Devil Sent the Rain

by Tom Piazza

  Piazza is a well-known writer on American music as well. He won a Grammy Award for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey and is a three-time winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing, for his books Understanding Jazz and The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz, as well as for his Oxford American article “Note in a Bottle,” which appears in Devil Sent the Rain. His writing on music and American culture has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, the Village Voice, Bookforum, Columbia Journalism Review, and many other places. He lives in New Orleans. You can visit him at www.tompiazza.com, or at his author page on Facebook.

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  About the Book

  A Conversation with Tom Piazza

  Tom Piazza and his editor, Cal Morgan, have worked together on six works of fiction and nonfiction, dating back to the early 1990s. They talked about Devil Sent the Rain in the spring of 2011.

  Cal Morgan: Some readers may be surprised to find Gustave Flaubert, Jelly Roll Morton, and Bob Dylan all sharing mental space (and cover space) in this collection. What was going through your mind as you pulled these figures together? What do such diverse figures have in common for you?

  Tom Piazza: Real artists are all mutants. That’s the main thing artists have in common. None of the people in the book takes anyone else’s word for how reality looks. If anything connects them, it’s the idea that the individual sensibility is what you have to assert against a basically hostile or entropic world. Of course it takes a lot of hard work to convert that individual sensibility into something other people can use. Obviously a lot of ego is involved. . . .

  I think there’s a real affinity between imaginative writers and creative musicians. You have to stand at the microphone, actual or virtual, and deliver something that’s worth someone else’s time, and that people can’t find anywhere else. My favorite writers all have a strong performative aspect to what they do—where you can feel their minds working between the lines. I like a little sense of struggle in there, a little trace of the improvisation that is always involved in coming up with the scenes and ideas.

  “None of the people in the book takes anyone else’s word for how reality looks.

  Morgan: I can see that in the work of Norman Mailer, whom you write about, but didn’t Flaubert try to erase any evidence of his own effort in his prose?

  Piazza: He tried, but at the same time he was absolutely obsessed with his own process. He wrote about it constantly in his letters, especially the ones he wrote when he was composing Madame Bovary.

  Morgan: There is a lot of tension in the book around the question of what role an artist’s persona plays in his or her art. In your essay on the singer-songwriter Gillian Welch, you claim to “trust the song, not the singer.” Yet elsewhere you spend a lot of time thinking about the public faces of Dylan, Jimmie Rodgers, Mailer, and other artists. Are the personal qualities of artists a meaningful aspect of their work, or a distraction from it?

  Piazza: Both. Artistic creation has always attracted speculation and fascination with the person who makes the art. The activity is recognized as being different in kind from other human activity, and yet it also feels familiar. That simultaneous sense of familiarity and strangeness is the essence of attraction.

  Beginning in the twentieth century, with the rise of sound recording, film, and broadcast media, that fascination has grown exponentially. It has also coarsened in the process. One of the reasons artists are a little strange is that most of them simultaneously invite that fascination and are at least a little disgusted by it. That ambivalence itself is very interesting.

  Morgan: In the 1980s and early ’90s, you wrote a great deal about jazz. In the years since, your focus has shifted to what some might consider more “vernacular” music—country, blues, bluegrass, folk. Was this a conscious choice?

  Piazza: In 1991 I left New York City, after years of living there, to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Before I left, a friend made up a whole library of cassette tapes for me—like thirty or forty; he just ran them off. Some of the artists I had heard of, most I hadn’t. Everything from Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family to Uncle Dave Macon, Mac Wiseman, Hobart Smith, Almeda Riddle, the Monroe Brothers, Mike Seeger, the New Lost City

  Ramblers, Ewan MacCool, Hedy West, Hank Thompson, Jimmy Martin, Dock Boggs. Some blues in there, too: Crying Sam Collins, the Memphis Jug Band, Frank Stokes, the Mississippi Sheiks. . . . It went on and on. I listened to those tapes as I drove to Iowa, and that mix of sound got fused, for me, with the experience of leaving New York and moving into the heart of the country. I listened to those tapes the whole three years I was in Iowa. It was like having a giant ham in the refrigerator. You’d just go in and cut yourself another slice. Eventually

  I started playing and singing, as well. There were a lot of good players and singers in Iowa City and still are— Greg Brown, Dave Moore, Bo Ramsey, Dave Zollo, Al Murphy.

  Iowa City is a cosmopolitan bubble in the middle of endless farm country. If you drive for ten minutes, you’re out in the rolling cornfields. Everything about it was so different from New York that it demanded a different soundtrack. Jazz is very urban music. The subtext is always the fusion of disparate cultures in a hothouse environment. All the folk music I was listening to also had that syncretic aspect to it—all American music does—but it was under less pressure, in a sense. The elements exist in a different relation to one another. The musical structures are usually simpler than those found in most jazz, and the expression is a little more straightforward. That’s not to say that the result is any less profound.

