Music to celebrate Friday -- Jo-El Sonnier

If your feet ain't tappin', call the funeral home. 

I'm in Texas this week, enjoying the grand babies. Have a great weekend!

Book Review: Lori Roy's Until She Comes Home

How far back in time do you have to go to write historical fiction? I read somewhere that I now can't find historical fiction goes back at least 50 years. So Lori Roy's Until She Comes Home (Dutton, June 13, 2013) should qualify, and I'm safe to review her novel here.*

Roy's first release, Bent Road, predisposed me to love Until She Comes Home. This second novel didn't disappoint. It is set in the same era as Bent Road and covers some of the same ground, Detroit, 1958, in the throes of racial unrest. 

The blurb, courtesy of Amazon.com, gives a good idea of the book's main plot points:

Winner of an Edgar Award for Best First Novel for Bent Road, Lori Roy returns with Until She Comes Home, a tale of spellbinding suspense in which a pair of seemingly unrelated murders crumbles the facade of a changing Detroit neighborhood.

In 1958 Detroit, on Alder Avenue, neighbors struggle to care for neighbors amid a city ripe with conflicts that threaten their peaceful street.
Grace, Alder’s only expectant mother, eagerly awaits her first born. Best friend Julia prepares to welcome twin nieces. And Malina sets the tone with her stylish dresses, tasteful home, and ironfisted stewardship of St. Alban’s bake sale.
Life erupts when childlike Elizabeth disappears while in the care of Grace and Julia. All the ladies fear the recent murder of a black woman at the factory on Willingham Avenue where their husbands work may warn of what has become of Elizabeth, and they worry what is yet to become of Julia—the last to see Elizabeth alive.
The men mount an around-the-clock search, leaving their families vulnerable to sinister elements hidden in plain sight. Only Grace knows what happened, but her mother warns her not to tell. “No man wants to know this about his wife.” Ashamed that her silence puts loved ones in harm’s way, Grace gravitates toward the women of Willingham Avenue, who recognize her suffering as their own. Through their acceptance, Grace conquers her fear and dares to act.
On Alder Avenue, vicious secrets bind friends, neighbors, and spouses. For the wicked among them, the walk home will be long.

One of the central mysteries of the book is answered close to the beginning. Roy presents the evidence for the reader to conclude what happened while leaving the characters to struggle on in the dark because the truth is too horrible to grasp, much less accept. Only Grace Richardson can do both after her baptism of fire.

Lots of things are hidden from the residents of Alder Avenue, including the nature of Malina Hertz's marriage, another mystery her neighbors can't face. Lori Roy forces the reader to face it, though, and feel for Malina. There's a lot of drama and ugliness under the cracking surface of Alder Avenue, but that is a storyteller's job:  to rupture human nature, exposing its timeless struggles and triumphs.

The dated lifestyles mark it as historical fiction:  the wife's job is at home, cooking, cleaning, and tending children; the husband's  is providing for his family. But those lifestyles haven't really been eliminated, only altered. Readers will realize certain attitudes toward and crimes against women will never be outdated.



*In 2011 I still wrote reviews for The Best Damn Creative Writing Blog (as it existed then) and LitStack, and I requested a copy of Roy's Bent Road. Since I had reviewed that novel, I guess, Dutton sent me an advance copy of Until She Comes Home, which arrived in the mail unrequested. But I'm pleased to have read it and review it here.

Sisterhood

Many thanks to my blogging friend M. J. Joachim, who extended to me the Sisterhood of the World Bloggers Award. MJ is part of a wonderful community out there, women who blog about their faith, their professions, their dreams. You're all great, and I'm glad to be one of you.

Happy blogging, my friends!

I'd like to share this award with some of my writing/blogging sister
Jessica Ferguson (Here and Here).

Music to celebrate Friday -- Buckwheat Zydeco

"Ils Sont Partis!" They're off to the races, cher -- you remember how to pronounce that, right? -- and all you have to do is dance around while you listen to Buckwheat Zydeco. If you also listen to Clifton Chenier, you'll hear some influence because Chenier was Buckwheat's mentor, though zydeco wasn't his first love. Buckwheat started out in R&B and funk. 

