 Dance? This jukebox plays only the collected speeches of Harry S. Truman and if you don't like it there's the damn door. 
We had a few different ways we could have gone with the music in this jukebox. Austro-Hungarian military marches. Hawaiian ukulele classics. Bavarian beerhall oompah. Even the soothing sounds of cicadas and crickets. We had options. But as far as the actual book goes, James Ross's They Don't Dance Much deals with misadventures in and around a North Carolina roadhouse. You know the drill: guy takes a job but the job almost takes him. Basically, a destitute Depression-era farmer scores employment at a just-opened roadhouse, but when the owner becomes financially overextended, he conceives of desperate measures to obtain cash—namely robbing a friend rumored to have $20,000 buried on his land.
Burying money might not make sense to some. Stop us if you know this, but back during the Depression if a bank went under the customers generally lost their deposits. Those who went broke were often ridiculed for not being savvy enough concerning the bank's fiscal health. Today we call that victim blaming. It was only when the U.S. government took the evil socialistic step of guaranteeing deposits that people's life savings became safe. Thank you, Mr. Roosevelt. But the point is, burying a fortune on one's own land is not an outlandish plot device. And considering how modern banks have devolved into robbery franchises, we're almost ready to consider it ourselves. Please don't e-mail asking for our address.
Anyway, stealing the money turns out to be doable, though not pleasant, for our farmer-bandit, but everything after that is—shockingly—a country fried clusterfuck. This is our first James Ross book and we were pretty satisfied. It feels like something that could have inspired Blood Simple. As a novel set in the south it has the usual pitfalls for those who don't want to be subjected to something like one hundred racial slurs, however there's no doubt the language is accurate for the place and time. We heard people speaking like that when we were last in North Carolina, and that was not terribly long ago. In any case, you've been warned. And lastly, the cover art is by Stanley Meltzoff, who we've featured only once before, here.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot. 1912—Pravda Is Founded
The newspaper Pravda, or Truth, known as the voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It is one of the country's leading newspapers until 1991, when it is closed down by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin. A number of other Pravdas appear afterward, including an internet site and a tabloid. 1983—Hitler's Diaries Found
The German magazine Der Stern claims that Adolf Hitler's diaries had been found in wreckage in East Germany. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books, plus a volume about Rudolf Hess's flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. But the diaries are subsequently revealed to be fakes written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger. Both he and Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann go to trial in 1985 and are each sentenced to 42 months in prison. 1918—The Red Baron Is Shot Down
German WWI fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen, better known as The Red Baron, sustains a fatal wound while flying over Vaux sur Somme in France. Von Richthofen, shot through the heart, manages a hasty emergency landing before dying in the cockpit of his plane. His last word, according to one witness, is "Kaputt." The Red Baron was the most successful flying ace during the war, having shot down at least 80 enemy airplanes. 1964—Satellite Spreads Radioactivity
An American-made Transit satellite, which had been designed to track submarines, fails to reach orbit after launch and disperses its highly radioactive two pound plutonium power source over a wide area as it breaks up re-entering the atmosphere.
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