In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Jeremy B. Jones’s memoir Cipher shares mesmerizing story of his fourth great-grandfather.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil wrote of the book:
“Jeremy Jones’ Cipher introduces us to a lost ancestor’s coded diaries and brings them to life with prose as intricate and revelatory as the secrets they contain, unraveling the vivid, conflicted world of William Thomas Prestwood—a nineteenth-century farmer, philosopher, and flawed human being. With lyrical precision and unflinching honesty, Jones transforms archival fragments into a haunting meditation on history, inheritance, and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.”
In his own words, here is Jeremy B. Jones’s Book Notes music playlist for his memoir Cipher:
I stole the term from the writer Sarah Viren, but I think of this book as a biogoir—part biography, part memoir. Cipher tells the story of my enigmatic 19th-century ancestor, but in so doing I imagine his life as a kind of code through which to read mine. Our stories wind together like a double helix. You’ll be glad, I’m sure, that I talked myself out of conceiving this list too literally and bouncing back and forth between 19th and 21st century songs. You may also be glad to know that I abandoned the handful of murder ballads I’d flagged (unsurprisingly, there is a lot of death in the 19th century). Instead, I tapped songs that get at some of the happenings and undercurrents of the book (while still sneaking in a fiddle tune).
I write, unfortunately, by feel. I can often sense there’s some connection or disruption between ideas or events or questions and so I write towards them. It’s incredibly inefficient. But music is one of the ways into these seams. A song can sometimes unlock a mood or empathetic impulse that helps crack something open that I hadn’t seen. In fact, while writing this book, I became a little obsessed with tracking old time songs I play on the banjo that my ancestor might have also played on his fiddle. I wanted us to be a two-man band, making music across a couple centuries.
Alas, all I did was take his diaries and make a book. But here’s some music anyway.
“Let’s Get it On,”Marvin Gaye
The word “scandalous” is in the subtitle of my book, so let’s get on with it: my great-great-great-great grandfather, William Thomas Prestwood, had many sexual affairs. He loved women. He chased them across two states. And he tracked these encounters in coded diaries he kept for over 50 years (1808-1859). He snuck into barn lofts and pig pens and closets and forests with women, and he invented symbols to identify his lovers in his notebooks. Later in his life, he began to rate these trysts: “good,” “middling.” Is there a more yearning song—desperate but somehow not needy—than Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get it On?” I could imagine my ancestor uttering a version of this argument to some woman after he set down his fiddle at a dance: “giving yourself to me can never be wrong if the love is true.”
“O0-De-Lally,” Roger Miller
My book bounces back and forth between my ancestor’s life and my own. He and I both had roaming childhoods. I half-jokingly tell people I had a feral boyhood, released into the woods with my cousins until we were called back for meals. This song from the great animated Robin Hood always conjures those imaginative, free days for me. But it also gets at something slinking around in the background of William Prestwood’s life: often he worries and dreams about the sheriff coming for him. Once, he has to flee on horseback from the sheriff coming out of the lowlands of South Carolina.
“Bonaparte’s Retreat,” Tommy Jarrell
This fiddle tune is old enough that I suspect William may’ve played it too—or at least some version of it. I play clawhammer banjo, which means I play a lot of old music, and I realized while writing this book that if my fiddling ancestor were beamed into the future, we could sit down and immediately start playing music together. It would be one of the few things that connects us.
The great North Carolina fiddler Tommy Jarrell plays this version of what he calls “Bony Part’s Retreat.” When I first started playing banjo, I listened to a lot of old recordings of Tommy Jarrell and the banjo player Fred Cockerham. As a duo, they lured and guided me into old time music.
The history of this tune is hard to easily trace (like all old American songs), so it may not really be “ol General Washington’s tune,” as Jarrell says on the recording. Despite the title, it may not really be about Napoleon either, but Napoleon shaped my ancestor’s life in some measure so it’s a good one for my list. William had been elected captain of the militia as the War of 1812 started and the various pressures and conflicts across Europe mounted, and he spends his days mustering and riding the roads looking for red coats. Something about the war and this time, shakes him loose from his family and ultimately sends him into the North Carolina mountains (settling not far from where Tommy Jarrell was born) to start over.
“Family Affair,” Sly & the Family Stone
“Another child grows up to be,” Sly sings, “somebody you just love to burn.”
William sells off his family land, fights with his father weekly, and ultimately he and his mother leave all the family wealth and status in their wake. Later, his sister sues him and his mother. The Prestwoods of the Cheraw District of South Carolina were just a tad dysfunctional.
I love how this song is angsty and a bop all at once. It’s a groove, and there’s a hook (sort of), but Sly’s vocals are subdued and the song never really builds anywhere until the brief “ahhh-haaa” he croaks out near the end. It’s a surprising song to top the charts, in other words. But it’s steady, which feels just right for a song about unconditional love—”blood’s thicker than the mud”—and sticks with you, which also feels just right.
“Grandma’s Hands,” Bill Withers
I grew up on land settled by William’s grandson (my great-great grandfather). My uncles and aunts and grandparents and great grandmother all lived through the woods. Unlike William’s, the family surrounding me held me tight. I could walk into any house without warning, call on anyone for help. I spent most of my summer days at my grandma’s house, with all my cousins. When I was sick, I went to Grandma’s. When I was hungry, I went to Grandma’s.
