‘Cookies &
A R T S A N D C U LT U R E
Milk'
Blues musician Shawn Amos creates family traditions By Bliss Bowen
James Freeman/Submitted
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Shawn Amos/Submitted
A fictionalized take on his ’70s Hollywood childhood as the son of Wally “Famous” Amos, blues musician Shawn Amos’ new children’s book “Cookies & Milk” is his way of documenting his family’s story for his kids.
“Cookies & Milk,” written for middle-grade children, is blues musician Shawn Amos’ first book.
n 2011, blues artist Shawn Amos — musically known as “The Reverend” Shawn Amos — posted a four-part series of gritty essays on Huffington Post titled “Cookies & Milk: Scenes From a ’70s Hollywood Childhood.” Six years later, we discussed them during a conversation about Amos’ music for a story in the Argonaut (argonautnews.com, one of the Arroyo Monthly’s sister publications), when he said they were “cathartic but rough to write” and had been “intended to be a teaser for a book.” At the time, the material had been optioned for a possible play or movie. “That thing has a lot of legs,” Amos says, though nothing wound up getting made. Realizing he “didn’t have the stomach” for writing a full-blown memoir, he refocused on his music. But last month, “Cookies & Milk” finally emerged — as a warm, witty novel for middle-grade kids. Published by Little, Brown, the book presents a fictionalized version of Amos’ rocky upbringing as the son of Wally “Famous” Amos, a flashy talent agent turned chocolate chip cookie entrepreneur, and Shirley Ellis, a mentally ill former nightclub chanteuse (who later inspired Amos’ moving 2005 album “Thank You Shirl-ee May,” two years after her suicide). Laurence Fishburne’s production company has a deal with Disney to develop the book into an animated series. “I realized when I wrote the Huffington Post (essays), it was sort of everyone’s story but my own in a way. I talked about my father, I talked about my mother, and their experience of moving to Hollywood and how they sat in this lineage of Black excellence. But I really hadn’t written myself into that,” Amos recently recalls, laughing at how he had positioned himself almost as an outsider observing his life. “To write myself as a character in my own story was the piece I was missing before, and frankly the piece I wasn’t brave enough to do in an adult book. “But in the context of a middle-grade book, I found it easier to write myself into my own story and to tell a happy chapter (that’s part) of a larger story. … I found it easier to talk about things that were personal or maybe somewhat unresolved in the context of a fictitious moment.” Grounded (with age-appropriate discretion) in the unglamorous, cracked-sidewalk nether regions of 1970s Hollywood, “Cookies & Milk” is narrated by Amos’ alter ego, 11-year-old aspiring harmonica player Ellis Johnson (named after Amos’ real-life son), and opens shortly after Ellis’ parents have divorced. Ellis’ mother has left him for the summer with his father, an exasperating Willy Wonka-like character in Ellis’ eyes (“If Willy Wonka was tall, skinny, Black, and had a salt-and-pepper beard”). His beat-up Rambler smells like brown sugar and cocoa, courtesy of the wrinkled paper bags of homemade cookies he hands out to Ellis and friends, and Ellis admiringly confides to the reader, “I could eat his cookies and nothing else.” But he scorns his dad’s starry-eyed intention to open “the world’s first chocolate chip cookie store” in an empty A-frame littered with cigarette butts, peeling paint and rooftop pigeon poop. Their six-week rush to ready the space for opening drives the plot. Music pulses behind and between episodes such as a chocolate chip avalanche at the Rock and Roll Ralph’s and a shopping cart drag race down Sunset Boulevard: Sly and the Family Stone, Funkadelic, Howlin’
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