Phillips was the first woman to hold a principal chair in any major American orchestra when she was chosen by conductor Leopold Stokowski for a spot in the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1930.

Read the book excerpt here: SymphonyNow – A Harpist in the Lion’s Den.

Photo: Edna Phillips.  Photographer unknown. From the family collection.

“This book began in an unexpectedly twenty-first-century way. In late 2008 my grandson Zachary had just set up a Facebook account for me. In one of my first posts, I mentioned that I was looking for some new projects. Barry Willis, author and compiler of America’s Music: Bluegrass (Pine Valley Music, 1989), who saw the post, knew of my sideline career—as a bluegrass historian, journalist, and broadcaster—pursued in fits and starts since 1965 when I attended the first multiday bluegrass festival at Fincastle, Virginia, at the age of fourteen.

Willis asked if I’d like to take up an endeavor he had begun years ago and never been able to finish. Over eight days in November of 1994, he had conducted extensive interviews with Josh Graves¹ at Graves’s home in suburban Nashville. Their intention was to work these materials into an “as told to” Josh Graves autobiography. At the time, Barry Willis was a commercial airplane pilot based in Colorado. Mike Dow, a business associate there, had offered the services of his assistant to transcribe the tapes. The assistant was familiar with neither bluegrass nor the southern dialect and expressions used by Graves, but nevertheless she produced, to the best of her ability, a 113–page, single-spaced transcript.²

I agreed to review the material, and Barry Willis shipped from his present home in Hawaii a notebook containing the transcript and a handwritten cover note: “To whom it may concern: I, Josh Graves, hereby give my permission to Barry R. Willis and Mike Dow to write my official biography. Josh Graves 3/25/95.”

The rest of the introduction from the editor will be posted tomorrow. The book is on sale now at a 40% discount–only $13.17–from our website with promo code MAL40.

“RAY BRADBURY, the science fiction and fantasy author behind such classics as Fahrenheit 451, infamously claims to remember the details of his own birth. In 1920, he was born into an era of rapid scientific discovery – the advances of which inspired his long and fruitful writing career.”

Coincidentally, yesterday I was forwarded this article. It includes answers Bradbury sent to a young student asking questions about “New Criticism,”

“During a lifetime, one saves up information which collects itself around centers in the mind; these automatically become symbols on a subliminal level, and need only be summoned forth in the heat of writing. . . . I trust my subconscious implicitly. It is my good pet. I try to keep it well fed with information through all my senses, but never look directly at it.”