In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Barry Pearce’s collection The Plan of Chicago features a uniquely strong sense of place, the stories rooted in the city’s culture and diversity.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Pearce illuminates the soul of Chicago and the perplexities of human nature with exquisite sensitivity, authenticity, and artistry.”
In his own words, here is Barry Pearce’s Book Notes music playlist for his story collection The Plan of Chicago:
My collection, The Plan of Chicago: A City in Stories, has an unusual structure – nine linked stories set in nine Chicago neighborhoods – and unusual range. The characters are Black and White, straight and gay, wealthy and working-class. There are immigrants from Poland, Mexico, Ireland, Somalia, and elsewhere. My musical playlist reflects that diversity, which is the city’s greatest strength and, too often, a source of division.
Choosing songs was easy, since music figures prominently in the book (I picked one track for each of the nine stories). Most of the tunes fall under what used to be called world music and might now be branded “global” but to me are simply folk. As the great Chicago artist Big Bill Broonzy said, “All music is folk music; I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song.”
There’s love and joy in the playlist, but D minor dominates (the saddest of all keys, according to rocker Nigel Tufnel). Chicago’s motto is “city in a garden,” as urban planner Daniel Burnham pointed out in his 1909 Plan of Chicago. Much of the music here, I realized, reflects the massive gap between that idealized, almost Edenic plan – the kind we’ve all made – and the fall that inevitably follows when we collide with reality. It’s an album full of exile and loss, disillusionment and division, but also of connections across race, class, and national origins. Music is the purest and most transcendent art, I believe, and the similarity of sentiment in songs by Bobby Sands, Tish Hinojosa, and Abdullahi Qarshe gives me hope that people of all backgrounds can connect in a wildly diverse place like Chicago (a stand-in for America) despite the systems designed to divide us.
“The Grand Caprice Fantastique” by Henryk Wieniawski
The Polish composer Wieniawski wrote this demanding and virtuosic opus at 12, which is incredible. It’s not his greatest or most developed work but a great feat of imagination and his announcement to the world – and to himself, I think – that he’s an artist, a record of his budding gifts as he discovers their power. The piece appears in “Enumerator,” the first story in my collection, a tale of a woman discovering and exercising her artistic gifts. Along the way, she rejects formula, as Wieniawski did with “The Grand Caprice,” and learns that true artists don’t just play the notes, they also love the spaces in between.
“Kali Sara” by Dorado Schmitt
“Kali Sara” is named for the Black Madonna. Associated with “the three Marys,” she’s the patron saint of the Roma, venerated by many Catholics, though not recognized by the Roman Catholic church. I had both her and Sarai, Abraham’s wife, in mind when I named the character of Izzy’s mother in my story, “Out of Egypt.” This story, and much of the book, is about displacement, loss, and longing for lost roots. As a migrant herself and a figure of dual identity (Hindu and Christian), Kali Sara is an obvious icon for these themes. Schmidtt’s tune, sweet but also deeply sad and discordant, even ominous, played in my head as I wrote this story. I thought I first heard it from Chicago’s extraordinary gypsy jazz guitarist Alfonso Ponticelli, then realized I’d heard it in Latcho Drom, a mesmerizing film that uses music to tell the story of a people in a way I haven’t seen before or since.
“You Played Yourself” by Ice-T
When the narrator of “Chez Whatever” (2019 Nelson Algren Award winner) recounts the story of the fateful night she backed into breaking up with her first girlfriend, she says that this song played on the car radio. As an anthem about concocting an identity and sabotaging yourself, the song perfectly sums up her story – too perfectly, in fact. We later learn that like much of her narrative, this detail is made up. Her mention of the song is first about self-aggrandizement, then self-recrimination, and, finally, self-forgiveness. I love the way the lyrics build to a robbery gone wrong, the subject, who really steals from himself, tragically trapped in the end.
“Só Você” (Only You) by Vinicius Cantuária
Toward the end of my story “Creatures of a Day,” the character of Paul recognizes “subterranean strains of Bossa Nova” playing in the next room, though not the song his girlfriend has put on. It was “Só Você” as sung by Luciano Antonio, Chicago’s ethereal “Brazilian Jazz Guy” (ah, the perks of omniscience). Like so many Bossa Nova love songs, the sweetness is undercut by a suggestion of sadness, even pain. It’s perfect for Paul and Iona’s haunted relationship, as is that title, which means “Only You.” It points to the idea that their union is somehow fated, that no other is possible, though each is also in a way the other’s worst possible counterpart.
