Welcome guest author blogger Malcolm Jones, author of Little Boy Blues: A Crash Course in Growing Up coming from Random House in Jan 2010. Malcolm will join 20 writers at The Moveable Feast of Authors at the SIBA Trade Show.
Admiring Chuck Berry
by Malcolm Jones
One of the many reasons to admire Chuck Berry is the way he smuggles the names of towns and cities into his songs. “In the heat of the day, down in Mobile, Alabama …” “Long distance information, get me Memphis, Tennessee …” “They bought a souped-up jitney, ’twas a cherry red ’53. Drove it down to New Orleans to celebrate their anniversary …” And then, of course, there’s “Promised Land,” a song that’s mostly a roadmap in rhyme:
I left my home in Norfolk, Virginia,
California on my mind.
Straddled that Greyhound, rode him past Raleigh,
On across Caroline.
After that, he stops in Charlotte, bypasses Rock Hill, goes through Atlanta, and then, halfway across Alabama, “that hound broke down and left us all stranded/In downtown Birmingham,” whereupon he buys a train ticket for New Orleans, then on to Houston, where he hops a plane that takes him “high over Albuquerque” and on to the Golden State.
I have always assumed that one of the secrets of Berry’s success was his insistence on using place names. Surely the folks in Rock Hill and Charlotte and Albuquerque loved him just a little bit more for mentioning them in his songs.
Other singers do this, too, of course. James Brown calls off the stops on “Night Train.” Johnny Cash had that “I’ve Been Everywhere” song that’s a virtual atlas. It’s such an endearing trick, not enough to make you a star, maybe, but it can’t have hurt on the charts.
I thought a lot about those songs while I wrote “Little Boy Blues,” my memoir about growing up in the South in the fifties and sixties. More than once, I wished my family had been a little more footloose, that we had covered more territory. Instead, my past trapped me in the couple of hundred miles between Winston-Salem, N.C. and Kershaw, S.C., a town I described as being so small that you could walk from one end of the business district to the other in the time it took to drink a Coca-Cola, and “business district” is the grossest sort of word inflation. I would have dearly loved to name check a few more towns and cities. Instead, I found myself writing about a handful of towns so small and so little known that in the end I insisted the book include a map, just so a reader might feel a little more at home in the landscape.
Every genre has its limitations, and too often you don’t discover what they are until you begin to write. Memoir, to anyone who hasn’t tried to write one, looks like it might be more flexible than, say, a novel or a sonnet, since it’s so ill-defined. Ex-presidents write one kind. Ex-strippers write something else. But in memoir, if you’re honest, you’re stuck with the hand your past has dealt. If you grew up in the sticks, that’s what you write about. You may envy the Army brat who gets to write about Germany and Ft. Sill and El Paso, but all you can do with that is curse your luck. And frankly, a lack of family mobility was the least of my troubles.
The bigger problems with memoir have been talked to death. Tell a story, but stick to the facts and resist the temptation to embellish. (I’m ignoring those who choose to simply make it up as they go along—that’s a sin of a different order.) Don’t let the imperatives of narrative distort the shape of the truth. But those are problems that you know going in. It’s the stuff that blindsides you as a writer that’s more interesting. My story is set 40 or more years in the past, just long enough to force me to explain customs that no longer exist, little things usually, such as the fact that in my youth, you could sit through a movie more than once in a theater and no one cared. You could come in late and leave when you liked. I had to stop and explain that and a lot else that I hadn’t counted on. I found myself detailing the likes of surprise balls, Turkish taffy, Victrola needles—a host of things I figured no one under 30 would understand. It wasn’t a problem talking about civil rights because the ground there has been amply covered, but even religion posed dilemmas: the South of my childhood was no less religious than the South today, but at the same time it was completely different—for starters, it wasn’t nearly so politicized. But I wasn’t writing a book about that, so I had to sketch and hope I suggested enough.
The biggest problem to overcome was a matter of perspective—how to convey to a modern audience how distanced one felt 50 years ago if one did not live in, say, New York City. Movies, for example, took not weeks but months to arrive in my hometown of Winston-Salem, a city of around 130,000 people. If you wanted to see dance or art or decent theater or a foreign film, you went to New York or Washington. As for bookstores, there were two, and both were primarily stationery stores that put a few books in the front of the store (I know, I know, at least it was the front.) And this is in a city with a college and two universities (Wake Forest had a decent campus bookstore, but it cared nothing about catering to the public, stocking its books not by genre but according to publisher, which explains why I can still reel off the backlist of just about every major house up through 1970—this is my version of walking five miles to school in the snow). When we said we lived in the sticks, we meant it. The sense that things were happening elsewhere but not where we lived was intense in the early sixties. Today, if you want to see a foreign or indy film, you put it on your Netflix wish list. You want a book or an out of town paper, no problem. No matter where you live, there is no longer the nagging sense that to be where things are happening, you have to move somewhere else.
But all this explaining raised the issue of how much is too much. Maybe the uninitiated would grasp more than I thought. Maybe they would be insulted if I beat them over the head with the facts. Maybe my contemporaries would think I had lost my mind going on about the obvious. But the author of a memoir has no idea who his audience is or how knowledgeable or how ignorant they may be. Writing this book was an education, but the one being educated was the writer: I confronted—for the first time with any seriousness–how much the world has changed in my lifetime.
I never resolved the problem of explaining. Some things I probably went on about too long, and other things will sound more mysterious than they should. I had to settle in the end for working my little postage stamp of soil and hoping that someday my story would add itself to the mosaic of history, that by delving into my story, I amplified a larger one. Anything else was, as Chuck Berry says, just too much monkey business for me.
