River Of No Return: Tennessee Ernie Ford and The Woman He Loved
By Jeffrey Buckner Ford
River of No Return: Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Woman He Loved is the story of a husband and wife who loved each other deeply, whose alcohol addictions swept them helplessly down a river, and whose emotional instabilities made it a river of no return.
The cover photo beautifully illustrates this theme. It’s a snapshot of a glamorous young couple sitting in a nightclub or restaurant, snuggled together and smiling for the camera. The original photo has been torn in half and the two halves taped together.
A masterful opening line plunges the reader into immediate suspense and captures the tone of the entire book: “It was two days after his death before we learned where Dad’s body was.”
Jeffrey “Buck” Buckner Ford, the elder son of Ernest Jennings Ford and Betty Jean Heminger Ford, is the author of this memoir about his parents. At one point in the book, he plays for Ernie a song he wrote about them, “Tell Me You Remember, Betty Jean.” Ernie starts crying and says, “I don’t know what to do any more. I love her so much, but I don’t know what to do.”
In describing his dysfunctional family, Buck Ford devotes page after page to his own youthful misbehavior. The book reads like a combination of memoir to publish the story of his parents and private journal to come to terms with an abusive childhood. His mother ended her life with a pill overdose in 1989, and Ernie remarried three months later. The new wife kept her husband away from his sons and did her best to destroy the family fortune and reputation after he died. River of No Return begins and ends, not with the woman in the title, but with Buck’s bitterness about his dad’s second wife.
Ernest Jennings Ford, better known as Tennessee Ernie Ford, is universally recognized for his recording of “Sixteen Tons,” along with his many gospel songs. During the 1950s and 1960s, while gaining fame in his singing career, he hosted network television shows in California. He later spent time in Nashville, although he remained a resident of San Francisco. He died of liver failure in 1991, a year after his election to the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Buck Ford mentions going through hours and hours of tapes of his dad’s shows, and I wish he had shared some of them with the readers. I wanted examples of witty remarks, quotes to express Ernie’s opinions, instances of interactions with friends such as Minnie Pearl. To get a sense of his personality, I wanted more quotes like this one, concerning Ernie’s television audience: “I don’t perform for executives in L.A. and New York. I play all the houses in between.”
Although the book is generally well-written and easy to read, it would have benefited from additional editing. The many forward and backward jumps through time make the chronology difficult to follow, and sentence fragments are distracting. The author’s excellent sense of humor would come through more clearly without amateurish asides such as, “Trust me, it gets better,” “pun intended,” and “Have you got this?” Buck Ford expresses pride that his mother taught him to curse, but the way he describes his father makes me think Ernie Ford would have been mortified by his son’s frequent use of “Jesus” and “Christ” as cuss words. An editor should have noted that the B-29 bomber was not a “Flying Fortress,” Germany did not resign from World War II, and the author was not referring to himself when he wrote, “Being the only woman on the entire base, I also have it on good authority. . .”
River of No Return left me feeling sad that Tennessee Ernie Ford led such an unhappy life. I felt sorry for him because he didn’t know how to change the way he and his family treated each other. People who want to know the details of his life will value this book in spite of its sadness. Those who prefer to keep a happy image of him may choose to avoid it.