Lewis Grizzard

Lewis Grizzard was the last great Southern newspaper humourist — a writer who carried forward the tradition of vernacular storytelling that ran from Mark Twain through Flannery O’Connor to Grizzard’s own childhood on the red-clay back roads of Georgia. At the height of his popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s, his syndicated column in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran in over 450 newspapers, his books were perennial bestsellers, and his live comedy performances drew thousands of fans across the South. He was also, beneath the jokes and the good-ol’-boy persona, a deeply autobiographical writer whose best work was about loss — the loss of his father, his marriages, his health, and the rural South he grew up in.

Moreland, Georgia

Lewis McDonald Grizzard Jr. was born in 1946 in Columbus, Georgia, but grew up in Moreland, a tiny community in Coweta County about forty miles south of Atlanta. His father, Lewis Grizzard Sr., was a decorated Korean War veteran who suffered from what we would now recognise as post-traumatic stress disorder. The elder Grizzard drifted in and out of his son’s life — sometimes present and charismatic, sometimes absent for years — and this wound was the emotional centre of Lewis Jr.’s writing.

He was raised primarily by his mother and by the small-town world of Moreland — its churches, its baseball games, its general stores, its rhythms of speech and social ritual. This world, which was already disappearing by the time Grizzard became famous, furnished him with his material, his voice, and his values.

Newspaperman

Grizzard was a prodigy of journalism. He became the youngest sports editor in the history of the Atlanta Journal at twenty-three. He was hired as the executive sports editor of the Chicago Sun-Times in 1975 — a move to the North that made him miserable and that he mined for comedy for the rest of his life. He returned to Atlanta in 1977 and began writing the general-interest humour column that made him famous.

The column was written in a distinctive first-person voice — conversational, anecdotal, sentimental, politically incorrect, and laugh-out-loud funny. Grizzard wrote about the things he knew: football (he was a passionate Georgia Bulldogs fan), Southern food, country music, the absurdities of modern life, the differences between the North and the South, his multiple marriages and divorces, and the changing South he simultaneously celebrated and mourned.

The Books

Grizzard published twenty-five books, most of them collections of columns and autobiographical essays. The titles alone are a genre unto themselves: Won’t You Come Home, Billy Bob Bailey? (1980), Don’t Sit Under the Grits Tree with Anyone but Me (1981), Elvis Is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself (1984), My Daddy Was a Pistol and I’m a Son of a Gun (1986), Don’t Bend Over in the Garden, Granny, You Know Them Taters Got Eyes (1988).

My Daddy Was a Pistol and I’m a Son of a Gun is his finest book — an extended memoir of his father’s life, decline, and death that transcends humour and becomes something genuinely moving. It is the book in which Grizzard’s comedy and his sorrow meet, and the result is writing of real depth.

They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat (1982) was a characteristically titled account of his first open-heart surgery — Grizzard had a congenital heart defect that required four surgeries over his lifetime and that eventually killed him. I Took a Lickin’ and Kept on Tickin’ (1993) covered a later surgery with the same mixture of bravado and vulnerability.

The Comedian

Grizzard performed stand-up comedy across the South, filling auditoriums and theatres with audiences who knew his material from the column. His performances were essentially oral storytelling — long, elaborately constructed narratives built around family, football, and Southern life, delivered in a drawl that he cultivated and exaggerated for comic effect. He recorded several live albums and appeared on television talk shows, though his humour was so specifically Southern that it did not always translate to national audiences.

Controversy and Legacy

Grizzard was frequently criticised for sexism, racial insensitivity, and a nostalgic conservatism that idealised a South that had been, in reality, a place of segregation and inequality. He was unapologetic — “I don’t believe the world has changed near as much as the world thinks it has,” he once said — and his refusal to modulate his views for a changing audience limited his reputation outside the South.

He died on 20 March 1994, at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, following his fourth heart surgery. He was forty-seven.

Collecting Grizzard

Grizzard’s books were published in large commercial printings and are not scarce. Won’t You Come Home, Billy Bob Bailey? (Peachtree Publishers, 1980) is his first book. My Daddy Was a Pistol and I’m a Son of a Gun (Villard, 1986) is his most important. Signed copies are collected, particularly those inscribed at his many Southern book-signing appearances.