In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
The stories in Robert Busby’s story collection Bodock are marvelously nuanced and diverse in genre, and taken together form an impressive debut.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“If this is where Busby’s literary career is beginning, it suggests even better things to come. Devastatingly precise”
In his own words, here is Robert Busby’s Book Notes music playlist for his story collection Bodock:
Bodock: Stories mostly takes place in 1994 and uses the real ice storm that devastated the Mid-South that year to map the history and mythos of the fictional town of Bodock in Claygardner County, Mississippi. The collection features a cast of Bodockians who are desperate to reconcile past failures—while coming to terms with their own, sometimes foreseeable, mortality—and was written almost entirely without any songs playing in the background.
That’s because I can’t listen to music while I write. Give me a grave-silent office or the muted patter of ice falling in the woods out my window or even the ambient bustle of a classroom, coffee shop, or bar and I can tune out the world and slip into a vacuum so solidly that it’s like I’ve grabbed onto electrified metal and the only way to break me free is with a two-by-four or some similar nonconductive object of considerable heft.
But if I’m in the trenches or lost in the cave, trying to solve my way through some problem of plot or character, any tune, chord, melody, or lyric can break the spell and pull me intermittently out of the work. I kind of hate this about myself.
All that said, away from the desk, I can and did get inspired by a ton of music—so much that my song-for-story playlist structure quickly collapsed beneath the weight of choosing just one track per narrative.
Anyway, here’s the seemingly random, intentionally eclectic, burned CD–equivalent soundtrack to Bodock: Stories. Hope y’all enjoy.
“Sixty Acres” by James McMurtry | Story: “Mistletoe”
I had the good fortune of seeing James McMurtry play Proud Larry’s in Oxford, I think in 2007 or 2008. Of all the songs on this playlist, this one probably most closely parallels the short story it accompanies. McMurtry tells such succinct stories and writes so convincingly from perspectives different or even in conflict with his own and does in eight stanzas what took me, like, sixteen pages to accomplish.
While the narrative perspective differs, both “Sixty Acres” and “Mistletoe” involve family squabbles over land inheritance. In the song, the speaker fusses that “cousin Clifford, he got the good land / right on the highway out by Air Base Road / looks like a Wal-Mart waiting to happen.” In “Mistletoe,” the protagonist tries to prevent his dead brother’s son from turning his extant sister’s orchard into a truck stop to keep the land from being “purposed for a reason other than the family had intended.”
“Cicada” by Silverchair | Story: “Fraternal Twins”
I was nearly ten years old in 1994 when the ice storm from Bodock hit the Mid-South. I was twelve when I bought my first CD with my own money—Silverchair’s Frogstomp, which is about how old brothers Nathan and Nicholas are in “Fraternal Twins.” Silverchair hails from Australia, but the title of the tenth track, “Cicada,” on the album possesses Southern connotations in addition to its obvious figurative meanings.
At the beginning of the story, the twins’ favorite jam is much more likely to be the theme song to the X-Men animated series. But on “Cicada,” Daniel Johns sings that “growing up [is] like a civil war” and that the protagonist had “been born under a curse / things started to fall apart,” which could certainly summarize Nicholas or Nathan’s trajectory. Two years after the conclusion of the story, I can definitely see these brothers as angsty fourteen-year-olds trying to devise a plan to get to the nearest record store over in Tupelo to buy some down-under grunge.
“Indianapolis” by The Bottle Rockets | Story: “Steer Away from That Darkness”
Ask me to choose one genre of music to listen to for the rest of my life, and I might elect alt-country rock from the eighties through the aughts. Uncle Tupelo, The Jayhawks, Old 97s, Drive-By Truckers, The Volebeats, Son Volt, The Dexateens, Blue Mountain, Lucero, etc. I went with “Indianapolis” by The Bottle Rockets here, a raunchy, catchy track that—similar to “Steer Away from That Darkness,” but much more lightheartedly—tells the story of how absurd life can get and how powerlessly anchored to circumstance you can feel and just how downright difficult it can be to get unstuck from the purgatorial sum of a series of well-intended but ultimately unfortunate decisions.
Runner-up track: “Puttin’ People on the Moon” by Drive-By Truckers, which does a good job explaining the lengths of moral compromise the economically disadvantaged or even the middle class shouldn’t have to resort to in order to survive a capitalist system where trickle-down economics is just gaslighting or a bait-and-switch that feels much more like getting pissed on than hitting any windfall.
