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Nashville Tennessean - Interview with journalist and book reviewer Jonathan Marx. Sunday, June 1, 2008

The eldest son of singer Tennessee Ernie Ford, Nashvillian Jeffrey Buckner Ford, is the author of River of No Return: Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Woman He Loved. Published by local imprint Cumberland House, the book chronicles Ford's astounding popular success in the 1950s and '60s while also conveying the often painful realities of life in a family touched by celebrity. More than a biography, the book offers a firsthand view from someone who was there to experience many of the highs and lows.

What do you hope readers will remember about Ernie Ford after reading this book?

That he was a simple man, an ordinary man who, along with the woman he loved, was caught up in and changed forever by an extraordinary life.

River of No Return seeks to strike a balance between biography and memoir. Did you struggle with figuring out how much of yourself to put in the book?

Yes. I began this book in 1979, just after the birth of our first child. Both my parents were still alive then. When I pitched it to an agent in New York, the concept initially was a great deal more based in my own life as it related to theirs. But as I matured as a man, a father, a husband and a writer, I realized the story that needed to be told was not my own. Because what it is, really, is a love story between these two people — but I was there for part of it. I'd love to be able to coin a genre — memoigraphy — but that sounds like a medical procedure.

Your book begins with your father's death, and it closes with your mother's death. Was writing a way of coming to terms with their loss?

When you face crises in your life with your eyes fully open, it is a growth and learning and humbling experience. I was forced to chronicle incidents in my life that I remembered with great pain, but I needed to record them in such a way that it was correct on the page, and that made the process doubly difficult.

"Darkness Visible", William Styron's own memoir of his passage through depression was a case study for me in how someone could take something that was traumatic, and make moving through those incidents almost like an exorcism.

Could you talk about the ways your mother, Betty Jean Ford, occupied such a singular role in your father's life?

They were molecularly tied to each other. Like a yin and yang symbol, where one is balanced with the other, the truth is also that the two are completely opposite, and yet they must coexist. Everything that Ernie Ford was, from Sept. 18, 1942, until the day he passed away was in great part because of who Betty Ford was. The influence she had on him was undeniable; the division and rancor between them was as pronounced as it was in their later years because of how integrally connected they were. I couldn't tell the story of any part of Ernie Ford's life without telling the story of Betty Ford.

In one passage, you meditate on the word "intoxicated," and the various ways that played out in your family's life. Do you see this book as a substance abuse narrative?

There's a common thread of substance that passes through much of the story, and occasionally in the thread there's a little knot of abuse in there. It's a narrative of a number of lives that were dramatically affected by the abuse of alcohol and pharmaceuticals. But it's not a narrative about that — it's a narrative about lives affected by that.

Your father was born and raised in Bristol, Tenn. Can you talk about how the state of Tennessee figured into his life?

Dad for all practical purposes stopped being a Tennessean the day his bus arrived in San Diego at the beginning of World War II. He returned on an occasional basis, and those occasions increased in frequency in the later years of his life, but for most of his life, he didn't come back often. The impact that the state and its people had in his life made him culturally and probably socially more of a Tennessean than a Californian, but there is great truth to the legend that if you place your feet in the waters of the Pacific, those waters will replace your blood, and you will forever return there. Tennessee gave him a sense of identity as a person. Here was this man who could speak as lovingly about sugar-cured ham as he could about performing at the Hollywood Bowl. When he did come back to Tennessee more in his later years, I think he did so primarily because he felt a responsibility to ensure that he not forget where he came from.

 —INTERVIEW BY JONATHAN MARX, STAFF WRITER

Thanks, Jonathan...