  I think most writers’ experience of something isn’t complete until they have written about it. The writing is a way of processing experience. I always wrote about music. One of the dangers of writing about art is that you can become a specialist. You get known for writing about a subject, and so you get asked to write about it more, and pretty soon you start repeating yourself, and then your experience begins to grow dull. At a certain point I felt that I had said what I had to say about jazz, and I was interested in all these other kinds of music, too, so I started thinking about them in print. But I’ve never stopped listening to jazz. I just went through a big Sonny Rollins phase, in fact.

  Morgan: The essays in Devil Sent the Rain always seem to circle back to the context that America provides, which informs these artists and against which they work. Do you think our country recognizes its artists for what they actually create?

  “I think most writers’ experience of something isn’t complete until they have written about it.”

  Piazza: I’m not sure what you mean by “our country.” Are you talking about the state apparatus, or the citizens? I don’t love the idea of the state getting too involved in “recognizing” artists.

  Morgan: I was thinking about citizens—about what meaning artists really have to the audiences who follow them. As you point out, Jimmie Rodgers embodied the new promises and dangers of America in the 1920s. A decade or two later, the character of Charlie Chan offered moviegoers an example of sly rationality in the face of an increasingly crazy geopolitical landscape. Do you think these effects were key reasons for their success in their time, or were they more like dividends that have paid off in retrospect?

  “Important artists are usually important because they articulate something of which the audience is not yet fully conscious.

  Piazza: Important artists are usually important because they articulate something of which the audience is not yet fully conscious. Even the artists themselves may not be fully conscious of it. The theme, or the concern, or the subject, is there under the surface, but it can’t yet be seen directly. An artist gives it some kind of tangible symbolic embodiment through image and sound, in the same way that dreams express elements in the psyche that haven’t yet reached the dreamer’s conscious mind.

  I don’t mean necessarily i
n terms of subject matter. Someone who says to himself, “I will now write a novel about climate change, because it is an Important Issue . . .” is likely to deliver something dead on arrival. Creative artistic work isn’t primarily a linear, rational process. At some point the rational mind comes in and works with that dreamlike mind; otherwise you can end up with something unintelligible. It’s a partnership, or a dance, involving both parts. But, for me, the intuitive part has to lead the way.

  Obviously, if that is how you work, elements enter the picture that will surprise you, and that even run counter to what you think you want to say. You have to recognize the need for that and create a space where that can happen. The will can’t dominate the process, or control the results in advance.

  Generally speaking, I think this has become a harder thing for people to recognize and understand, in America at least. There’s even a degree of hostility toward it. In any case, people who have no feeling for imaginative expression have seemed freer in the past few years to express that hostility. People are anxious about everything— the economy, the environment, the political process itself. Images of domination and control become attractive in proportion to the degree that elements of unpredictability and vulnerability feel threatening. Art constantly reminds us of unpredictability and vulnerability, so it is a logical target.

  Morgan: As you mention in your introduction, Devil Sent the Rain changes course in Part Two, after the impact of Katrina shifted your compass. For me, though, the most surprising moment comes just before that—in your 2004 essay “World Gone Wrong Again,” with its wild, arresting parade of images and questions. At the time, did you recognize that your writing was leading you in a new, more urgent direction—in terms of both style and content?

  Piazza: Not really. That was the way I had to write that particular piece. I wasn’t thinking about any new direction. I’m not sure that it did represent a new direction. I mean, I did write more conventional pieces again after that. But things were headed straight toward a brick wall in America right around when I wrote that piece. We had invaded Iraq, a disastrous decision for every reason you can think of, and the media were still giving the Bush administration a free ride, and like many people I found the situation sickening. Maybe the sound in that piece reflected some sense of foreboding. Like a preemptive impatience with a certain kind of polite rhetorical strategy. Ironically enough, it was the administration’s botched response to Katrina that ended their free ride in the media.

  Morgan: In Why New Orleans Matters, you asked readers to consider what we had to lose, as Americans, if the city were allowed to fail after Katrina. Your post-Katrina pieces in this book suggest that the city remains both vital and vulnerable. What have we learned from these six years? And what are we still overlooking?

  Piazza: One of the main things that give individuals the strength to come back from a disaster like Katrina is the love of a shared culture, attached to a sense of place. This is a lot of what we have been writing about in HBO’s Treme, and my books Why New Orleans Matters and City of Refuge deal with it, too. Of course, the aftermath of a disaster like Katrina also brings huge opportunities for hustlers, con men, and real estate developers with no interest in the development of community, and everything to gain from wiping out any connection to the past or to place. But that’s an old story, and certainly not specific to New Orleans. I offer some thoughts about it in “Other People’s Houses” and “Incontinental Drift.”

  Morgan: From the very first piece in the collection, your profile of Jimmie Rodgers, through the new essay “The Devil and Gustave Flaubert,” you return several times to the idea of sentimentality and its temptations. Why do you think the power of the sentimental persists—attracting both great artists (like Rodgers or Jimmy Martin) and callous politicians?

  “Sentimentality involves the exaggeration of the emotionally obvious for a short-term gain, at the expense of the more subtle and ambiguous truth.

  Piazza: Sentimentality involves the exaggeration of the emotionally obvious for a short-term gain, at the expense of the more subtle and ambiguous truth that usually lies underneath human relations. It’s like a sugar high—you get an immediate rush of what feels like empathy, but eventually the body grows fat and slack.

