Typewriters of the Stars

“Now, this one,” she said, “belonged to Mr. Faulkner. It was one of his.”

The old woman, thin and bent with silver, matted hair up under a faded, blue ballcap with a white, felt letter I upon it, nudged with her scuffed sneakers a dusty, black manual typewriter. The keys were marked with flaking, gold letters. The space bar listed heavily to one side, the right, like a seesaw at rest. She nudged the typewriter as if it might pick up the story from there.

-- From my novel, "The Very Last Night"

True love and false hearts

Monday morning. Coffee and some re-writing on "The Long Gone Daddies" and Dock Boggs singing "False Hearted Lover's Blues" from the Tompkins Square label's new old-time compilation, "Aimer Et Perdre -- To Love & To Lose: Songs 1917-1934."

They'll bite the hand that feeds them
spend all the money you can save
from your heart strings weave silk garters
build their dog house on your grave

Ah, true love gone deep south. Ah, lines like "from your heart strings weave silk garters." That's poetry from our man Dock, or whoever wrote it -- if anyone wrote it. Who knows, in the folk tradition of things? It may have been written by ten men or the wind; it may have made it to these shores by ship, on a dead man's cracked lips. It may have emerged whole from the dark hollows of some guitar. It may hail from Bristol, Tennessee, or Bristol, England. But the secret is safe, no matter, six feet deep in some dead soul's final resting place. You know the one. The dog house is a dead giveaway.

RIP, William Gay

The day drew on, was swallowed in dusk. No bird called, no insect. Life in abeyance, the world itself grinding to a halt, who knew what would follow. Light through the glass grew dim but he read on as if the passage of day into night was of no moment. The world was winding down, and young Bloodworth wound down with it.

-- from "Provinces of Night," by William Gay (1943-2012)

Murder ballads and dark turns (More songs about Delia and Frankie)

Delia
Oh, Delia
Delia all my life
If I hadn't a-shot poor Delia
I'da had her for my wife

-- "Delia's Gone," Johnny Cash

Now, I see the bones in the river
I feel the wind through the pines
And I hear the shadows a-calling
To a girl with a dark turn of mind

-- "Dark Turn of Mind," Gillian Welch

A Friday-night playlist (partial) ...

1. "Delia's Gone," Johnny Cash
2. "Go-Go Boots," Drive-By Truckers
3. "Codeine," Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
4. "Claudine," Rolling Stones
5. "Big Leg Woman," Jerry Lee Lewis
6. "Ten Cent Pistol," Black Keys
7. "Georgia Lee," Lincoln Durham
8. "Heartaches and Grease," Ray Wylie Hubbard
9. "Joe Friday," Alvin Youngblood Hart
10. "Guttersnipe," Bhi Bhiman
11. "Frankie," Mississippi John Hurt
12. "Folk Bloodbath," Josh Ritter
13. "Delia," Bob Dylan
14. "Dark Turn of Mind," Gillian Welch

Heaven sent, Tupelo bound

Wednesday morning. My iPod on shuffle ...

1. "Too Close," Roebuck "Pops" Staples and the Staple Singers. Recorded live, 1957, at an unknown church in Chicago. I started listening before I looked at the title, and thought Pops was singing about going to Tupelo. But no, talking about heaven. And playing a guitar that could take you there. Lordy, as Pops' old hero Charley Patton liked to say.

2. "It Won't Happen Twice," M. Ward. A quiet little song, fine guitar playing by M. Ward (a John Fahey fan, as Fahey was a fan of Pops Staples, as Pops was a fan of Charley Patton; it's connected, all of it). It might have been recorded in an attic or crawl space (a church, of a sort), someplace small and quiet where you can hear yourself think about life and larger things: "If I get the chance, I'll be braver / like holy wine."

3. "Steamboat Gwine 'Round De Bend," John Fahey. OK, so I cheated and hit "next" until I got a Fahey song, to bring this whole thing home. But I only had to skip four songs (two by Dylan, a Patsy Cline, a Springsteen). This is the last song on the "Of Rivers and Religion" record, and it's prime Fahey. For a man with only an acoustic guitar, a man who didn't sing and didn't have a band and didn't smash or set that guitar on fire or even strut all around the stage, the sound was mighty mighty. He sounded like a giant of a man, like his guitar was strung with Mississippi River bridge cables.

