Interview with Tom Williams, author of Don’t Start Me Talkin’
11/26/14 Tom Williams has published two novels, The Mimic’s Own Voice and Don’t Start Me Talkin’. His short story collection, Among The Wild Mulattos, will appear in Spring 2015 from Texas Review Press. The Chair of English at Morehead State University, he lives in Kentucky with his wife and children.
Don’t Start Me Talkin’ is a novel about Brother Ben, billed as the Last of the True Delta Bluesmen—but is he? Born in Mississippi, certainly, and purveyor of “authentic” delta blues, far from being the near-illiterate, hard-drinking, womanizing country boy he purports to be, Brother Ben turns out to be a vegetarian, Volvo-driving health fanatic, who listens to jazz for pleasure, is actually an accomplished jazz guitarist, and an extremely savvy and sophisticated manager of his own business—which he manages under his own real name, Wilton Mabry.