Story and Music–the Songs behind Blue Hole Back Home
February 7, 2010
As my musician buddies would be quick to remind me, music tells its own story–whether or not it involves lyrics. Often, we writers owe a great debt to the stories in the music we listen to during the weeks or months or years that our own stories are coming to life–or not–on the page.
In the case of Blue Hole Back Home, a coming-of-age tale of teenagers living in the still-racially and ethnically fractured South, I’d already included a good bit of music in the book by the final draft. But in the final weeks before the galley stages, my husband came home from the library with a CD of an 1960-70s compilation of Atlantic Records hits, including R&B standards like Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.” That got me digging out old R&B favorites, just for fun. And, okay, also just because in the final stages of a book I become frantic for any distraction or excuse not to write. A peculiar thing happened, though: the songs began finding their way into the plot.
Below is Ben E. King singing “Stand By Me,” which figures significantly into the final chapters when The Pack is coming face to face with senseless cruelty, and what it means to stick by a friend, no matter the cost.
That same week, a friend of my son’s was staying with us for a few days and brought with him an Earth, Wind and Fire CD. I hadn’t heard them for years–or hadn’t paid attention if I had. Suddenly, though, I was finding that the story of Turtle and Emerson and Jimbo and Farsanna Moulavi and the Mangy Pack was all happening with a kind of soundtrack in the background– the most unlikely assortment of music, from James Brown’s “I Feel Good” to gritty, blues versions of “Amazing Grace.” Lots of these songs found their way into the plot.
No story that takes place in the Appalachian Mountains can spin out without the storyteller hearing a good bit of bluegrass along the way–at least in her memory. On the mountain where I grew up, people gathered on Friday nights for “Mountain Opry,” a jam session free-for-all where some of the best banjo pickers and guitars in seven states just show up and play with whoever is there–and the audience passes the hat. In the novel Blue Hole Back Home, Emerson plays a mean bluegrass guitar, but there’s also mention of banjo along the way. Here is Earl Scruggs with Wild and Crazy Guy Steve Martin on “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”
And here is Martha and the Vandellas with their “Dancin’ in the Street,” which figures into the plot when The Pack is down in the city on Seventh Street, based loosely on Chattanooga’s former Ninth Street, where five African-American women were critically injured in a 1980 drive-by shooting by three white men.
One of the main characters, Jimbo, typically rides in the back of the pick up where he is teaching himself to play guitar. As they jolt down the old logging trail roads, he thrums out strange medleys of “Stairway to Heaven” and “Holy, Holy, Holy” (try finding that on YouTube). But below is another song Jimbo plays–this one with a few more posted public versions. Here is LeeAnn Rimes with a blues-inspired acapella version of “Amazing Grace.”
When Baylor University in Texas chose Blue Hole as its 2009 Common Book, my teenage daughter kindly bought and burned the songs for me that appear in the book, and I carted the CD to Waco with me to speak. Nervous as I was–okay, catatonic with fear–over having to speak to the 4,000 freshman who’d just read and were about to discuss my novel, I managed to raise one arm to hand the CD to the sound guy, who graciously popped it in as the students were arriving in the big hall.
Music is amazing. By the time Diana Ross had belted out her “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (which figures into the early chapters) and we’d moved on to “Dancin’ in the Streets,” I was forgetting to be nauseous and tongue-tied, and about two minutes away from dancing on the platform’s table with the microphone balanced on my nose.
Here is Diana Ross performing her inimitable “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” in 1979, the year in which the novel is set.
May stories–in music and on the written page–inspire you today to offer outrageous forgiveness, to stand by a friend, and to find a good table to dance on.
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Thanks for a great post and interesting comments. I found this post while looking for some popular lyrics. Thanks for sharing this story.
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I utterly enjoyed reading about Story and Music–the Songs behind Blue Hole Back Home : Joy Jordan-Lake and think it was well worth the read. The only other site I found on Ask wasnt as good as this one, thanks.