“Those Memories of You” by Dolly Parton, Linda Rondstadt, and Emmylou Harris | Story: “Seasonus Exodus”
“Seasonus Exodus” is the only flash fiction in the collection, a tetralogy that narrates the last four seasons of an elderly couple’s life. As is inherently the case with a lot of short-short fiction, much is understated here. The wife compares the ice storm out their window to “cancer in marrow [having] escaped bone” and her husband struggles with memory and hearing.
Ours is a world of impermanence, which perhaps gives our experience meaning, but it doesn’t make goodbyes any more hellish. While the speaker in “Those Memories of You” doesn’t necessarily struggle with remembering, the panicked, manic quality of lines like “my body trembles / I wake up and call your name / But you’re not there / And I’m so lonesome … until the day they lay me down” feels tragically applicable to the husband in the final season of the story.
“Brunswick Stew” by Kacy & Clayton | Story: “Bodock, 1816–1834”
Bluegrass has a special knack for euphemizing dark subject matter with energetic, upbeat rhythms and high-pitched vocal melodies of high lonesome that dress up tragedy like tripod flower arrangements wreathing a coffin. Kacy & Clayton’s song similarly juxtaposes my story, “Bodock, 1816–1834,” with the conflict in either composition being both parallel and inverted to the other.
In “Brunswick Stew,” an unwed daughter and her parents hatch a dark, clandestine plan that ultimately results in infanticide so they can avoid the judgment of their small town for what it will consider an illegitimate pregnancy. In “Bodock, 1816–1834,” a farmer’s wife furtively plots with an enslaved woman to help doctor a Brunswick stew in such a way to prevent her husband from taking her son away from her as he has their first two born.
The short story shifts perspectives, though. While the above summary could have also accommodated The Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl” as an apt song companion, from the father’s point-of-view, Hayes Carll’s “Bad Liver and a Broken Heart” might’ve sufficed.
“Time Is Tight” by Booker T. & the M.G.’s | Story: “The Parable of the Lung”
I almost went with “Your Daddy Hates Me” by Drive-By Truckers (and even did, back when the story was titled “Anglers of the Keep,” for this Mississippi Noir playlist). For this edition, the story has a new title—”The Parable of the Lung”—and a new song: “Time Is Tight” by Booker T. & the M.G.’s. But what does “time is tight” mean in this instrumental Memphis groove with all its soulful nonchalance? Does it mean time is cool? Interesting? Is it inebriated? Is time stoned?
Two days after the ice storm, a slacker divorcee has to get his ex-father-in-law from Bodock to near about Memphis in time for his lung transplant surgery. Time then is a tight deadline for these two. The stakes are high as well: Most of the state is without power or phones and felled trees make a maze of the wrecked highway. The journey starts off absurd, and the farther north they go, the further south their predicament heads. But if this story were set to film, I could definitely see the narrator and his ex-wife’s father setting off from Bodock with “Time Is Tight” on the radio as a sort of smooth, equable, ironically optimistic soundtrack to what becomes a somewhat existential conundrum.
“Atlantic City” by The Band | Story: “Stubborn as a Fence Post”
“Stubborn as a Fence Post” is probably the story with the lowest stakes in the whole collection. A fired high school baseball coach and his mostly more level-headed wife square off over the husband’s future job prospects. Will they reconcile? Won’t they? Will they compromise? Won’t they? Their straits ain’t nearly as dire as the couple in Springsteen’s “Atlantic City,” but they’re certainly headed toward more financial problems—and perhaps even divorce—if the protagonist can’t get his shit together.
I’ve always loved and appreciated how this line from the song—“Well now, everything dies, baby, that’s a fact / but maybe everything that dies someday comes back / put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty / and meet me tonight in Atlantic City”—captures all at once the impermanence of life, the cyclical nature of an infinite universe, and the spontaneity of observing that eternal film with the few frames we brief mortals are allowed to watch. “Stubborn as a Fence Post” ends on a high, if potentially precarious, note, but I can definitely see this couple taking off for a more proximate casino town, Tunica, at the nearest weekend, which is why I went with The Band’s livelier, peppier cover.
“Heartworm” by Thee Oh Sees | Story: “Heartworms”
It’s 1994. Thee Oh Sees (see also: Osees, Oh Sees, The O.C.’s, The Osees, et al.) are a few years from forming and beginning a nearly three-decade tear of almost thirty studio albums. But while their angst is affably arduous to categorize—experimental, psychedelic, cosmic garage metal?—another angst-centric genre is on the horizon of the temporal setting of the short story, the earliest tendrils of nu metal already rooting into the 1990s music canon.
