In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Yah Yah Scholfield’s On Sundays She Picked Flowers is a mesmerizing debut, a Southern Gothic novel both visceral and profound.
Library Journal wrote of the book:
“Through their vivid, intoxicating prose, Schofield creates a visceral tale infused with feminine rage and the inherited trauma from being Black in America that is beautiful, bloody, and gory…This evocative work that’s lush as a humid Georgia summer night will stick with readers for a long time.”
In their own words, here is Yah Yah Scholfield’s Book Notes music playlist for their debut novel On Sundays She Picked Flowers:
LINER NOTES
I don’t listen to music while I write, it distracts me, but the music is always there. In public and in private, whenever I was writing something for On Sundays, songs would come to me—bits of jazz, a hymn I grew up hearing in church, a blues song, something moody by Hozier or Nina Simone. Sometimes the songs snuck their way onto the page as with “Don’t Let Me Misunderstood” and “There’s a Leak in This Old Building”, but most stayed in my head, happy to be hummed while I wrote out some horrible, stomach-churning scene of horror.
More often than not, the earworm would end up in the triumvirate of On Sundays, She Picked Flowers playlists I made—Ain’t No Grave, for Jude and Nemoira’s toxic romance; Silent, Womanish, for Jude alone; and On Sundays, She Picked Flowers as a catchall for the songs that matched the general vibe of the novel. Listen. I am a former Tumblr girl, a shameless lover of any well-thought-out fandom playlist, and my passion for fanmixes and mixtapes has been handed down to me from my DJ dad. I can’t do anything half way, especially not when it comes to music and to my writing, and so big playlists got bigger and more complex as the story did.
(I’m just as bad with other books and media. Ask me about my five Interview with the Vampire playlists.)
This is a truncated version of the three On Sundays mixes, pruned and pared down to the sixteen songs I felt best presented the mood of the book (green, gleaming like a knife, writhing with violence) as well as Jude’s inner monologue.
- LES FLEURS by Minnie Riperton, is just so dreamy! The guitar, the strings, Miss Riperton’s nigh angelic voice—this song to me is the epitome of being Black in nature, a feeling bolstered by the song’s themes of rebirth and renewal, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it religious tones. Just listen to the song, and you’ll see our Jude, her arms full of purple loosestrife, a crown of dandelions in her afro.
- DON’T LET ME BE MISUNDERSTOOD by Nina Simone, is one of the first songs mentioned by name in the book. It plays while Jude is in her mother’s kitchen, considering murder. It’s so perfectly Jude, all other explanations feel extra! I’ll let Miss Simone tell it—i’m just a soul whose intentions are good / oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood
- I KNOW I’VE BEEN CHANGED by LaShun Pace, wasn’t my original choice for this abridged playlist. I wanted to use another song by LaShun Pace, “There’s a Leak in This Old Building” that I thought better exemplified the Gothic-gospel mood—it’s a perfect song for that, the metaphor about the leaking house and the joyous wait for death, a new body and spirit, a building not made by man’s hands. But “I Know I’ve Been Changed” stuck with me. It’s a song that echoes through you, and the imagery of transformation, black souls dipped in red blood coming out white, is so evocative. It tracks for Jude’s story—she changes, constantly, physically and spiritually, her soul undeniably Black but still soaked in lamb’s blood (or should I say deer’s blood?). i stepped in the water and the water was cold… / it chilled my body but not my soul…
- BOTH SIDES NOW by Dianne Reeves. If I had to place this song at any point in the book, I would place it in the final part, the not-epilogue epilogue, because it’s a song that looks back, you know? It’s reflective and calm, a wise old woman admitting to knowing nothing about nothing while having learned every lesson life can teach her. With Jude, especially, I think about the lines but now old friends are acting strange / they shake their heads, they say i’ve changed / well something’s lost but something’s gained in living every day.
