Pulphead

"This is a new book by a writer in his mid-thirties, about all kinds of things. A lot of it is about the South, some of it is autobiographical, there is a long and quite wonderful piece about going to a Christian music camp. But what I love most about this book is an essay about old country blues, and about the way in which music made by people in the twenties and thirties – African Americans from Mississippi or other parts of the South – can create an aura of enigma. You desperately want to find out how these magical sounds were created, and what kind of lives lay behind them. So often this kind of knowledge is absolutely inaccessible – you’ll never find the answers to these questions but the questions never go away. Nobody has dramatised that as well as he has in this book, so I’m really recommending it for one marvellous essay about old country blues. I think he’s ploughed his own road. It just so happened that he was fact checking an article I wrote about an old blues singer named Geeshie Wiley. We both became completely fascinated with this person, who recorded in 1930 and about whom absolutely nothing is known. We don’t even know her real name. We don’t know when she was born, where she was from or when she died, assuming that she has died. I think she left behind five or six recordings, one of which is one of the great works of American art, a blues song called “Last Kind Words Blues”. I wrote an essay about trying to get to the heart of that recording. Then he went off and tried to get to the heart of who Geeshie Wiley was. So in that sense we shared a quest. But he’s certainly his own writer. I guess anywhere you look you can always be surprised. You can be surprised by somebody’s insight, by the way they turn a phrase, by a jump in a melody. You can always hear something you haven’t heard before. That’s what keeps me paying attention."