Paul Hemphill

Paul James Hemphill (February 18, 1936 – July 11, 2009) was an American journalist and author who wrote extensively about often-overlooked topics in the Southern United States such as country music, evangelism, football, and the blue collar people he met on his journeys around the South.

Hemphill was born in 1936 in Birmingham, Alabama, where his father was a truck driver. He grew up Birmingham's Woodlawn neighborhood and attended Woodlawn High School there. He briefly played for the Class D minor league baseball Graceville Oilers of the Alabama–Florida League but was cut from the team at the start of spring training. Hemphill then played semi-pro baseball before switching to focus on college and writing. He graduated from Alabama Polytechnic Institute (later renamed Auburn University), working on the school newspaper, The Plainsman, earning a bachelor's degree in 1959. While in college, he worked as an intern at the Birmingham News, working his way up from covering little league to writing about high school sports.

He was a sports reporter for papers in Augusta, Georgia and Tampa, Florida before being hired in 1964 by the short-lived Atlanta Times. His writing led to a spot as a featured columnist in the Atlanta Journal shortly thereafter, where he became a reader favorite for his reporting on people and places from the South. He resigned despite all his experiences and opportunities with the paper, having felt that "with the next column due by dawn, I had run out of gas".

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