Brooks The Catchers

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78463-321-9
Verlag: Salt
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 0, 416 Seiten

Reihe: Salt Modern Fiction

Spring 1927. The birth of popular music. John Coughlin is a song-catcher from New York who has been sent to Appalachia to source and record the local hill-country musicians. His assignment leads him to small-town Tennessee where he oversees the recording session that will establish his reputation. From here he ventures further south in search of glory. He is chasing what song-catchers call the big fish or the firefly; the song or performer which will make a man rich. Waylaid at an old plantation house, Coughlin gets wind of a black teenage guitarist, Moss Evans, who runs bootleg liquor in the Mississippi Delta. The Mississippi has flooded, putting the country underwater, but Coughlin is able to locate the boy and bring him out. Coughlin views himself as a saviour. Others regard him as a thief and exploiter. Coughlin and Moss - the catcher and his catch - pick their way across a ruined, unstable Old South and then turn north through the mountains, heading for New York.

Xan Brooks is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He was one of the founding editorial team at the Big Issue magazine in London and spent 15-years as a writer and associate editor at the Guardian newspaper. His debut novel, The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times, was listed for the Costa First Novel Award, the Author's Club Award, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brooks, Xan

Leseproben

1

Honest Jim was a catcher, the first and the finest, in the mid-1920s, right before the big flood. He drove out from New York to criss-cross Appalachia with a recording lathe packed in the bed of his van. If you had a good song then you had his attention. He’d pull up a chair and give you three minutes of time.

“Three minutes?” men said. “Why, three minutes is nothing.” Not knowing that this was all the time the apparatus allowed: three minutes before the pulley system unwound and the lead weight hit the floor. Not realizing, also, that outside of the mountains the pace of life had sped up and that this was the age of motorcars and Bell telephones, airplanes and film cameras. The world races on and only dawdlers drag their heels. If you can’t play a good song in the space of three minutes, most likely it’s not worth recording at all.

“Three minutes,” he’d tell them. “But then the song lasts forever.”

In those days it was said the land was mostly made up of music, as though it was stirred up with the water and the soil, as though the very breath of the wind was God’s orchestra tuning up. The people played banjos and fiddles, washboards and dulcimers. They played sacred songs and chicken songs; shanties, reels and laments. Songs poured through the hills like migrating salmon. Songs fell out of the trees like round russet apples. Catching one was so easy, you only had to stick out your hand. But catching the good ones, the sellers, that required real skill.

“Who makes the best songs?” Honest Jim liked to ask, a cigar in one hand, a cup of produce in the other. “Who did it, I mean. Who’s responsible for a song?”

“Picture it as a crime scene,” said Rinaldi, tapping the table. “You weigh up the evidence and identify the main culprit.”

“So fine, a crime scene if you like. Who did it? Your chief suspect.”

“The musician,” replied the rookie catcher, John Coughlin, who was on his first trip to the mountains and hopelessly out of his depth. “The performer. The singer. Whoever wrote and played the piece.”

They were boarding at the Bide-a-Wee, a hunter’s inn outside Harpers Ferry. Business was slow and the inn was struggling. Honest Jim thought maybe the name was to blame. The catchers sat in the lounge beneath antler chandeliers, listening to the tick of the clock in the lobby and the lash of rain on the glass. The chestnut floor at their feet was the color of bourbon. A man might drop to his knees, lick the grain and get high.

“Take your hat off, for Christ’s sake,” he told the rookie, because appearances were important, even at the Bide-a-Wee. They were not punks from the city. They were gentlemen. They were swells.

“A Mole in the Ground,” said Rinaldi. “Explain that one to me.”

“What’s to explain? Some they like and some they don’t.”

“Sure, but that piece specifically. What’s to like? It’s a joke.”

He knocked ash from his cigar. “Whoever played it, Mr Coughlin says. Which is true. Which is fair. But keep in mind, kid, that most hill-country pieces are old. They got no owners, no parents and they keep on changing shape. Each time you hear one it’s just a little bit different. So try again, who’s responsible? Who decides this version, not that one? This shape, not the others? Who is the real creator here?”

The rookie nodded. “OK, I get it.”

“He gets it, Jim.”

“It’s the catcher who makes the song,” said Jim Cope. “It’s the fellow who caught it. Which means us, by the way.” He had his smoke and his drink and a cushioned footstool for his heels. He was getting comfortable now. He was settling in for the night.

