Reviewed by Leslie Friedman
The Ballad of Falling Rock
by Jordan Dotson
BHC Press
September 2024, 368 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1643973647
The Ballad of Falling Rock is a stunning book that follows at least four generations of a family in the Appalachian region near Virginia and in tiny towns and forests. If you are a Hemingway fan, this one’s not for you. Or, if you are a Hemingway fan but maintain an open mind, you can read it and set yourself on a path thick with adjectives. For this writer, I am open minded and actually prefer Fitzgerald. The Ballad of Falling Rock opens with a story apparently separate from the main part of the book. It is a new treatment of the Eurydice tale. There are many versions of Eurydice; you will remember that she was the true love of Orpheus, the musician. The deal was that if he looked back, Eurydice would be re-claimed by Hades. The lovers would lose each other forever. Finding love and losing it happens to the men of the Crabtree family more than once in a generation.
Music is a constant theme and also the source of action. Saul Crabtree’s name was really Solomon. He is in himself the father-king and the wise son. Or could this Saul have the habit of the Saul who became Paul and traveled all over telling his news? Music and religion are bound together throughout the book. He made:
the most curious discovery with the addition of only a lonely twang and a husky, minor-key exhalation, he found he could transform the old church hymns into dark and aching stories. Just like that, “Farther Along,” a song he’d sung every Sunday for years, cast a foreshadow of revenge. Suddenly, within its childish notes, “This Little Light of Mine” told a tale of violence in a bloody bed… (11)
It is said, by the folks who live in this small but spread out town, that Saul’s singing creates immense and far flung reactions. His neighbors at church have strange experiences. The author’s descriptions of how Saul’s singing affects an audience is like a body count at the end of a battle. There would be, for instance, 25 carried to the emergency room, 3 who fainted in the aisles, 9 who died, 18 who think Saul was taken by the devil to sing the way he did. His father, a preacher, did not approve. Others were sent into something like apoplexy just hearing him on the radio.
On a day of baseball and then a story competition:
They said that not a body dared move. They said that they could only listen as Saul stood before them tall and unblinking, his voice like a river and his eyes like ghosts, until everyone in Red Pine County discovered that a story could also be a song, and a song a story… (21)
That was the story of this story. Saul’s songs that told tales were the best and most dangerous of all. The dangers took him farther and deeper than any tune which only had a tune.
Saul’s sister is his twin. Saul’s grandchildren were also twins, and comments about their twin-ship were frequent. Saul’s twin, Annie, was a church pianist and as she grew up she became a piano teacher. Her musical life was never pushed farther onstage than her brother’s singing. Saul’s son became a preacher. Generations skip in this family, but do not miss any similarities.
The Ballad of Falling Rock is about the boys and men of the Crabtree family. The female relatives are significant as minor characters, though their pregnancies, birth-giving, and rearing of their offspring receive attention.
Occasionally in the narration of Saul’s activities, the author mentions that Saul’s lips have blood on them. It seems that the blood came just from his singing too hard. On a Christmas Eve, Saul coughed more than once. He had received a letter inviting him to come to Bristol, TN, to record his songs. His father’s reaction was “Praise Jesus.” Saul had a “hacking” cough, saw blood on his hand again, and collapsed. It was tuberculosis. He was sent to the Catawba Sanatorium. One of his lungs was removed. He and Sid, another patient, become friends. Sidney was in the bed next to Saul. He was allowed in the sanatorium for patients with “white” skin because the sanatorium for patients with dark skin had too many arson attacks. Saul and Sid had a special activity: Saul had collected all that could be used for percussion. He had a pie dish, a bowl filled with paper clips, a ladle and a wooden chair. I am happy to communicate these possibilities if the readers and I ever have to make music while in hospital or incarcerated.
Sid had to leave Catawba as the other sanatorium was repaired enough for a few patients to return. Before Sid leaves, Saul notices that his guitar, which he had kept in the corner of the room, is gone. He becomes angry and depressed. He thinks someone must have taken it. Maybe the bossy nurse; he was not allowed to play it. Sid takes him for a walk at night where no one would find them. Sid had gotten new copper strings for the guitar and coaxed Saul into playing. I think that Sid is the only true friend Saul ever has in this book. Saul sets a schedule to sleep instead of eating breakfast and lunch, so he can practice outside at night.
