VOX Press will host a release party to celebrate the publication of Fix It, Leroy! Adventures in Misfit Music by local author David Shirley on Tuesday, February 28. The event, which is open to the public, will be held at High Point Coffee on the and will begin at 6 pm.
Shirley will read a brief selection from the book, which features interviews with and articles about a variety of offbeat, under-appreciated musicians, including Laurie Anderson, Pere Ubu, Robert Wyatt, The Fugs, Faust, Wadada Leo Smith, Arto Lindsay, Kristin Hersh, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Bill Fay, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Vashti Bunyan and 20 other brilliantly gifted but commercially neglected performers.
The reading will be followed by a live musical performance by the Yodeling Anarcho-Syndicalists, an Oxford-based anarchist musical collective featuring Tyler Keith, David Lonesome, Wallace Lester, Mark Adamec, and other local misfit musicians. The band’s set list will include acoustic versions of songs by a number of the musicians included in the book.
Copies of Fix It, Leroy! will be available for purchase at the event, along with the latest publications from VOX’s celebrated Prison Writes Initiative: In Our Own Words: Writings from Parchman Prison and Unit 30: New Writings from Parchman Farm. Posters, photographs, and art from past VOX events will also be available for purchase, as well as visual art created by participants in the Prison Writes Initiative.
Advance praise for Fix It, Leroy! Adventures in Misfit Music:
“My mind was blown by this book,” says Grammy-award-winning producer Dennis Herring. “Not only by the words of this most motley assortment of awesome artists, but also by Mr. Shirley’s ability to move, groove, & empath such great words from them—that’s what makes this collection so insightful and magical.”
“The essays here are genuine, instantly engaging, beautiful, and big-hearted,” reports Oxford-based mystery novelist William Boyle. “Shirley has given me new ways of seeing records I’ve long admired and has introduced me to others I can’t wait to hear. The book is, above all, an act of love.”
“What Shirley shows us is that the ‘underground’ is a deep well. The lifeblood of our culture. Not the runoff or the septic tank. Still water runs deep. A must read,” says Oxford musician Tyler Keith.
About the Author:
David Shirley is the co-author, along with Nancy Webster, of A History of Brooklyn Bridge Park: How a Local Community Reclaimed and Transformed the New York City Waterfront (Columbia University Press, 2016). He has also written more than a dozen books for young adult and juvenile readers, and his articles on music and popular culture have appeared in Option, Spin, Rolling Stone, Raygun, Chicago Review, New York Press, Sound Collector Audio Review, Oxford American, and The Brooklyn Rail. He spends his spare time working as a research consultant in international development and singing and playing mandolin in the avant-country band, Lonesome Skeeter & The Corndogs of Love.
VOX Press is a 501 (c) 3 arts organization based in Oxford, Mississippi. Its sole purpose of existence is to publish, perform, and disseminate the greatest works of art our age has to offer.
For additional information, visit the VOX web site: www.voxpress.org. 
