Novel Sounds: Southern Fiction in the Age of Rock and Roll by Florence Dore (review)

Florence Dore’s Novel Sounds makes a singular contribution to the rapidly swelling body of scholarship concerned with the interrelationships between twentieth-century American literature and popular music. Following such studies as Bruce Barnhart’s Jazz in the Time of the Novel (2013), T. Austin Graham’s The Great American Songbooks (2013), and Erich Nunn’s Sounding the Color Line (2015)—and sharing with the latter a particular concern with southern authors—Dore’s work is nonetheless unique. Where other monographs in this field prioritize the first half of the twentieth century—the age of jazz, blues, and country—Novel Sounds takes as its specific subjects the 1950s and rock and roll.

This unusual emphasis leads Dore to several works of fiction that do not typically appear in studies of popular music and American fiction, including Robert Penn Warren’s The Cave (1959), William Styron’s Set This House on Fire (1960), and Donald Davidson’s The Big Ballad Jamboree (written in the 1950s but published posthumously in 1996). What is more, although numerous scholars have addressed the presence of blues, gospel, and jazz in such works by William Faulkner as Go Down, Moses (1942), Sanctuary (1931), and “That Evening Sun” (1931), nobody until now has explored the musical dimensions of The Town (1957).

The primary claim of Novel Sounds is that, just as pioneering musicians in the 1950s were synthesizing blues, country, jazz, swing, and folk into rock and roll, southern authors “drew from the same eclectic group of musical genres” (3) to interrogate modernist literary canons and high-art assumptions by eschewing experimentation for realism, invoking pop culture, and making the disruptive presence of mass-media technology—radios, tape recorders, and microphones—central to their stories. In the 1950s, then, canonical southern authors subverted a rigid orthodoxy favored by both reactionary agrarians and elitist academics that celebrated the literary value of a supposedly pure, timeless, and unmediated Anglo-Saxon ballad tradition. In Dore’s reading, the southern novel in the age of rock and roll demonstrated that vernacular expression had long been implicated in both industrial technologies and commercial mass culture, thus providing a resounding—if belated—rebuttal to Andrew Lytle’s famous demand in I’ll Take My Stand (1930) that farmers “throw out the radio and take down the fiddle from the wall” (qtd. in Dore 17). A particular highlight of the book is the extended interpretation of the scene in Set This House on Fire in which Cass and Lonnie, while seeking to redeem a defaulted radio from an African American farmer, vandalize his cabin. Equally fresh and illuminating is the reading of The Town, which focuses on the conflict between mechanic Matt Levitt, an embodiment of mass culture, and the Donne-worshipping New Critic Gavin Stevens.

Ultimately, however, the very thing that makes this study unique also undermines its most impressive insights. Despite its repeated and insistent claims, this isn’t a book about rock and roll, but, rather, a study of how southern fiction in the 1950s engaged with music produced between the world wars, before the advent of rock. The 1950s, after all, were not simply the decade of rock’s birth but also an era in which—aided by new, more durable audio technologies such as the LP and hi-fi—Americans rediscovered and reevaluated their nation’s musical heritage. The works of fiction that Dore explores often seem to have less kinship with rock and roll than with the impulses behind Ella Fitzgerald’s series of Great American Songbook albums, the overdue popularization of Robert Johnson and the Delta Blues, Louis Armstrong’s reconstructions of the repertoires of Fats Waller and W. C. Handy, and the appearance of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (the latter of which does appear several times in Novel Sounds).

The book’s determined rock-centrism tends to divert it from a more inclusive and nuanced historical vision. It operates from the...