A book that uses the waterfront squatter settlements and Black entertainment district near the levee in St. Louis as a window into the world of the river poor in the Mississippi Valley, exploring their daily struggles and experiences and vividly describing people heretofore obscured by classist and racist caricatures.

A childhood memoir of a long-gone cement company town in the Mississippi River bottoms near the Mark Twain Cave in Hannibal, Missouri. A tiny three-room “shack” that lacked indoor plumbing was the author’s look-out perch on the American dream in the 1950s and 1960s. Bottled up inside was a family of five struggling with a father’s alcoholism, war demons, crippling illness, and early death. Set to a bluesy songwriter’s rhythm and rhyme, the memoir takes readers on an intimate lyrical journey through the ups and downs of a riverbank childhood that was dangerous in many ways but rich in experiences and grounded in family and community networks. Struggle, resilience, and resistance are at the heart of the book’s seamless storytelling. This is not just another “poor white trash” narrative.

CD of 12 original songs written by Gregg Andrews (Doctor G) and recorded with his band. Produced by Kent Finlay, Cheatham Street Records, B.M.I., 2010. High As a Poor Boy Gets (3:52) Lazy Swing (3:49) Double Load Blues (3:29) We’ve Been Here Before (3:15) Evil in the Delta (4:15) The Things You Do (4:44) Drag Race Time (3:22) Crawdaddy Moonshine (3:38) My Daddy’s Blues (3:40) Cousin Jesse (5:50) Soft Loving Side of Me (3:32) Gonna Be Free (3:58)

The extraordinary tale of two sisters, Mary Alice Heinbach and Euphemia B. Koller, and their seventeen-year property dispute against the Atlas Portland Cement Company. By the time the court dust settled in 1927, both sisters were declared mentally incompetent, one of them was forcibly confined to the state mental hospital and buried in an unmarked grave, and the cement corporation gained control over the town site of Ilasco, Missouri. A case of political intrigue, ruthless abuse of power, and manipulation of guardianships and “insanity” by local authorities enmeshed with the cement company. Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. This is one of those times!

CD of original songs written by Gregg Andrews (Doctor G) and recorded with his band. Produced by Kent Finlay, Cheatham Street Records, B.M.I., 2015. Swampy Tonk Blues (3:12) Jesse’s Getting Out (4:24) From a Table Made for Two (I Watched You Break My Heart) (3:51) Rockabilly Barbershop at 7th & Broadway (3:40) Leaving Tennessee (3:56) J. Cool Blues (3:30) I Might Go Crazy (4:14) My Texas Dance Hall Girl (4:19) It’s the Blues Tonight (3:20) One of Those Things I Left Behind (4:12) Cottonmouth Blues (4:24) Still Missing You (3:39)

The rise and fall of Ilasco, Missouri, a largely southern and eastern European immigrant community near the Mark Twain Cave on the southern outskirts of Hannibal. The industrial town originated to serve the purposes of the Atlas Portland Cement Company in 1903, and it was destroyed to serve the purposes of the US Steel Corporation and Hannibal’s Mark Twain tourism industry in the 1960s. The book is a sensitive and vivid portrait of working-class life in a small company town on the Mississippi River.

Biography of a civil rights, labor, and women’s rights activist, journalist, and social worker whose grandparents used the Mississippi River to escape slavery near Hannibal. Born on December 25, 1897, in Wharton, Texas, Thyra J. Edwards was a leading Black internationalist who helped to shape the radical foundations of the modern civil rights movement. Hounded by the FBI and other government intelligence agencies, she traveled extensively abroad, including to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and wrote from an anti-imperialist, anti-fascist perspective on the Spanish Civil War and other important world events for Black newspaper outlets.