He meets a woman he had noticed early in his stay at the Catawba. They begin an affair outside, late at night. It is a wild sexual adventure for two people who have a disease that was usually terminal. Their love develops; they find ways to keep together:
Yet in truth, among all the things that neither Saul nor Betty knew in that moment, only one mattered: how facing each other in the light of the moon in a valley where people came to die, it was the furthest the two of them would ever be apart for the rest of their lives. But then again, maybe they did know that after all.” p 70 “And then they made love, as if nothing else could keep them both from dying. (76)
Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain takes place in a Swiss sanatorium for tuberculosis. They have a Carnival feast. It is an outrageous event named after Walpurgis Night. It is transformed into “Blocksberg.” In German tradition it is where witches and wizards perform obscene revels. Castorp, the protagonist, courtsanother patient, Madame Chauchat. In Magic Mountain, that relationship did not have the devotion that embraced Saul and Betty. I looked at current reports about male and female tuberculosis. Men are more likely to die than women, but treatments of the 2000s were not available in the 1940s. I wonder why authors see tuberculosis patients so highly sexed as in Magic Mountain and even in The Ballad of Falling Rock. Perhaps at a sanatorium where people would stay for months or years, the boredom of rest encourages or was said to encourage sexual adventures. The Roanoke County newspaper, Oct. 15, 1940:
Widespread moral depravity at TB farm.” Catawba lost its “funding and operational support….75% of its tuberculosis patients were breaking the parameters of quarantine nightly to engage in widespread acts of sexual deviancy….’It was like a tomcat rodeo.’ (83)
Characters’ conversations take readers to Appalachian towns. Examples. “Hey now, Harl! You watch yourself! I’m liable to whoop you six ways from Sunday!” “Twenty Dollar Johnny wore muddy overalls with no shirt beneath. He flexed his arm and patted his bicep, gnarled like an old tree root.” p 235 I remember studying Russian language and writing it like I would write in English. The teacher explained that Russian writing admires long, complicated sentences. The English teacher wanted direct, somewhat brief sentences. Language changes with local cultures even if it is the same language.
I should not reveal happenings, but I will. Betty and Saul left Catawba and returned to Saul’s home. His parents were living there, too.
Age hadn’t diminished the reverend’s vitality, nor Evelyn’s tender affection, nor their Baptist enthusiasm for the sanctity of the marital bed….Yet the newlyweds’ nocturnal circus was taking a toll. (91)
Annie, Saul’s twin sister, felt rejected and would “pray herself to sleep.” Later, she was a ghost visiting her old home. Saul’s singing career took off. Betty died giving birth. Tuberculosis caused the pool of blood that killed her, but the baby lived. Their son, Lee, had music in his nature. He became a preacher trying to keep his son away from a life in music. Saul reconnected with Peggy, his teenage girlfriend. They had five, six, or seven children. Lee, the one whose mother died, had twins. The last 153 pages of book is The Gospel of Eli. Eli was the boy twin; the girl was Eliza. She often helped her twin brother. The Gospel of Eli begins with the day his voice changed. That was on page 201; the author first mentions her on page 211. If I did not count that correctly, it was close. A child of a small family, it took me decades to figure out how someone was related to me. The Crabtrees kept multiplying. As Eli said, “It’s a tale without an end.” (353)
About the reviewer: Writer and dancer/choreographer Leslie Friedman’s writing has been published in France, India, Poland, and the US. Her dancing and dances have won applause from audiences and critics on four continents. The US State Dept. co-sponsored her with host countries on historic “Firsts:” performance tours to Russia, China, Egypt, Poland, Hungary, Spain, England, many others. She received her History Ph.D. from Stanford, taught there, Vassar, Case Western Reserve, and left academia to write and dance full time. She received the Fulbright Lectureship to India and Senior Lectureship to Bulgaria. She published two natural history books: The Dancer’s Garden, a garden memoir, and The Story of Our Butterflies. She has written 6 plays awarded Best Play, Best Director, Best Actor. Audubon, Stories of the City (SF), and Berkeley Selected Poetry published her poems.Tupelo Quarterly and Compulsive Reader have published her reviews. The Wall Street Journal, San Jose Mercury News, St. Louis Journal of the Arts, others have published features, op-eds, letters. In Mountain View, CA, she is an activist to save trees and open space.