Requiem for a Monday morning

There's a John Fahey record called "God, Time and Causality," and on that record a medley called "Interlude/The Portland Cement Factory/Requiem for Mississippi John Hurt," about which is written in the liner notes:

C tuning has a wonderfully spacious sound. Fahey uses it for a blend of bugle calls, oriental scales, and hints of 'Train 45' in his requiem for the gentle John Hurt.

The liner notes are by Mark Humphrey. It's a remarkable couple of sentences, for being about the technical aspects of music, of which I know nothing. You don't have to know C tuning to understand what he's saying. He makes C tuning into a blue sky, an open road -- something you can see, grasp, fathom, follow. So in a short, direct way -- a literary psst, really -- he grabs you, says he's about to tell you something you might want to know. He's giving you a map and rations. He's sending you on a wild-hair journey into the deep hollows of John Fahey's guitar. Then he springs that second sentence on you -- a sentence that captures Fahey with all his feathers showing, a peacock in full strut. Do peacocks strut? Would Flannery O'Connor have bought a record called "God, Time and Causality"? Would she have played it backwards, for to see what this fellow Fahey had to say about God, time and causality? Did Fahey really mean it when he said, elsewhere in the liner notes, that the album title was "just a joke from a former philosophy major"? Was Mississippi John Hurt God's favorite blues singer? I don't know these things, but all this wondering seems to be getting me through the Monday morning blues. Bugle calls, oriental scales, hints of 'Train 45.' I'm listening. Tell me more ...

You can't get that stuff no more (More songs about cornbread and beer, whiskey and wampus cats, bottles of bread and the bottleneck blues)

I don’t need a bottle to tell me what to do
just like I don’t need a lightning bolt to cut my steak in two

-- "With a Bottle in My Hand/Farewell Blues," Tangleweed

I am the tiger, like a wampus cat
You raised up on me, like a big swamp rat
You took my money, and you left me flat

-- "Cornbread & Beer," Bonneville County Pine Box

Now, pull that drummer out from behind that bottle
Bring me my pipe, we’re gonna shake it
Slap that drummer with a pie that smells
Take me down to California, baby

-- "Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread," Bob Dylan and The Band

A Friday-night playlist (partial) ...

1. "Bottleneck Blues," Blind Willie Johnson
2. "Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread," Bob Dylan and The Band
3. "You Can't Get That Stuff No More," Tampa Red and Georgia Tom
4. "Cornbread & Beer," Bonneville County Pine Box
5. "Bukka's Jitterbug Swing," Bukka White
6. "It was the Whiskey Talking (Not Me)," Jerry Lee Lewis
7. "Muscat Hill Blues," Buddy Woods with The Wampus Cats
8. "Bean Vine Blues, No. 2," M. Ward
9. "Homesick and Lonesome Blues," Blind Boy Fuller
10. "With a Bottle in My Hand/Farewell Blues," Tangleweed

Greatest songs of all time: No. 2, "James Alley Blues," Richard "Rabbit" Brown

Sometimes I think that you too sweet to die
Sometimes I think that you too sweet to die
And another time I think you oughta be buried alive

-- "James Alley Blues," Richard "Rabbit" Brown

“Let me tell you, boys, of sweet mayhem,” said the old man to the children scattered about him. “Let me tell you about the flash of knife.” They were his grandchildren and their friends of the neighborhood. They sat about him with their heads cocked, watching, and their ears perked, listening. They were barefoot to a boy. They were scattered about the old man like bones awaiting assembly into real human creatures that would grow tall and go to school and learn about Henry Ford and the Founding Fathers and the cotton gin, but not, the old man silently lamented, Rabbit Brown and the Light Crust Doughboys and the trick leg.

