Ray Hill’s biography of Senator McKellar available for preorder
By Focus Staff
Faithful readers of The Knoxville Focus can now go online and preorder a copy of Ray Hill’s new book about Senator Kenneth McKellar from Amazon.com. The Kindle version will be released on June 20, 2025, and the hardback edition of the book will be shipped on June 10, 2025, if you order soon. The book’s title is “Senator Kenneth McKellar: Feudin’ Son of Tennessee.”
Ray Hill has been writing one of the most popular features of The Knoxville Focus for the last fourteen years. “Pages of the Past,” which focuses on history, has a wide readership not only within the metro Knox County area, but also in Nashville and Washington, D.C. Hill’s column also is a big draw with folks from states all over the country.
“I’m asked all the time when I am going to write a book,” Hill said recently. “Well, I’ve written one.”
The University of Tennessee Press is publishing Hill’s biography of Tennessee’s Kenneth D. McKellar, who served longer in Congress than any other person in the Volunteer State’s long history. McKellar served for six years in the U.S. House of Representatives and for thirty-six consecutive years in the United States Senate for an amazing total of forty-two years.
The description of the book on Amazon reads, “In his new biography of McKellar, Ray Hill traces the political career of Tennessee’s longest-serving senator and paints a colorful, nuanced portrait of the senator’s character and convictions. He chronicles McKellar’s decades-long political contributions to Tennessee and the United States as a whole, from the beginnings of the Boss Crump political machine to McKellar’s historic victory as the first popularly elected US senator from Tennessee in 1916. Hill offers a balanced account of McKellar’s forty-two years in office, exploring his early Democratic successes under Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, his steadfast support for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and his fierce, unwavering commitment to Tennessee and its people.
“As the only full-length biography of McKellar to date, Hill’s meticulously researched volume fills a significant gap in scholarship, shedding new light on the life and career of one of Tennessee’s most prominent political figures. Drawing on articles from more than one hundred U.S. newspapers on McKellar’s life and politics, this biography will not only appeal to both scholars and students of US political science but also offers a captivating story to all who love Tennessee and the state’s rich history.”
It will surprise no one who regularly read’s Ray Hill’s column that his book on the life and career of Senator McKellar reads like a Bible of Tennessee politics for the period of 1911 through 1952. No aficionado of Tennessee history or politics can do without a copy of “Senator Kenneth McKellar: Feudin’ Son of Tennessee.” With a forward written by former Congressman John J. “Jimmy” Duncan Jr., who is also a Focus columnist, it is a volume with the complete cast of colorful characters which populated Tennessee’s political stage for decades. Readers will be able to read about the rough and tumble political wars, “Boss” Crump, Luke Lea and how the State of Tennessee lost most of its money over a few days and McKellar’s reputation as Washington’s most fearsome feudist.
Be sure to preorder your copy as soon as possible.
