Blind Singer Joe's Blues: A Novel [Hardcover]

Robert Love Taylor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 5, 2006

Set in the first two decades of the twentieth century, mainly around Bristol, Virginia (which is partly in Tennessee), the novel focuses on Hannah Ruth Bayless, an untutored Appalachian singer with a beautiful voice; her handsome, thieving, backwoods husband, Dudley Crider; their child, Singer Joe, who is born blind and inherits his mother’s gift; and Pink Miracle, a fiddler from Oklahoma, who falls in love with and later marries Hannah Ruth, taking her away from Bristol and her family and forming a musical partnership with her. Broodingly lyrical, the novel deals with faith, blindness, betrayal and trust, the tug of family versus selfhood, and the claims of music versus the claims of ordinary life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Blind Singer Joe’s Blues has the power of a heated fever dream." -- Denise Giardina

"Blind Singer Joe’s Blues is a miracle itself." -- Lee Smith

"A penetrating, pitch-perfect tale of the flinty, upland South, an impeccably authentic East Tennessee serenade." -- T. R. Pearson

"An extraordinary book, a chronicle of a past world brought passionately to life." -- Cary Holladay

"This wonderful tale is rich with the music of its language and its characters' strange lives." -- Lewis Nordan

About the Author

For over three decades ROBERT LOVE TAYLOR taught creative writing and Appalachian literature at Bucknell University. He is the author of two collections of linked stories and two other novels. His short fiction has appeared in such venues as Georgia Review, Southern Review, and Southwest Review, and in Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Awards, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. A passionate old-time fiddler, he plays with the Buck Mountain Band in Virginia and North Carolina. He grew up in Oklahoma City and now lives in southwestern Virginia.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 232 pages
• Publisher: Southern Methodist University Press (October 5, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870745115
• ISBN-13: 978-0870745119
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,823,874 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Appalachian ballad, March 27, 2007

By 

Amy W. Boucher (Independence, Virginia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blind Singer Joe's Blues: A Novel (Hardcover)

More truth in reviewing: I know the author too, and I knew he could make a fiddle sing like God's choir of spring-morning birds -- but I had no idea he could do the same thing with mere words of clay. Blind Singer Joe's Blues sings through hard-bitten characters and hard times; through soul-searching, generosity, orneriness and forgiveness; and through the greenbrier thicket of family ties.

Taylor eases the reader through viewpoint, time and place, just as a tune effortlessly weaves from chorus to verse and back again. The plot unfolds so sparely that you wonder at how he creates such a complex tapestry in such a small space.

His characters -- Hannah Ruth, Pink Miracle, Dudley Crider and his mama Pearlie, Mama Bayless, Emmett and Amelia Holt -- reveal themselves, their stations, their hopes and beliefs through their language, all of it sounding as true as a tuning fork, as when Dudley gives a piece of his mind to the toddler, Singer Joe: "We are Criders and don't have no fear, he told the boy, and he imagined some of O.T., some of Uncle Crockett and Uncle U.S., some of Daddy, some of himself, yes, and then all the Criders before them, grandaddies and grandmamas by the score, crowded up in Singer Joe's veins."

Religious passion and personal passion meet sorrow and self-denial and all of it makes up the blues that are the fabric of Singer Joe's life.

Start this book on Friday night; you'll want the weekend to finish it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece, May 23, 2007

By 

Ulysses - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blind Singer Joe's Blues: A Novel (Hardcover)

I couldn't put this beautifully-crafted book down once I started it. Robert Love Taylor's masterful handling of perspective and dialogue, his insightful and sympathetic development of characters, and the precise perfection of the language throughout make this a rare gem. You won't find its match in evoking the feel of music. I loved it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How the music and its makers got that way, March 27, 2007

By 

C. Ebeling "ctlpareader" (PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blind Singer Joe's Blues: A Novel (Hardcover)

Truth in reviewing: I am acquainted with the author, but haven't seen him in ages. Years ago he promised another novel with the old-time fiddler character Pink Miracle from his earlier book, THE LOST SISTER, and he has finally delivered. It is well worth the wait: it is highly readable and atmospheric, filled with memorable people. It's about souls who may seem kind of marginal in global and universal schemes but who find a way to be heard, to matter in the middle of it all.

Taylor has drawn on family history and legend out of his ancestral territory of Oklahoma and the mountains of eastern Tennessee for his past books. In this new work, in which he is at the top of his powers as a storyteller and fiction stylist, he looks at the early 20th century country folks who poured their lives into the songs that became the modern bluegrass, jazz and folk traditions. The jazz musician of the title and his blues are the legacy of the stories that flow together in this narrative, swirling around a restless songbird teenage mother who deserts him as well as everyone else in her life.

I confess to having been haphazardly acquainted with bluegrass music through occasional street festivals and local arts events. Coincidentally, as I was reading BLIND SINGER JOE'S BLUES, an Alison Krauss concert video was brought into the house. Listening and reading at the same time, I realized just how much Taylor's novel is alive with the music and explains how it got that way; and Krauss, well, she and bluegrass have a new fan.