Movie about local English teacher worth watching

"Time was never a friend to Bobby Long. It would conspire against him, allowing him to believe in a generous nature and then rob him blind everytime."
- "A Love Song for Bobby Long"

I guess the first time I heard his name, I was a little kid, swinging from my father’s knees and listening to the stories.
Bobby Long.
The name had a ring to it, and so did the stories about him. To me, Long was a creature of mystery and later in life, I would come to learn that there were more men like him in the world – Hunter Thompson, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, maybe Allen Ginsberg.
For many years, I only knew Long as my father’s high school English teacher at Evergreen High School. My father, usually at family "get-togethers," had on more than a few occasions told of how Long would often disregard the official school curriculum, taking an unorthodox approach to the study of English. Instead of making his students conjugate verbs or diagram sentences, Long, a native of Brewton, would usually spend the entire class reading to his students. Taking this approach, Long would expose his students to some of the great writers of the 20th Century – John Steinbeck, Joseph Heller and Ernest Hemmingway among others.
My father, a 1972 graduate of Evergreen High School, never speaks of any of his other teachers, only Long.
Fast forward to a lazy Sunday afternoon about a month ago, when I found myself lounging around the house waiting on Monday to arrive. My wife enters the scene. She’d been to the video store and had returned with a movie: "A Love Song for Bobby Long."
It took me an about an hour to realize that the movie was about my father’s old teacher, and it wasn’t long before I found myself watching the movie (for the second time) with my dad.
"A Love Song for Bobby Long," based on the novel "Off Magazine Street" by Ronald Everett Capps of Fairhope, is the story of Purslane Hominy Will, who returns to New Orleans after learning of her mother’s death. Expecting to find her late mother’s house, abandoned, Pursy is shocked to discover that it’s inhabited by two of her mother’s friends – Bobby Long, a former Auburn University literature professor, and his young protégé, Lawson Pines.
These broken men, whose lives took a wrong turn years before, have been firmly rooted in the dilapidated house for years, encouraged only by Lawson's faltering ambitions to write a novel about Bobby Long's life. Having no intention of leaving, Pursy, Bobby Long (played by John Travolta) and Lawson are all forced to live together. Yet as time passes, their tenuous, makeshift arrangement unearths a series of buried personal secrets that challenges their bonds, and reveals just how inextricably their lives are intertwined.
Now, you may be asking yourself: How can he be so sure that the Bobby Long in the movie is the same Bobby Long who taught his dad high school English?
That’s a good question, and the answer has to do with the movie’s soundtrack, which includes two songs by Grayson Capps, Ronald Everett Capps’ son. One of these songs, "Love Song of Bobby Long," is a ballad that describes Long’s life in Brewton and even how he played football against W.S. Neal. Coupled with other facts that I knew about the man and his life, it left me with little doubt that it was the same man who’d read to his students in that Evergreen classroom all those years ago.
With that said, I can say that I enjoyed the movie and recommend it to anyone who’s heard of Long or to anyone with an interest in an obscure, yet interesting, character from our area.