Devil Sent the Rain (25 page)

Read On

Further Listening and Reading

D
EVIL
S
ENT THE
R
AIN
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 Sun
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.

The Charlie Chan Chanthology
(six DVDs, MGM) picks up where the 20th Century Fox series leaves off, collecting Chan films featuring Sidney Toler, including
The Secret Service
,
The Chinese Cat
,
The Jade Mask
,
Meeting at Midnight
,
The
Scarlet Clue
, and
The Shanghai Cobra
.

Jelly Roll Morton

Complete Library of Congress Recordings
(eight CDs, Rounder) is the definitive collection of Morton's recordings for Alan Lomax, featuring both spoken-word and musical performances.

Joe Liggins

“Going Back to New Orleans” can be found on
The Shuffle Boogie King: Joe Liggins and his Honeydrippers
(two CDs, Proper).

Dr. John's CD
Goin' Back to New
Orleans
(Warner Bros.) closes with his own version.

Norman Mailer

Mailer wrote more than thirty books of wildly varying quality, almost all of which have something interesting going on that nobody else would have come up with. If you haven't read him, the five that I would recommend to begin with are
The Naked and the Dead
(his first book, a World War II novel that made him an instant celebrity at age twenty-five),
The Armies of the Night
(a journalistic piece on the 1967 March on the Pentagon, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award),
The Executioner's Song
(his stunning “nonfiction novel” about the crime and punishment of Gary Gilmore, which won him his second Pulitzer Prize),
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
(a classic of political reportage, on the 1968 Democratic and Republican conventions), and
Advertisements for Myself
, a seminal collection of essays in which Mailer first found his own distinctive voice.

If you want another five, try the novel
An American Dream
; the essay collections
The Presidential Papers
and
Cannibals and Christians
; his fantastic
The Fight
, about the 1974 Ali-Foreman championship bout; and his slim, brilliant polemic against the Iraq invasion,
Why Are We at War?
. The last title is also available as an audio book from Random House Audible through iTunes, read aloud by Mailer himself. It is well worth getting.

Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary
is available in several translations, including a new one by Lydia Davis (Viking, 2010). My own reading is based on the translation I am most familiar with, by Francis Steegmuller (currently available as a Vintage paperback or Everyman's Library hardcover). Steegmuller also wrote
Flaubert and Madame Bovary
, one of the great literary biographies, newly reissued by NYRB Classics.

Credits

Cover design by Adam Johnson

Cover photographs: courtesy of

Jimmy Martin; Carl Perkins, Norman Mailer, Bob Dylan © Getty Images; Tom Piazza by Rick Gargiulo; Gillian Welch by John Chiasson

Also by Tom Piazza

Fiction

City of Refuge

My Cold War

Blues And Trouble: Twelve Stories

Nonfiction

Why New Orleans Matters

Understanding Jazz: Ways to Listen

True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass

Blues Up and Down: Jazz in Our Time

The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz

Setting the Tempo: Fifty Years of Great Jazz Liner Notes
(editor)

Copyright

DEVIL SENT THE RAIN
. Copyright © 2011 by Tom Piazza. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-06-200822-0

EPub Edition © AUGUST 2011 ISBN: 9780062094926

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