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How would you feel if your 12-year-old ran around the house singing, "I'm Selling My Pork Chops, but I'm Giving My Gravy Away"? Personally, I'm a little nervous about it, though I admire a child with entrepreneurial spirit. It seems to me that a pork chop is only a pork chop until it shows up in a song by Memphis Minnie, the Mississippi-born blues singer who belted out double-entendres before Little Richard was a twinkle (or a leer) in anybody's eye. If Minnie had been a Girl Scout, she'd have sold a lot of cookies.
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Well, I have only myself to blame for the musical happenings around here. Myself and Roy Blount, Jr. Reading his new book, Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South, gave me an appetite for the music he describes so deliciously in essays like "Good Gravy," "Memphis Minnie's Blues: a Dirty Mother for You," and "Love Those Bozzies." So, by the miracle of iTunes, I dredged up songs by the Boswell Sisters and the metaphorically vivid Minnie, along with my own all-time favorite, Fats Domino, who has recently resurfaced in New Orleans. You can't keep music like this to yourself; actually, you can't keep from yelling it out in the shower at the top of your lungs, which is why even the dogs next door to us are now howling about pork chops.
Blount is such a good writer that I almost—ALMOST—paid $35 to go see him at a fundraiser in Birmingham. Most writers have to pay other people to come to their book signings, but Mr. Blount lends his amiable Southern voice to the NPR show Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me, which makes him a celebrity, at least among the kind of people who go to book signings. If I had gone, and had the chance to shake the author's hand, what would I have said to him?
I probably would have said, "Mr. Blount, nobody's worth $35, but you're a heck of a writer. I don't write as well as you do, but I think I could—if my life were so full of ironies."
OK, it's not true that I could ever write as well as Roy Blount, Jr., but it is true that his life is awash in irony. The most ironic thing about him is that he writes so well about places like Atlanta but lives in western Massachusetts. His politics are liberal, he's spurned the Methodism of his parents, and though he still considers himself Southern, it's only in the best senses of the word, which are mainly literary and musical-culinary rather than political. He likes Faulkner, Krispy Kreme Donuts, and Ray Charles; he doesn't care for George W. Bush (a pseudo-Southerner, anyway). Still, he can understand why people wouldn't vote for a Yankee liberal—somebody like John Kerry, for instance. After all, Reason and Enlightenment only get you so far, and then you've got to be able to tell a good story.
Which brings me back to his essay on Memphis Minnie. In looking for a biography of the singer, Blount found just one, Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie's Blues, by a pair of married scholars named the Garons—and woe, I say woe unto the Garons on the day he crossed their path. Blount calls Woman with Guitar "one of the goofiest damn books I've ever read," "a vaporous mishmash of transmutational femino-Marxist 'paranoiac-critical' Franco-Freudian-surrealist theory." (Tell us what you really think.) Though he praises their discography, research, etc., he despises the "flummery" which they "have heaped upon the supremely no-nonsense Minnie, of all people." Songs that advise, "Babe, I've got to have a socket if you want me to iron your clothes" aren't really that hard to figure out, are they? "To me," Blount says, "blues music doesn't seem so exotic that it requires recourse to France. It may be surreal, but it's not trying to be."
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