-- from some lost story of mine

... I was disappointed no one mentioned Bascom Lamar Lunsford's 1928 "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground," the most seductively unsolvable song I've ever heard, or Richard 'Rabbit' Brown's 1927 "James Alley Blues," which I think is the greatest record ever made. Well, I thought, there's no accounting for taste.

-- Greil Marcus, writing about the "Anthology of American Folk Music" in Granta, 2002.

Who was Rabbit Brown and why isn't held up as blues royalty, songster division? Why doesn't history reach over to light his cigarette and say to the great man, "Sing the one, won't you, about how she oughta be buried alive?" Why isn't he up on the wall with Robert Johnson and Skip James, Blind Lemon and my all-time fave Charley Patton? Because he left us just one great song and a few strays? Because he didn't go down to the cross roads and fall down on his knees? Because not much is known about him other than, as Wikipedia notes, he was "most likely born around 1880 in or near New Orleans, Louisiana" and some of his most popular songs were topical numbers that, alas, "were never recorded, however, and only a verse from one of them has endured"? Is it that he didn't die drinking poisoned hooch and barking like a dog on the floor of some juke, or anyway we don't know that he did, Wikipedia noting that "not much is known about Rabbit Brown after 1930 other than that he died in 1937"? Was it because he didn't live long enough to be rediscovered and put on stage at Newport or in a movie staring Burt Reynolds? Do we know what he looked like? Was he a brown-eyed handsome man? Did R. Crumb draw him? Why was he called Rabbit? Why has he disappeared, mostly, down history's rabbit hole? Was he, I must ask, buried alive?

Strange things happening

Now, the stranger, lest we forget: He was a sight.

He was tall and lanky and had a shambling way of about him. He had dark eyes that shone and broad shoulders that slumped. He had long brown hair to those shoulders and he wore tattered jeans and an old white shirt that flowed from him like some thrift-store aura. He was barefoot, pushing thirty.

He'd been in town for a few weeks. He didn’t make a big fuss of the fact that he was a stranger even to himself. Prophet was shy of strangers, on any given day, and so people would just naturally ask the stranger his name and he would say something like, “Search me,” or, “I haven’t the foggiest,” or, “I wish to Jesus I knew.” What with his long brown hair to his shoulders and those dark eyes that shone, he did have the sad air of Jesus about him. And he was a soothing presence. Everyone noted it. He’d walk in a room and the petty squabbling would stop. There would be silence, and from open windows would come the sound of birds. Folks would listen. Sounded like those birds had taken up mandolin and fiddle, how sweet the sound.

He was a walking man. He shambled about town in search of himself. He attended church regular, sat in the back as the Reverend Graves preached the word and the choir sang old favorites like “I Want Jesus to Walk With Me” and “Wade the Water to My Knees” and, in a sly nod the Reverend Graves abided but just the once, “Strange Things Happening Every Day.”

One Sunday after church, the Reverend Graves drew him aside and said, “We’re all of us just rank strangers sometimes, you know.” He pressed into the stranger’s hand a roll of bills from the collection and said, “There’s other towns out there in all directions. One of them knows who you are and what house you live in and what you do for a job.”

“Well, Reverend, I don’t know. I just seem to feel at home here, in Prophet.”

“You ain’t one of them,” Reverend Graves said.

-- from "Strange Things Happening Every Day," being adapted from a story published in The Pinch

Elevate me mama (More songs about life, blues, and the stuff you gotta watch)

She had scolded him and chided him and now set about to teach him, about life and the blues, about women and men, and what one poet of the dark chord called the stuff you gotta watch.

-- from my novel, "The Very Last Night"

A Friday-night playlist (partial) ...