“Back Home in Derry” by Bobby Sands
This is one of the more plaintive recent songs of forced exile in an Irish tradition full of such songs. It tells the story of 60 rebels transported to Botany Bay after Robert Emmet’s failed rebellion of 1803. The character of Sully in “Chief O’Neill’s” sings it while painting the eponymous fictional bar. The longing in that chorus, “Oooh, oooh, I wish I was back home in Derry,” captures Sully’s strange feeling of missing a place he’s “never really been,” which I think is common for kids of immigrants. For him, the reference is the Ireland of his parents. For me, it’s also the pub and community that are about to force him into exile. His Chicago home is another place he’s never really been, or seen, and once he does see it, rebel that he is, he can’t unsee it – or go home again.
“On Green Dolphin Street” by Bronislaw Kaper with Ned Washington lyrics
The story “Swing Night” is set in a bar named for this song, the theme for the 1947 movie Green Dolphin Street, starring Donna Reed. The actress comes up repeatedly in the story, which is in many ways, about performance. Reed was known for playing mythic domesticity but had a seamier side in movies like From Here to Eternity. The character of Cynthia in my story plays the part of a bohemian bad girl at her partner’s direction but secretly longs for romance and domesticity. “Swing” takes on multiple meanings, those shifts captured by the great surprising rhythmic and chordal changes in the tune. Miles Davis has the definitive instrumental version and Sarah Vaughn, the best version with lyrics.
“Tú Que Puedes, Vuélvete” (You Who Can, Return) by Tish Hinojosa
This is a lament about a river that wishes it were a lagoon, standing still rather than rushing onward. The river reminds us of the things we love and leave behind, advising that those of us who can, should return to our origins, where the mountains that love us are waiting. Okay, it sounds better in Spanish, but it’s a great metaphor for the story of Hector Chavez in my story “Dibs” and for the immigrant experience generally. The yearning in Tish Hinojosa’s stunning voice, clear and pure as a mountain stream, captures Hector’s wandering, all that he’s left and lost, and the disillusionment he finally must face north of the Rio Grande.
“Spancil Hill” by Michael Considine
This is a standard in the Irish repertoire, though nearly all recorded versions dramatically shorten Considine’s original. He emigrated in 1870 at the age of 20, with plans to make some money, get a foothold here, and send for his lover. He died without her three years later. Before dying, he went home in a song, conjuring a vision full of compelling, ordinary details. It seemed to me a likely piece for the character in “Clearing” who finds himself homeless, his business shuttered, and many bridges burning behind him. My character also “steps onboard a vision,” though it’s fueled by the DTs, and he, too, feels baffled by an irretrievable youth that still feels close enough to touch.
“Dadkan Dhawaaqayaa” by Abdullahi Qarshe
I’ve always loved taking cabs in Chicago and talking to drivers about whatever music they’re playing – often from the Middle East or Africa. I imagine that Dakhil, the taxi driver in “Lost and Found,” might at some point play “Dadkan Dhawaaqayaa” by Abdullahi Qarshe, the father of Somali music. It’s striking to me how similar the Qarshe recording of this song is to the music Michael Considine would have heard growing up on the West Coast of Ireland or which my character Sully heard on the South Side of Chicago. That commonality highlights the ability of art, particularly music, to transcend borders and division of all kinds, to connect people and reveal our shared humanity, which is also one of literature’s greatest goals.
Barry Pearce’s parents immigrated from Ireland to the U.S. and settled on the South Side of Chicago, where he grew up with six siblings. He graduated from Northwestern University – the first in his family to attend college – and earned an MFA in creative writing in New Mexico. He has won the Nelson Algren Award Grand Prize, an Illinois Arts Council Award, and The Mercedes Delos Jacobs Book Prize. Pearce lives in Chicago, where he ghostwrites nonfiction books and occasionally teaches. Visit www.BarryPearce.com.