Gregg Andrews

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Texas State University, former National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, former Andrew Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities, prize-winning author, and singer-songwriter/recording artist who fronts the south Texas band, Doctor G & the Mudcats. I grew up in the shadows of a sprawling cement plant in Monkey Run, a section of the company town of Ilasco, Missouri. My childhood playground was a creek at the mouth of the Mississippi River, a couple of miles south of the cave hollow popularized in Mark Twain's writings about his boyhood home of Hannibal. Occupational lung diseases killed my father and grandfather in their late 40s, but education perhaps saved me from a similar fate. As a songwriter and author who has known hard times and struggle in a tiny house that lacked indoor plumbing, I've been fortunate to have written the soundtrack of my life in many ways. I write and sing about working-class people's struggles because I'm well-familiar with them. My Daddy's Blues: A Childhood Memoir from the Land of Huck & Jim (2019) took readers on an intimate lyrical journey into the world of a working-class family's turbulent struggles in the Mississippi River bottoms. Now comes my new book, a cultural history of the Mississippi River and the product of a deepening intellectual journey into the shantyboat world of my maternal grandmother's family. Shantyboats and Roustabouts: The River Poor of St. Louis, 1875-1930 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022) uses St. Louis's waterfront settlements and Black entertainment district near the levee as a window into the world of the river valley poor in the age of Mark Twain and well beyond. The book has been awarded the 2023 James V. Swift Medal for excellence in maritime literature by the Herman T. Pott National Inland Waterways Library at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, the John Lyman Book Award in the category of US Maritime History by the North American Society for Oceanic History, the Hamlin Garland Prize in Popular History (Midwestern History Association), and the Missouri History Book Award (State Historical Society of Missouri).