about tupper

Birth of a non-respector of persons

My aunt, who was there, told how I was born. My grandfather delivered me from his daughter at home. He was an MD. When he hoisted me high to examine my parts, I peed in his face.

This story was kept from me until my aunt, reflecting on the way I’d lived my life, decided it might have been one of those prophetic events like Esau and Jacob wrestling in the womb. “Lord knows how many other authorities you’ve figuratively done that to,” she laughed.

My parents had me trained as a classicial pianist but I gravitated to jazz (and back again—I now play mostly Bach and Mozart). My school teachers wanted me to pay attention but I drew pictures in class. I was sent to a good Episcopal college, the mountain-top University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and took a degree in English. During that time I studied piano and composition with Oscar Peterson, John Lewis, Bill Russo, and George Russell at the School of Jazz in Massachusetts.

I taught English at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, but resigned in order to go into advertising, from which I resigned after seven years to do music. My piano concerto was performed by Bill Pursell with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. Don Gant and I invented the Neon Philharmonic, which won three Grammy nominations for Morning Girl. My songs have been recorded by such a diversity of artists as Shaun Cassidy, Perry Como, Chet Atkins, Al Hirt, Brenda Lee, Ray Stevens, Patti Page, Mama Cass Elliot, and Sacha Distel.

I started painting paper bags in order to have pictures to hang on the walls of the restaurant I inaugurated with Mary Walton Caldwell, the flash-in-the-pan Ritz Cafe. A market for my paintings developed when a leading collector, Bill Martin, dined at the Ritz and tried to buy them all. (I parted only with one, but Bill encouraged quite a portfolio of work, all of which he and other collectors purchased.)

When Americans began examining their national roots during the Bicentenniel year 1976, I moved my family to Sewanee and began using the University’s extensive library to look at the Constitution. In the valley below, I converted an abandoned church into a dinner theatre, imported a chef from Dijon, and attracted regional crowds to enjoy good food and remarkably talented actors.

Provoked by the Constitution, I wrote a play and a book. The Gimmes is a dark comedy about intimate relationships perverted by a government addicted to tax collections. Press previews attracted undercover IRS agents to its opening night performance. They started a file and wrote a terse, secret review of it (which I obtained through FOIA): “Saussy portrays taxmen unfavorably.”

Indeed, it has been observed that The Gimmes catapulted my life into a kind of performance piece in itself.

The Miracle On Main Street was published in 1980. It tells—maybe for the first time—how the Constitution’s framers made America permanently free of unlimited governmental expansion by denying the states power to enforce payment of debts in “any Thing but gold and silver Coin.” (Twenty years and six printings later, MOMS is still considered, as one reviewer said, “the only lawful and workable solution there can ever be to our worsening financial woes, public and private.”)

As noted by Missouri attorney general (now US Senator) John Danforth, the publication of MOMS started what have been called “the money wars.” My monthly periodical, “The Main Street Journal,” for six exhilarating years documented the struggle against inflation, depression, and recession by Americans attempting to hold the states accountable under the constitutional provision for gold and silver coin. (Someday I hope to post the entire MSJ on this site.)

To help our side present the money issue, I reprinted the only known treatise on money by the very author of the Constitution’s monetary clause, Roger Sherman. It's an amazing document, A Caveat Against Injustice.

In 1984, apparently to silence a movement that was gathering steam, the Justice Department filed three nebulous IRS-related misdemeanor charges against me. A jury found me guilty of one misdemeanor count of willful failure to file an income tax return for 1977. (They acquitted me of wilfullness for the tax years 1978 and 1979.) The trial's publicity attracted the attention of James Earl Ray, who asked me to help him publish his autobiography.

Rather than serve a year’s prison term, and for a variety of reasons, I went into seclusion. I remained a fugitive here in America for ten years, during which time I thoroughly investigated my beloved adversary, the United States of America. Who really runs America? Who really created it?

My discoveries, which went through some seventeen drafts culminating in RULERS OF EVIL: Useful Knowledge About Governing Bodies, I hope will intrigue and amaze you.

By the way, I was peaceably captured in November 1997, and served fourteen months in federal prison as chapel musical director and instructor in piano. This was just enough time to coordinate all my drafts and ready a final manuscript for publication.

ROE's initial appearance was in the form of a special collectors' edition. One of the 40 or 50 editors to whom my agent, Peter Fleming, sent copies was Robert Jones at HarperCollins. Robert was a Roman Catholic whose seven aunts were nuns. Robert found the book ”fascinating” and bought it without changing (except for a few typos) any of its original text or page layouts. “A rarity,” Peter says.

I practice non-respect of persons most vigorously on myself. It's painful to have to label myself "artist" or "composer" or "writer" or "musical director." Yet I was gifted with abilities to do what these persons do. Can't I do the things without taking the names? One day the answer came in a letter from a Texas student of my works: "I'm not attracted to your uniqueness. I am attracted to the Substance of your uniqueness which is 'Christ in you.' It's His workmanship that attracts me."

—Tupper Saussy

REACH TUPPER