, won the “Outstanding Fiction” Award from The First Annual Mixed Media Watch Image Awards and also won Honorable Mention at the 2004 Myers Outstanding Book Awards.

Alice Randall reading from one of her books
Alice Randall reading from one of her books

Rebel Yell, her most recent novel, centers around Abel Jones, Jr., the son of a famous black civil rights lawyer. She reminded the audience at the conference dinner that Abel, of course, was the first person in the Bible to be murdered; thus the name of her character. She describes him as “colored-baby royalty” but he later dies while dining with his second wife, a white woman, at a dinner theater named Rebel Yell. When his first wife, Hope, learns about some of Abel’s activities that may include CIA operations, she is haunted with worries that she may have saved Abel’s life had she not left him to shield her son from Abel’s latent violence. Hope begins a search to know the “true” Abel, a spy, and the book moves to Manila, Rome, Nashville and Washington, D. C.

Alice Randall, after graduation from Harvard, moved to Nashville when she was 23. Her first husband, attorney Avon Williams III, proposed to her the day her first song, “Reckless Night,” (described as a retelling of The Scarlet Letter) was recorded. The lived together for five years in places like Martinique, the Philippines, and Washington, D. C., but Alice says that Rebel Yell is not autobiographical.

After her divorce from Williams, she moved back to Nashville with her three-year-old daughter. She founded Midsummer Music “to fund novel writing and a community of powerful storytellers.” She is the first African-American woman to write a number one country song. With Matraca Berg, she wrote “Xxx’s and Ooo’s (An American Girl),” recorded by Trisha Yearwood. Of Alice’s 20 songs that have been recorded, several have reached the top ten and top forty lists.

“I fell in love with country music as an art form,” Alice related. “I believe it to be the music of uneducated white people and I want to stand up for their civil rights. I believe that Merle Haggard is one of our greatest American poets.”

Alice Randall speaking with Conference Attendees
Alice Randall speaking with Conference Attendees

While at Harvard in addition to her American Literature studies for her major, Alice took an independent study in cooking with Julia Child. Alice began cooking when she was a child. She explained to her writers’ conference audience that she has a dining table that seats 18 and likes to cook for even 100 people at her home.

Ms. Randall is now married to David Ewing, an attorney who practices green law. On the grounds of the Capitol during the inauguration of President Bill Clinton, Ewing (who is six feet, five inches tall), suddenly dropped to his knees in front of Alice.

“Being a neurotic worrier, I thought he had been shot or had a heart attack,” she remembers. The crowd around them began applauding and she realized that he was proposing.

Having formerly taught at Harvard, Princeton, The University of Virginia, and Wesleyan, Alice Randall is now Writer in Residence at Vanderbilt University where she teaches Country Lyric in American Culture, Creative Writing, and Soul Food. She contributes frequently to Elle Magazine.

She has appeared on television scores of times and is quoted regularly in magazines and newspapers throughout the country. Co-authored with Carter and Courtney Little, her first book of non-fiction, My Country Roots: The Ultimate MP3 Guide to America’s Outsider Music, has its introduction written by George Jones.

Alice Randall with Patricia Winn
Alice Randall with Patricia Winn

Even Starbucks loves Alice Randall. On their coffee cups, they have written her lines, “Mother-love is not inevitable. The good mother is a great artist ever creating beauty out of chaos.” To date more than five million of these cups have been and are continuing to be distributed.

John Seigenthaler, founder of the First Amendment Center, says about her, “Alice Randall has given us Hope (referring to the character in Rebel Yell). And Hope helps us understand that black and white, more than a definition of contrasting colors, and more than a means of identifying two races, is the sum of our dark past, our glowing present and out bright future.”

Is Alice Randall a Renaissance woman? Decide for yourself.

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Sue Freeman Culverhouse
Sue Freeman Culverhousehttp://culverhouseart.com/
Author of Tennessee Literary Luminaries: From Cormac McCarthy to Robert Penn Warren (The History Press, 2013) Sue Freeman Culverhouse has been a freelance writer for the past 36 years. Beginning in 1976, she published magazines articles in Americana, Historic Preservation, American Horticulturist, Flower and Garden, The Albemarle Magazine, and many others. Sue is the winner of two Virginia Press Awards in writing. She moved to Springfield, Tennessee in 2003 with her sculptor husband, Bill a retired attorney. Sue has one daughter,  Susan Leigh Miller who teaches poetry and creative writing at Rutgers University. Sue teaches music and writing at Watauga Elementary School in Ridgetop, Tennessee to approximately 500 students in kindergarten through fifth grade. She also publishes a literary magazine each year; all work in the magazine is written and illustrated by the students. Sue writes "Uncommon Sense," a column in the Robertson County Times, which also appears on Clarksville Online. She is the author of "Seven keys to a sucessful life", which is  available on amazon.com and pubishamerica.com; this is a self-help book for all ages.
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