Notes to "Good Ole Boys Like Me" by Don Williams *Thomas Wolfe / Wikipedia Thomas Clayton Wolfe (October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938) was a major American novelist of the early 20th century.[1] Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, vividly reflect on American culture and mores of the period, albeit filtered through Wolfe's sensitive, sophisticated and hyper-analytical perspective. He became very famous during his own lifetime.[1] After Wolfe's death, his chief contemporary William Faulkner said that Wolfe may have had the best talent of their generation.[1][2] Wolfe's influence extends to the writings of famous Beat writer Jack Kerouac, authors Ray Bradbury and Philip Roth, among others. He remains one of the most important writers in modern American literature, as he was one of the first masters of autobiographical fiction. He is considered North Carolina's most famous writer.[3] From his Essays: •God's Lonely Man (undated as an essay) Excerpt: "The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people -- not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul…we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness." --see @: http://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Archives/An%20Existential%20View%20Of%20Loneliness.htm • •--------------------------------------------- **["washed-in-the-blood" ] "Washed in the water," is to be washed in the word of God. "Washed in the blood," is to believe that God raised Jesus from the dead and His spilled blood cleansed us from all unrighteousness. (These are Evangelical Christian doctrines. It is not exactly a "traditional" doctrine as would be associated with Catholicism. Instead, it is part of a religious tradition derived from the Protestant Reformation, and is an "offshoot" and consequence of that radical change. However, in the United States, that are many people who employ these ideas and phrases in their Christian teachings.--Bruce Bain)