Blind Singer Joe's Blues by Robert Love Taylor (review)

RobertLoveTaylor.BlindSingerJoe'sBlues. Dallas: SouthernMethodist University Press, 2006. 222 pages. Hardback in dust jacket. $22.50. Novelist Robert Love Taylor's literary heritage is as interesting as the bloodlines among the characters in Blind Singer Joe's Blues, Taylor's fifth publication of fiction. Taylor is the great grandnephew of his namesake, the first Robert Love Taylor—East Tennessee lawyer, publisher, writer, U.S. Representative, Senator, and three time Tennessee governor—"Our Bob" as he was popularly known. Tennesseans continue to tell the story of the famous "War of the Roses" gubernatorial campaign of 1886 when Robert Love Taylor and his brother Alf competed for the governorship through lively speech making and fiddle playing. Later in his political career Taylor is said to have "discovered" and hired the first country music recording artist, Fiddlin' John Carson, to campaign for him. This backstory is fun to know because our present novelist, Robert Love Taylor, uses his family's musical background and his own love and knowledge of music to craft a story as complex as the fiddle tune played by one of Taylor's characters. That tune, like Taylor's story, "had a slippery, eerie sweetness to it, moving in strange ways, one part giving way to the other before you knew it, with sudden shifts of chord, and the strings resounding like so many tongues." Readers might be misled by the title and cover of Taylor's novel. This is not really the story of Singer Joe, a blind blues singer born in 1916 in Bristol, Tennessee, (and perhaps very loosely patterned after real-life musicians like Riley Puckett, whose face graces the book jacket). This is the story of Singer Joe's wayward parents, doting grandmother, and various nosey, quirky, troubled, even violent aunts, uncles, step parents, and other relatives. Hannah Ruth Bayless, Singer Joe's mother, is one of seven children in a Bristol, Tennessee, family whose father has deserted them and whose mother is practical but fatalistic. Hannah Ruth is gifted with singing: "She liked to sing, knew even then the sweetness she could command, the pleasure she might call up and give out like it was hard candy at Christmas." Dudley Crider is Hannah Ruth's "sad, besotted husband" who is "sluggish and dark in his spirit." Dudley's father is an adulterer and abuser, his uncles are moonshiners, his mother is flat mean, and his brother is a self-proclaimed preacher and healer (although "Dudley had seen him cut a cat's throat once"). Dudley himself is a cat burglar and peeping Tom, stealing personal objects and clothing 97 from the bedrooms of the women he spies on while they are sleeping. When Hannah Ruth runs off to marry Dudley in Knoxville, she keeps herself occupied in their little rented room by singing and listening to the "melodies in her head." The first time Dudley deserts her (and this is his pattern) Hannah Ruth goes back to her mother's home in Bristol. Both Hannah Ruth and her mother are pregnant. Hannah Ruth delivers first (the blind baby she names Singer Joe); and whenher mother's baby dies shortly after birth, the mother unofficially adopts Hannah Ruth's baby, nursing, caring for, and claiming him. Hannah Ruth, meantime, goes to work for the wealthy Holt family in Bristol. Emmett andAmelia Holt, brother and sister, take a liking to Hannah Ruth. She has sexual encounters with them both, becomes pregnant, but decides to let Amelia raise her own brother's baby, named Alex. "Alex would remain her secret son," Hannah Ruth decides, "and no man his father." When Hannah Ruth's brother Alvin (who the family affectionately refers to as "Our Alvin") returns from World War I, he brings along his buddy Pink Miracle, a fiddler who grew up in the Oklahoma Territory and who had already paid his musical dues on Beale Street in Memphis before the War. Alvin and Pink also bring home the flu, and like the rest of the country in 1918, Bristol has its share of deaths. Pink survives and longs to marry "this Hannah Ruth the singer, her every motion announcing more life than she knew what to do with...