  You can also have the opposite problem. A certain kind of sensibility can easily mistake real emotion for sentimentality. Some people are fundamentally embarrassed by human connection. The embarrassment, or shame, translates into an active distaste, and they want to eliminate it from literature, make it only about language, or form. In extreme cases— someone like Robbe-Grillet, or Michel Butor—they are like people who starve themselves to eliminate every last ounce of fat from their body. The demand for utter rigor and purity suggests a degree of self-loathing, a deep shame in the body, even shame at being human in the first place. You need what Philip Roth called the “human stain.” Obviously, without delight in language, intellectual surprise, formal satisfaction, literature wouldn’t be literature. But without a tangible sense of the human it’s a dead end—or I find it so, at least. Of course, Robbe-Grillet and Butor seem fatally dated now, like the serial composers who rigorously eliminated any trace of tonality from their music. I mean, apologies if you still dig that stuff. . . .

  But all this talk is making me hungry. Let’s go eat.

  Morgan: One more question: Of all the people you write about here, who would you most like to have dinner with? Spend a lost weekend carousing with? Be marooned on a desert island with?

  Piazza: Seriously? Same answer to all three—my better half, Mary, about whom I write in the final piece, “Note in a Bottle.” Hope that doesn’t sound sentimental; too bad if it does.

  Now can we eat?

  Read On

  Further Listening and Reading

  DEVIL SENT THE RAIN has a Facebook page, for all who catch the connections between music, literature, food, and place. Visit it for film clips of musical performances and literary interviews, tips for further reading, and images of rare records, interesting places, and fried chicken. Charley Patton, James Joyce, Jimmy Martin, Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer, Furry Lewis, and their associates pop up on a regular basis. Be sure to “like” Devil Sent the Rain, and you’ll be notified as new items are added.

  In the meantime, you can’t go wrong with the following:

  Jimmie Rodgers

  For the complete recordings: Jimmie Rodgers: The Singing Brakeman (six CDs, Bear Family).

  Nearly complete, at a much lower price: Recordings 1927–1933 (five CDs, JSP).

  Single CD: The Essential Jimmie Rodgers (RCA).

  Also worth hearing: Merle Haggard’s Same Train, a Different Time, available online.

  Charley Patton

  For the complete recordings: Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton (seven CDs, Revenant).

  Nearly complete, at a much lower price: Complete Recordings, 1929–34 (five CDs, JSP).

  Single CD: The Best of Charlie Patton (Yazoo).

  The Blues: A Musical Journey

  Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey (five CDs, Hip-O Records).

  Rev. Willie Morganfield

  Several of Rev. Morganfield’s gospel albums, including Serving the Lord, The All-Powerful Name, and The Bible, are available online.

  Jimmy Martin

  The Music of Bill Monroe from 1936–1994 (four CDs, MCA Nashville) includes many of Martin’s classic recordings with Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys.

  Songs of a Free Born Man (CMH Records) collects twenty-five of Martin’s recordings as a leader between 1959 and 1992.

  Will the Circle Be Unbroken includes Martin’s unforgettable performance on “Sunny Side of the Mountain.” In 2002, it was reissued in a 30th Anniversary edition (two CDs, Capitol).

  Carl Perkins

  For his complete recordings, 1954–1965: The Classic Carl Perkins (five CDs, Bear Family) collects his work for Sun, Columbia, and Decca.

  Double CD: The Essential S
un Collection (two CDs, Recall Records).

  Perkins’s 1996 comeback CD was Go Cat Go (Dinosaur).

  Gillian Welch

  The essay “Trust the Song” was occasioned by Welch’s first two CDs, Revival and Hell Among the Yearlings (both on Acony). Her later work includes Time (The Revelator), Soul Journey, and The Harrow & the Harvest.

  Bob Dylan

  If you don’t yet know Bob Dylan’s work, you have a lot to look forward to. His catalog as of this writing runs to more than fifty albums, not counting best-of compilations. Even a top-ten list involves very painful omissions. But you could never leave out the following discs and sets: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Live 1966, Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks, Slow Train Coming, Infidels, Time Out Of Mind, Love and Theft, and The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1–3. Oh— was that eleven? Sorry about that. Did I mention The Basement Tapes?

  The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at Newport Folk Festival 1963–1965, Murray Lerner’s documentary, is available on DVD (Sony).

  Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan, with performances by Shirley Caesar, Aaron Neville, Rance Allen, the Fairfield Four, Mavis Staples, and Dylan himself, is available on CD (Sony).

  The essay “World Gone Wrong Again” discusses Dylan’s albums Good As I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993, both Sony). The albums that followed, Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft, are among the best work he has ever done.

  Charlie Chan

  Charlie Chan Collection, Vol. 1 (four DVDs, 20th Century Fox) collects five films featuring Warner Oland, including Charlie Chan in London, Charlie Chan in Paris, Charlie Chan in Egypt, Charlie Chan in Shanghai, and Eran Trece, the Spanish-language version of Charlie Chan Carries On. The Charlie Chan Collection went on to comprise five volumes, all of them necessary for the connoisseur.