- I’M HERE by Cynthia Erivo from “The Color Purple”, was one of the absolute easiest choices to make for all three (well, four now, I guess) playlists. The Color Purple, the book and the film, were already such important pieces for On Sundays, She Picked Flowers, so it only makes sense that the musical would follow. Cynthia Erivo’s strong, room-shaking voice inspires the kind of frisson that leaves me breathless with crying, and I understand 110% why she so rarely performs it live. It’s a song that presses at the center of you, it eviscerates you and rebuilds you, and I feel, for Jude, it is the biggest and boldest expression of her ethos of just being—not performing, not being a strong Black woman, not being anything but alive. Though every line and lyric is apt, the one that’s in my head right now is: I believe I have inside of me everything that I need to live a bountiful life / and all the love alive in me I’ll stand as tall as the tallest tree
- CRANES IN THE SKY by Solange, because I believe you cannot have a book about a Black women struggling with mental illness and malaise and ennui without bringing up thee depressed Black girl song. I was obsessed with “A Seat at the Table” when it came out in 2016, and for a solid month, it was all that I listened to on my little mp3 player. Many songs from the album gutted me (“Don’t Wish Me Well”, “Don’t You Wait For Me”, and “Mad” at the first that come to my mind…) but this one, “Cranes in the Sky” speaks to me (and to other Black women, I know) so loudly. Even listening to the song now as I write this, there’s little tears coming to my eyes. Beautiful! I tried to let go my lover / thought if I was alone then maybe I could recover / thought if I was alone then maybe I could recover / to write it away or cry it away
- EVERYBODY SCREAM by Florence + The Machine, is a newer addition to the fold, as this particular Florence + The Machine album only came out last year, but it’s perfect. True, at the time of writing On Sundays, the F+TM song of choice was usually “St. Jude” or “Shake it Off”, but I didn’t know better! This song is so perfectly Jude—it is Jude running through the woods with trees slapping her face, it is Jude in her cellar with her altar, it is Jude howling into the night to silence her haints. Here I don’t have to be quiet / here I don’t have to be kind, extraordinary, normal all the time
- CHURCH GIRL by Beyoncé, is an odd choice, I admit. The other songs on this playlist have been moody and soulful and reflective, and such an ass-shaking bop such as Beyoncé’s “Church Girl” may, at first, seem to be a misstep. But that is the beauty of Black art and of Black music—we dance through the hurt, we shake off the pain, we twerk and pop and lock and groove in the midst of it all (word to Yolanda Adams!) And doesn’t it make perfect sense that Jude, our former church girl, a woman formerly cooped up at home and shamed into sexlessness, be free to shake a little something in the middle of the forest? There is church in the morning, and flower-picking, and little witchy potions to brew, but Saturday evenings (hell, the whole week!) is for God’s other work—dancing, loving and living without shame. I’m warning everybody soon I get in this party / I’m gon’ let go of this body, I’m gonna love on me/ Nobody can judge me but me, I was born free
- BLACKBIRD by Nina Simone. We’re back into somber territory with Nina Simone’s “Blackbird”. It’s another one that feels oh-so-obvious to me, about feeling lonely and unseen, like your only lot in life is to suffer. I knew the first time I heard this song that Jude was a blackbird, homeless and motherless, with nowhere to put her tears. Cause your momma’s name was ‘Lonely’ / and your daddy’s name was ‘Pain’ / and they called you little sorrow ‘cause you’ll never love again
- WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Céline McLorin Salvant, and I will admit, I struggled between this version of the song and Kate Bush’s, but I’m glad I chose Céline. There’s a ghostliness to her voice, and it’s warbling and haunting. When I hear this song, I don’t even think so much about the Heathcliff and Catherine of it all—I think of the anger, the neediness, the passion, Let me grab your soul, she says! Oh! Let me have it, let me grab your soul!
- IT WILL COME BACK by Hozier, which of all the songs on the OG On Sundays playlist has lasted the longest. Even when I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with the story back in 2016, I knew I wanted Jude to be hunted and haunted, and I knew she needed something (or someone…) to howl outside her door, to be fed and to feed her and to return like a tamed stray. I’ve known the warmth of your doorways / through the cold, I’ll find my way back to you
- WILD IS THE WIND by Nina Simone, is my third Nina Simone song on this list, and one of the ones that hurts me the most. I didn’t mean to write a love story, necessarily, but love has a way of sneaking into a story. Characters lock eyes, they find pieces of themselves in others, and it only makes sense that they’re drawn to one another. To have said characters be drawn to each other, and to have the feelings between them become so intense so fast, I thought only a song as heavy-feeling as Simone’s “Wild is the Wind” would work. I invite readers to close their eyes and imagine two Black women, afroed and barefoot, dancing in dim kitchen light. You’re spring to me, all things to me / don’t you know you’re life itself?
- SINCE I’VE LAID MY BURDENS DOWN by Mississippi John Hurt, because I couldn’t imagine doing this playlist without this song. I’ve used a few hymns throughout the novel, but this one is one of my favorites, within the context of the book and just in real life. Growing up Baptist, you hear a lot of these devotionals, and I think, again, about the inherent goth-ness of being Black in the south, how we down here tend to view life and the worries of the world as merely temporary. Sisters bury a sister, a daughter leaves behind the pain of the past—they put down their burdens! Glory glory, hallelujah, since I laid my burdens down / Friends don’t treat me like they used to since I laid my burdens down!
- AIN’T NO GRAVE by Odetta, is our closing number, because nothing better exemplifies the themes of life and death, of the undying nature of trauma and the past. Bodies rise from the dead, and even the dead that stay put seem to roam the earth evermore. What beauty there is in the knowledge that all is ephemeral—we live and we die and, some say, we live again. Ain’t no grave can hold my body down, my body down / when the trumpets sound, I’ll be getting up, walking around
Yah Yah Scholfield’s work has been featured in a number of horror and speculative fiction magazines and anthologies, including Fiyah Lit Mag and Death in the Mouth Vol. 1. They have also published a short story collection, Just a Little Snack. When they’re not terrifying innocents, Yah Yah is a professional stay-at-home daughter in Atlanta with their cats, Sophie and Chihiro.