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Crossroad Blues |
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 Crossroad Blues byAce Atkins St. Martin’s 256 pages, 2000 ISBN 0312971923 Reviewed by Diane Gotfryd Here’s a man’s story for you. Written by a manly man about old men, dead men and lonely men who all have the blues. As the title suggests, this tale drives you down a long, dusty road back to the beginning, when the blues were new and cotton farmers gathered behind storefronts to hear the wandering minstrels of the time. You can feel the dust on your teeth and the sweat in the crease of your elbows in the New Orleans and Mississippi Delta settings. The music haunts every page of this book. We have one character on a voyage of discovery about another - a famed blues singer named Robert Johnson who died in 1938. Robert Johnson was a real person, and because his life is the running background to this story, the fictional characters all seem real too. Nick Travers, a former pro football player who went back to school for graduate degrees in the history of blues, sets off on a quest that rapidly switches from the unhappy disappearance of one of his colleagues, to a treasure hunt. There’s a rumor that Robert Johnson may have recorded nine more songs just before he died. Finding them would set the music industry on its ear. One problem is that someone else is after them (a thinly disguised portrait of the House of Blues). Another is that Robert Johnson’s colleagues still feel very loyal to him. Respecting them and the music as Travers does, he has to do it their way - one bourbon and juke joint after another. This is the meat of the book, the conversations, the characters, the cigarette smoke and the muggy nights. It took me longer than usual to finish a book of this length, and thus I pay tribute to the author’s ability to slow the story. Like molasses, it is a dense, satisfying read. You’ll learn a little bit about the blues and the south as you go - but your nose will not be rubbed in it. There is some violence, but it is not pervasive. The book would have been even better without the epilogue, usually deleted by savvy editors. My advice would be to not read the epilogue. Many blues songs have no resolution - neither should everything in this story. |
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