Dirty Bird Blues - Hardcover

Major, Clarence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1562790838 ISBN 13: 9781562790837

Publisher: Mercury House, 1996

Synopsis

Dirty Bird Blues tells the story of Manfred Banks, a Chicago blues musician and blue-collar worker, who drifts from Chicago to Omaha in the early 1950s. Caught between the casual comfort of a relationship with a male buddy and the domestic responsibilities of a wife and child in a racist America that assaults him at every turn, Manfred seeks easy answers in "Dirty Bird" (Old Crow whiskey) and in moving on. But the blues in his soul and the dreams in his mind keep bringing him back to face himself. After a nightmarish descent into his own depths, Manfred emerges with fresh awareness and possibility.
Through Manfred we witness and experience the process by which modern American English has been vitalized and strengthened by the poetry and the poignancy of the African-American experience.
As Manfred struggles with the constraints of society and his private turmoil, his rich inner voice resonates with the blues.

About this title

Review:

Clarence Major is an avant-garde novelist, short-story writer, and poet known for his bold experiments with language and style. What many don't know, however, is that Major can be a fine storyteller, capable of bringing his formidable talents to more conventional narrative forms as in this novel. This is the story of Manfred Banks, a blues musician in the early 1950s. We follow Man, as he's nicknamed, as he tries to woo his estranged wife, Cleo, as he struggles to make a living playing his music in Chicago, and then leaves for Omaha, where he finds work in a steel mill, and a weekend gig playing in a bar. When Cleo rejoins him things look as if they are finally coming together, but this is the kind of man for whom the blues line "if it wasn't for no luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all" was written. Major has written a fine, compelling novel, with language and characters as rich as the blues songs that are its inspiration.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Major, a prolific man of letters, seems to have abandoned for good the experimental styles that characterized much of his early work (My Amputations, 1986, etc.). His latest is a quite conventional morality tale dressed up with his extensive, if somewhat academic, knowledge of Afro-American slang. The lexicographer in Major (Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang, not reviewed) gets the better of him in an otherwise simple narrative about black life circa 1950. Manfred Banks, 25, born in Georgia, hates the winters in Chicago. An aspiring bluesman, he can't find day work and spends most of his waking hours in pursuit of the ``Dirty Bird'' (Old Crow whiskey). His wife has taken their baby girl to live with a preacher man, and his only friend, guitarist Solomon Thigpen, is also singing the ``dirty bird blues.'' A violent episode with the preacher and the police encourages Man to head to Omaha, where his older sister is leading a model life; her husband even lands Man a job at a steel plant, while Man begins gigging on weekends at the local hot spot. Soon Man's family joins him, and prospects look good until some racists at work decide to harass him. He retreats further into the bottle. When Solomon comes west, Man's wife fears the worst. But a long, drunken night, during which Man sees ``something deep and ugly come out'' in himself, sets him on the road to sobriety. This simple tale is punctuated with long stream-of-consciousness dream sequences in which Manfred imagines what success might be like, worries about losing his wife to Jesus, and sees himself lynched. Major also employs an extensive knowledge of the blues idiom- -Manfred is constantly thinking in lyrics, even if the moment doesn't seem to warrant it. There's a powerful, persuasive use of language here, but it's suspended in too studied a tale--one that never gets cooking. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mercury House
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1562790838
• ISBN 13: 9781562790837
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 279