Some catchers were grifters—it was a piratical trade and it attracted all types: con-men and crooks, snake-oil salesmen and pimps. But Honest Jim Cope by and large played it straight. He paid thirty dollars in cash for every side he laid down, a straight square deal with a bill of sale thrown on top. You got the money and he got the song and afterwards you were quits, it was a sweet, clean exchange.

“Shook your cherry tree the Friday before. Shook out your blossoms ’til the branches got sore.”

“Sex,” he said. “At the root it’s all sex.”

“Sex, sure, so why the dance? Why the costumes and the coyness? These are simple people so say it plain.”

“Tommy,” he said. “You want me to sit here all night and unpick every line?”

In the hills of Appalachia he was always Honest Jim Cope, glossy and handsome, come to make people rich. But he’d been born Shem Kopl—premature, underweight—and he had spent the first years of his life beside the tanneries in Trebic. Even today he retained a vivid memory of his arrival in New York—incredible, given that he could barely recall what he’d eaten for lunch or whether he had turned left or right out of town. He remembered the crush of the children being funneled single-file through the pens; the bored medics and deckhands playing bocci on the wharf. The sunlight so blinding and the sea-breeze so fierce that it felt that all of those bug-eyed urchins were about to be whisked into egg-white or dissolved into foam, which is maybe what happened, it was as good an explanation as any. He had been clutching a woolen rabbit, his cherished toy, but when he brought up his hands he saw it had gone. Belongings get lost, said his mother, not turning. So stop crying, keep walking, don’t hold up the line. Not everything survives the Atlantic crossing intact.

He was Kopl in short pants and he was Jim Cope in his twenties and he lived his life on the road, with the footwell of his van filled with maps and notebooks and hotel receipts that blew up like confetti when he cranked down the window. This was how the world turned and American men were made new. Shem Kopl, God help him, had been a ham-and-egger at best. Whereas Honest Jim Cope, general manager at Victor Records, was regarded as the finest catcher in the country. His salary last year had been just shy of $13,000.

“You have a goodly number of Jews in New York,” a dignitary’s wife had once remarked, solicitously touching his wrist inside some mildewed town hall, and he had replied that yes, this was true, a great number of Jews, most of them quite harmless, never gave him any trouble. Whenever the subject of his own background was raised—which was a little more often than he would have liked—he’d explain that he was raised Presbyterian and kept a doting wife, Glad, and three boys at home in Hoboken. A man in the field has to do his best to fit in, and never mind the fact that his birth name was Kopl and that he was unmarried and childless and most nights amused himself with loose women and whores. This was one of the curious quirks about Virginia, he’d found. It contained as many loose women as Manhattan and Brooklyn combined.

“Women,” said Rinaldi. He kissed his fingertips and steepled them as though in prayer. “Please God, let there be some women on this trip.”

“Wine, women and song. But songs first, always the song first and foremost. It’s the songs that pay for the other two.”

“Songs first,” said Rinaldi. He gestured with his cigar. “Except that the songs and the women are all thataway.”

“Over the river.”

Rinaldi nodded, lost in thought. “Over the river and into the trees.”

They called it the Far Corners, that part of Appalachia, because it seemed so remote to the paymasters in New York, like a fairy-tale kingdom, utterly foreign and strange. Thick forest, blue mountains and crossroad company towns that didn’t show up on the map. The first time Cope went down—summer of ’24—he’d been like some pith-helmeted explorer landing on Galapagos, or Adam in the garden, trying to name all the birds. One day, picture this, he had scared away a black bear. The musicians had barely begun playing when the bear wandered up, hips rolling, bold as brass and that might have been that—everyone either fled or dead. But he had clapped his hands and faced it down and the beast had paused for a moment, then back-pedaled and ran.

“That’s because you didn’t know any better. Soft boy from the city. You wouldn’t pull that shit now.”

“Who says that I wouldn’t? It worked, didn’t it?”

“Thing could just as easily have eaten you.”

“Yeah, but it didn’t. It didn’t, that’s my point.”

Rinaldi pivoted in his chair. “I hope you’re taking notes, kid,” he said to the rookie. “He’s breaking out all the old war stories now.”

“Oh I got a stack of them,” Cope said. “Tales of black bears and dragons.” Because privately he believed that the first trip was the...