Like so many rural kids from that decade, Chad from “Heartworms” will either continue to disassociate after the events of the story and/or seek his therapy in some seven-string intersection of metal, grunge, industrial, and hip hop discontent. It’d probably make more sense to have gone with a song by Slipknot or Korn or System of a Down or Rob Zombie or White Zombie–adjacent Static-X. But I had the pleasure of catching the Osees’ jackhammer of a live show at the 2023 Gonerfest in Memphis. And they have a song title nearly eponymous to the short story. So here we are.
“Whip-poor-will” by Magnolia Electric Co. | Story: “Frison the Bison”
Trampled by Turtles’ “Codeine” was my first choice for this track for obvious reasons: The eponymous protagonist of “Frison the Bison” is a cable technician who scavenges the medicine cabinets of his customers for painkillers to numb himself against past regrets of his own younger, more naive self’s design.
But Jason Molina can perform open-heart surgery with his precise lyrics, and the following lines from Magnolia Electric Co.’s “Whip-poor-will”—”I’ve made more mistakes than that just tonight / so all of you folks in heaven not too busy ringing the bells / some of us down here aren’t doing very well / some of us with our windows open in the southern cross hotel”—felt more inclusive of all the characters in the story framed in the windows of their figurative motels and waystations, waiting and wondering when grace is going to find them.
“Most Things Have Worked Out“ by Junior Kimbrough | Story: “Twenty Mile”
In “Twenty Mile,” Beauregard Eutuban—who grew up with Leon Claygardner, was enslaved (along with his parents) by Leon’s parents, and who was eventually, supposedly emancipated by Leon—has spent over a century in a sort of Southern-fried purgatory of Leon’s own design. Junior Kimbrough’s droning, repetitive, hypnotic rhythm mirrors this incomprehensible passage of time during which not much happens to disrupt the otherwise interminable chain of years—that is, until the ice storm of the living world extends to the afterlife and shakes loose forgotten memories that will eventually have Beauregard feeling like things haven’t, indeed, worked out.
At that point, on the porch of the bait shop–slash–town center of Twenty Mile, a frustrated Beauregard will begin to wonder, similar to the speaker in the Howlin’ Wolf song, how many more years does he have to get dogged around by his gaslighting, lifelong pal—and would he “rather be dead, sleeping six feet / in the ground.”
“Whiskey Bottle” by Uncle Tupelo / “So Much Wine” by Phoebe Bridgers / “Are You Alright?” by Lucinda Williams | Story: “Offerings”
I learned early on in workshops that every writer tries to write, and perhaps is only afforded, one “dead child” story. “Offerings” is mine, I guess, which is not only the longest story in the collection but one I’ve continued exploring in what is currently an unpublished novel. In any case, because “Offerings” is a novella, I’m hoping it can bear the weight of three songs here.
In “Whiskey Bottle,” when Jay Farrar sings “still aware of everything life carries on without,” it speaks to the mortal regret the protagonist, an ex-cop, awakes to every morning. And the chorus—”Whiskey bottle over Jesus / not forever, just for right now”—summarizes not only Noal’s plight but the whole Protestant quandry of how best to manage grief.
In Phoebe Bridgers’ “So Much Wine,” the narrator’s plea—”listen to me, butterfly, there’s only so much wine / that you can drink in one life / and it will never be enough / to save you from the bottom of your glass”—could very well be the estranged wife in “Offerings” before she leaves and then tries to return, getting as close as her grief allows.
Finally, in “Are You Alright?” by Lucinda Williams, the speaker repeats a lamentation that could apply to either character: “Are you all right? / All of a sudden you went away / Are you all right? / I hope you come back around someday / Are you all right? / I haven’t seen you in a real long time / Are you all right? / Could you give me some kind of sign?”
Robert Busby grew up in the hill country of North Mississippi and has worked as a bandsaw operator, bookseller, copywriter, driving school instructor, powder coater, prep cook, produce clerk, teacher, and satellite television technician. A graduate of the University of Mississippi, he got his MFA in Fiction from Florida International University, and his stories have appeared in Arkansas Review, Cold Mountain Review, Footnote, Mississippi Noir, PANK, Pleiades, Sou’wester, Surreal South, and others. Currently, he writes, runs, and raises two humans with his wife in Memphis, TN.