I didn’t know Bill Withers was a mountain man like me when I first heard this song, but it makes sense. The short song sometimes feels like a version of George Ella Lyon’s poem “Where I’m From.” I suspect anybody could sub out Withers’ specific details about his grandmother and fill in their own to reveal a lot about where they’re from. But for me, so many of them ring true to my experience as they are—“Grandma’s hand used to issue out a warning”; Grandma’s hands used to give me a piece of candy”; “Grandma’s hands picked me up each time I fell.”
“Writing to Reach You,” Travis
I questioned my sanity a bit when I started writing letters to William Prestwood. He died in 1859. Nothing about it made sense. But I started writing letters to him while working on the book. Part of it was guilt. I had his private life, so I figured I should offer a little something back. But part of it was trying to figure out who he was (so that I could understand who I am). I also wanted, in some weird way that this song captures, to reflect something about his life back to him in the letters: “only want to teach you, about you.”
“Why did you do this?” I’d often write, foolishly trying to point out all the hypocrisy between his recorded and lived life. “But I might never reach you,” the song says.
My South African roommate in college gave me a cassette tape of Travis’ The Man Who. (Time stamp alert.) He’d been living in London and brought with him music that hadn’t yet landed on the American pop charts. (I first heard Coldplay’s “Yellow” from one of his mixtapes.) I loved the sweet and sad throughline of this album. (Core aesthetic alert.) “Writing to Reach You” is the opening track and it sends me back to that dorm room every time, but it also somehow wraps up the strangeness of resurrecting an ancestor and finding myself upside down trying to better understand what his life means about mine. “My inside is outside.”
“Heart of Gold,” Neil Young
Naturally, when I bought a harmonica, this was the first riff I tried to learn. It’s perfect.
William spends a lot of his adult life obsessed with gold. When the gold rush hits North Carolina in the 1830s, he spends most of his days in mines, hoping to strike it rich. He doesn’t. But in my book, I mine his life (pun alert) “for a heart of gold.” Despite all his missteps and the terribleness of the 19th century, I found myself desperate to find some indication that he was a good man deep down. That’s a pretty silly goal for historical research, but I’m not a historian, so…“you keep me searching for a heart of gold.”
“Marjorie,” Taylor Swift
I know this is going to sound like the opposite of “I knew that band before they were big,” but truthfully I’d never listened to Taylor Swift until the release of Folklore and the Covid lockdown. My kids got into her around that time, and pretty soon I was looping Folklore and Evermore for hours working on this book. The songs became a perfect background soundtrack to those days—and they provided a steady propulsion to my writing.
But that’s not necessarily why she’s on the list (otherwise I’d have to drop in my other reliable background artists: Glass Animals and Rosalía). I love this song (sweet and sad core) especially because it’s exploring the same ideas that I explore in much of my work: family history and inheritance and the time-warping way we are connected to people long gone and still to come. Her grandmother’s own vocals are sampled in this song, layered into it. I mean, come on.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were still around.” (Did I mention I wrote letters to my ancestor, 150 years dead?)
“When it Don’t Come Easy,” Patty Griffin
Even though the book is biographical in its framing, it’s also a memoir. It’s about marriage and raising kids and trying to make a life that feels full and right. Patty Griffin is an artist my wife and I love in equal measure. We belted out every song of “Living with Ghosts,” her first album, on drives home from college when we were dating. Now Patty Griffin is mixed into every stage of our two-decade marriage. This song—from her fourth album—is the template for me. This is how you make it work, marriage and parenting and friendships.
“I don’t know nothing except change will come.”
“So many things that I had before, they don’t matter to me now.”
“Someone will say what’s been said before: it’s only love we were looking for.”
I’m ride or die, Patty G.
“The Promised Land,” Sacred Harp Singers
Shape note singing has persisted in the rural South more than anywhere else—the oldest continuous gathering happens every summer in Etowah, in the county where I live. In shape note singing, singers don’t need to know how to read music. They’re assigned a group—tenor, alto, bass, and treble—and handed pages with various shapes. They sit with their groups, forming the “the hollow square” and the leader steps into the middle. There are no set keys or meters. The leader sets the pitch and everyone falls in, singing their parts—their shapes—in relation to the leader’s voice, blending the four parts into one.
William spent a lot of time “at singing school.” These were shape note singings, often led by a “singing master,” who would come to town after the crops had been harvested and teach everyone new songs. He met a lot of women this way.
This song—from singers in Northern Alabama—would surely have sounded familiar to William. It might’ve been a song sung at his funeral, might’ve been akin to voices he heard as he passed on in 1859, drifting off somewhere, bound for the promised land, while his diaries stayed behind to be discovered over a century later in an abandoned house. Eventually, I’d pick them up and add my voice in with his to carry on the song.
Jeremy B. Jones is the author of two books: Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries and Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland. His essays appear in Garden & Gun, The Bitter Southerner, Oxford American, and many others, including the anthologies Letter to a Stanger (Algonquin) and Appalachian Reckoning (WVU Press). He teaches creative writing at Western Carolina University, in his native North Carolina Mountains.