1. "Elevate Me Mama" (alternate take), Muddy Waters
2. "Blue Light," Little Walter
3. "Come On In," R.L. Burnside
4. "She Asked Me So I Told Her," T-Model Ford
5. "Blues Hangover," Slim Harpo
6. "Last Train," Allen Toussaint
7. "Down There By the Train," Tom Waits
8. "Blue Grass Special," Bill Monroe & his Blue Grass Boys
9. "Snake Farm," Ray Wylie Hubbard
10. "Gangster's Blues," Phil Alvin
11. "Cherry Ball Blues," Ry Cooder
12. "Seduced," Leon Redbone
13. "Feather Bed," Cannon's Blues Stompers
14. "Bye & Bye," Bob Dylan
15. "Stuff You Gotta Watch," Muddy Waters

Hello walls

I like music, everywhere and always. I like it in my ears and on my walls. I think album covers are art and the old masters have nothing on whoever turned out that Muddy Waters concert poster in the photo above. I turn on music if I'm leaving a room, so some song's playing when I get back, "The Miner's Doom" or "My Home is in the Delta" or "Mystery Dance." My lone disappointment with my beloved greyhounds is that they seem unmoved by music -- or is it just my music? I've tried old string-band ballads and blues laments and Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue." I've tried live Dylan bootlegs and Jelly Roll Morton. So now it's silence when I'm gone to work, but music from the moment I return. Lately it's been the new Leonard Cohen record, lots of Louvin Brothers as I read "Satan Is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers," and some new finds -- Orpheum Bell, Bhi Bhiman, Lincoln Durham.

Wednesday morning. Coffee and writing on the novel, "Strange Things Happening Every Day," and Leonard Cohen singing, "I’m listening so hard that it hurts."

Mud, soot, fog, and the Dickens: The great man at 200

I think the opening page of "Bleak House" is the best writing ever, by anyone. My wife, who is all about the story, thinks that once he got that fancy first page of writing out of his system, Dickens wrote his finest novel -- indeed, I suppose she'd say, the finest by anyone, ever. Dickens the writer? Dickens the storyteller? Well, why choose? But this is my blog, so on the occasion of the great man's 200th birthday, here's a bit from the opening of "Bleak House" ...

... Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

-- From "Bleak House"

Broke was the engine, cold was the heart (More lullabies about the dark)

Sleep baby sleep
The day’s on the run
The wind in the trees
Is talking in tongues

-- "Lullaby," Leonard Cohem

A Friday-night playlist (partial) ...

1-3. "Goodbye," "The Darkness" and "Lullaby," Leonard Cohen
4-6. "Not Dark Yet," "Tryin' to Get to Heaven" and "Broke Down Engine," Bob Dylan
7-9. "Darkness on the Edge of Town," "Factory" and "Badlands," Bruce Springsteen
10-12. "In My Hour of Darkness," "Love Hurts" and "She," Gram Parsons
13-15. "Dark Turn of Mind," "The Way it Will Be" and "Hard Times," Gillian Welch
16. "Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground," Blind Willie Johnson
17. "Dark End of the Street," James Carr
18. "Beware of Darkness," George Harrison
19. "No Dark There," Wingless Angels
20. "Keep on the Sunny Side," the Low Anthem

The greatest books of all time: No. 37, "The New Journalism"

I'm pretty sure you can get high, just opening this book. You can get truly wasted, reading a handful of its stories. (Is it any wonder the thing is out of print and the cheapest used copy on Amazon.com is $59.19, plus shipping. Hell, this isn't journalism; this is contraband.) But what good shit it is, pure 1960s high-test -- Hunter Thompson, before he became the craziest character in his stories, hanging with the Hell's Angels; Terry Southern, arriving in Oxford, Miss., the day after Faulkner's funeral, to write about "Twirling at Ole Miss"; Joan Didion, strung out on California, writing, "There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows."

"The New Journalism" would make my Top 50 solely on what Hunter Thompson came to call "bad craziness," but I put it 37th for strictly old-school reasons: Rarely has journalism been so inspired, so ambitious, so balls-out, so hopped-up on the very notion that reportage can be -- why not? -- literature.

"What interested me," Wolfe wrote, "was not simply the discovery that that it was possible to write accurate non-fiction with the techniques usually associated with novels and short stories. It was that -- plus. It was the discovery that it was possible in non-fiction, in journalism, to use any literary device, from the traditional dialogisms of the essay to stream-of-consciousness, and to use many different kinds simultaneously, or within a relatively short space ... to excite the reader both intellectually and emotionally."