A searing, lyrical self-portrait by the maverick Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter, a Southern Gothic story of passion, violence, and music as salvation.

Shelby Lynne Moorer grew up in south Alabama, in Frankville, “not really a town, more of a zip code.” Her parents were musically gifted and imparted their talent and discerning taste to Shelby and her younger sister, Allison. But they were also locked in a violent, volatile struggle. Her father’s explosive rage and physical abuse, fueled by alcohol, culminated in a horrific act: in the pre-dawn hours of August,1986, Franklin Moorer came to the house where his wife had finally fled months before with the two girls in tow, shot her on the front lawn and then turned the gun on himself, while the girls were asleep in their beds. Shelby was 17; her sister just 14. Music, for Shelby, was the only way out. She’d dreamed of being a country star since she was a little girl, performing in local singing contests, harmonizing with her mother and sister in the car, speeding down the highway, studying albums and fraying videocassettes of Nancy Wilson, Quincy Jones, Dusty Springfield, Johnny Cash, and country legends. 

GUNPOWDER is an indelible, brutal, and lyrical self-portrait of the maverick artist, a rebel who never fit the Nashville mold, who blazed her own path and, not without pain and regret, forged her own identity. This short, powerful memoir is framed by the inexorable tragedy that defined her early life and the iconic record, I Am Shelby Lynne, for which she won the Grammy for Best New Artist (6 albums and 13 years into her career), and allowed her to feel, at last, like herself.

A searing, lyrical self-portrait by the maverick Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter, a Southern Gothic story of passion, violence, and music as salvation.

Shelby Lynne Moorer grew up in south Alabama, in Frankville, “not really a town, more of a zip code.” Her parents were musically gifted and imparted their talent and discerning taste to Shelby and her younger sister, Allison. But they were also locked in a violent, volatile struggle. Her father’s explosive rage and physical abuse, fueled by alcohol, culminated in a horrific act: in the pre-dawn hours of August,1986, Franklin Moorer came to the house where his wife had finally fled months before with the two girls in tow, shot her on the front lawn and then turned the gun on himself, while the girls were asleep in their beds. Shelby was 17; her sister just 14. Music, for Shelby, was the only way out. She’d dreamed of being a country star since she was a little girl, performing in local singing contests, harmonizing with her mother and sister in the car, speeding down the highway, studying albums and fraying videocassettes of Nancy Wilson, Quincy Jones, Dusty Springfield, Johnny Cash, and country legends. 

GUNPOWDER is an indelible, brutal, and lyrical self-portrait of the maverick artist, a rebel who never fit the Nashville mold, who blazed her own path and, not without pain and regret, forged her own identity. This short, powerful memoir is framed by the inexorable tragedy that defined her early life and the iconic record, I Am Shelby Lynne, for which she won the Grammy for Best New Artist (6 albums and 13 years into her career), and allowed her to feel, at last, like herself.