Tough Music

Colorful, full of twists and implausible events: Tough Music is raw and honest. The subject of this memoir is Dudley Allen. His birth in Waco in March of 1953 was sandwiched between two headline events. First, there was the death of Hank Williams on New Year s Day. When Dudley was two months old, his hometown of Waco was hit by a tornado that killed 114 people. Tough Music reveals what has been going on with Dudley Allen in the subsequent seventy years. He writes about events that some folks would view to be divine intervention: surviving near-death encounters so unlikely that the Maury Povich Show called or receiving a donated liver after only four days of being eligible. Dudley s father, Melton Allen, was his first music teacher. He was a stern, on occasion cruel, taskmaster. A small mistake, such as missing a beat on the drum, could be met with violent punishment. In 1963, Dudley was a boy of ten, playing drums in his family's band at a street dance. Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby both showed up that night.