From the acclaimed musician comes a tender, surprising, and often  uproarious memoir about his dirt-poor southeast Texas boyhood.

The  only child of a hard-drinking father and a Holy Roller mother, Rodney  Crowell was no stranger to bombast from an early age, whether  knock-down-drag-outs at a local dive bar or fire-and-brimstone sermons  at Pentecostal tent revivals. He was an expert at reading his father's  mercurial moods and gauging exactly when his mother was likely to erupt,  and even before he learned to ride a bike, he was often forced to take  matters into his own hands. He broke up his parents raucous New Year's  Eve party with gunfire and ended their slugfest at the local drive-in  (actual restaurants weren't on the Crowell's menu) by smashing a glass  pop bottle over his own head.

Despite the violent undercurrents  always threatening to burst to the surface, he fiercely loved his  epilepsy-racked mother, who scorned boring preachers and improvised  wildly when the bills went unpaid. And he idolized his blustering  father, a honky-tonk man who took his boy to see Hank Williams, Jerry  Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash perform live, and bought him a  drum set so he could join his band at age eleven.

Shot through  with raggedy friends and their neighborhood capers, hilariously awkward  adolescent angst, and an indelible depiction of the bloodlines Crowell  came from, Chinaberry Sidewalks also vividly re-creates Houston  in the fifties: a rough frontier town where icehouses sold beer by the  gallon on paydays; teeming with musical venues from standard roadhouses  to the Magnolia Gardens, where name-brand stars brought glamour to a  place starved for it; filling up with cheap subdivisions where  blue-collar day laborers could finally afford a house of their own; a  place where apocalyptic hurricanes and pest infestations were nearly  routine.