This YouTube clip is old, but I happen to really, really like "Hey Joe." Don't you?  There are several good BW songs on YouTube, including "When the Levees Broke" and the live appearance at the 2007 New Orleans Jazz festival.

The Originals

My friend Jess Ferguson can't keep her suggestions to herself, and I thank my stars for that. (Look for her blogs:  Praise, Prayers and Observations and Be A Real Writer.) She suggested some topics for posts. One of her ideas was the first Louisiana writer. I had to look that up. There are many Louisiana writers known nationwide and worldwide:  Kate Chopin, Walker Percy, Anne Rice, Truman Capote, Ernest J. Gaines, Jennifer Blake, and James Lee Burke to name a very few.

But who were the originals?

Among the earliest writers of fiction, drama and poetry in Louisiana were French and Creole:  Julien Poydras de Lallande, a poet, after whom Poydras Street in New Orleans was named; Paul Louis Le Blanc de Villeneuve, a playwright; novelists Albert Mercier and Sidonie de la Houssaye. If you're interested in what they wrote, go to KNOWLA, Encyclopedia of Louisiana, where I found these names.

Then came the writers in English, like George Washington Cable -- finally, a familiar name! "Cable's fiction established Louisiana as a fashionable source of Local Color Fiction, a popular genre in the 1880s and 1890s" (KNOWLA). That's his photo above; is that a mustache, or what? 

Other writers in English were Henry Clay Lewis, pen name Madison Tensas; and Solomon Northrup, who was born in New York and sold as a slave to a Red River plantation. He wrote Twelve Years A Slave.

Music to celebrate Fridays -- Cléoma Breaux

Hi, y'all. Well, I haven't been posting much lately, and I'm sorry about that on one hand, but not on the other. I've been writing and researching my WIP. Without letting that go, I'll try to be better about posting.

This week's musical celebration centers around the first woman inducted into the Cajun Music Hall of Fame:  Cléoma Breaux Falcon. Born in 1906 to a musical family, she played guitar, sang, and recorded with her brothers and her husband, Joe Falcon, yet Joe was inducted into the Cajun Hall of Fame in 1997, five years ahead of Cleoma. She died in 1941 at age 34, after injuries in a car accident the previous year.

Note the Dobro guitar in the photo above. The child is Cléoma and Joe's adopted daughter, Lulu. 

Cléoma and Joe recorded the first Cajun music record April 27, 1928:  "Lafayette." He sang and played accordion, she played guitar. Cléoma, Joe, and the Breaux family musicians recorded nearly a hundred songs for top record labels of the day-- Columbia, Decca, and Bluebird -- influenced by country & western, blues, and the popular music of the day.

Music to celebrate Friday -- Amédé Ardoin

Amédé (or Amedee/Amedie) Ardoin was a startling man, a black Creole contemporary of Jelly Roll Morton and  Buddy Bolden. Morton and Bolden were rolling music in a new direction in metropolitan New Orleans, while Ardoin created his own new sounds in rural south Louisiana, Acadiana. His music influenced not only Creole music, eventually Zydeco, but also Cajun music. Playing his accordion and singing the lyrics he made up on the spot, Ardoin and his white friend, fiddler Dennis/Denus McGee, traveled around making music wherever they could -- in barns, yards, houses and dance halls. Ardoin, alone and with McGee, recorded 34 records, some with Columbia Records.

Ardoin was a contemporary of and played music with Canray Fontenot. Alphonse "Bois Sec" Ardoin was Amédé's younger cousin.

There is a tragic, and some say apocryphal, story about how Ardoin ended his days. It's too true to bigotry not to have some truth. You can read about it HERE if you like or watch a video HERE. I'd suggest you just enjoy the music.

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amédé_Ardoin

his media file is in the public domain in the United States. This applies to U.S. works where the copyright has expired, often because its first publication occurred prior to January 1, 1923.