I Was A Sharecropper’s Son is an autobiography, self-published by the author, Travis W. Lewis of Lexington, Tennessee, in 2023.

The book begins with an account of the murder of the author’s grandfather in 1921, followed by a narrative of his parents’ lives prior to marriage. The opening describes the desperation of a widow left with eight children and the family’s transience until the author’s father becomes the last of the unmarried orphaned children, only to marry the daughter of yet another sharecropper in 1942.

The next five chapters detail the sharecropping family’s life in Henderson County, beginning with the author’s birth on September 29, 1947, as the firstborn. The storyline, common to local families at the time, progresses through the family’s transition from sharecropping to owning a small country store and, at one point, becoming migrant workers during an autumn season of cotton harvest. Punctuated by two housefires that destroyed virtually all the family’s few household goods, the narrative pauses regularly to describe rural life in the 1950s, including incidents around the country store, family deaths, local occupations across the hardscrabble hills and narrow bottomlands, education in a one-teacher school, and graduation from Lexington High School in 1964.

In Chapter 7, the author recounts the beginning of his spiritual journey in 1958, as the reader discovers how the conversion would be the single greatest influence in the author’s life.

Filled with many short stories and reflections, Chapters 8 through 12 describe the author’s first encounters with the high school sweetheart who would become his teenage bride and eventual mother to their two children. This section concludes with reflections on the transition from schoolhouse to workplace.
Chapters 13 through 36 progress through the author’s military service, along with the excitement and rigor of two extended professional careers. The first begins at Lexington Electric System immediately after high school graduation, followed by twenty-three years of progression from brush-cutter to General Manager. In 1987, he resigns and joins the sales team of Stuart C. Irby Company from which he retires thirty years later in 2017. Interwoven into these chapters are accounts of the author’s two part-time businesses and the lessons from his successes and failures, along with the heartaches and challenges along the way.

The text concludes with the worldview crafted by the author’s profound experiences in the workplace and from his life studies.
Laced into the text are nearly six-hundred footnotes bringing even more life to the factual accounts.

A twenty-three-page appendix contains maps, originating from a 1950 U.S. Geological Survey, followed by an index indicating coded locations and occupants of over two-hundred homeplaces of the author’s native land in northeastern Henderson County, Tennessee during the 1940s and 1950s.
In summary, I Was A Sharecropper’s Son is factual history of a poverty-stricken country kid who learned that if one does more than he gets paid to do, sooner or later he gets paid more for what he does.