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July 17, 2020
Kelli Jo Ford's Playlist for Her Novel "Crooked Hallelujah"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Kelli Jo Ford's debut Crooked Hallelujah is one of the year's most impressive novels that empathetically and strongly depicts the lives of three generations of Cherokee women.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:al
"Ford’s storytelling is urgent, her characters achingly human and complex, and her language glittering and rugged. This is a stunner."
In her own words, here is Kelli Jo Ford's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Crooked Hallelujah:
There was a time, my husband* recently reminded me, when a common after-hours complaint of mine was the use of popular songs in literature. Not because using a song might date the work, which raises a somewhat interesting question of do you want that or don’t you? (Of course I want my work placed in a specific time!). But because (and here, my husband did THE VOICE—that is he hit my my high and mighty two-drinks-in-and-I-have-an-opinion pitch):
“If you drop song lyrics or titles into your story, you’re relying on art that already exists to create an atmosphere that you should be creating yourself. It’s lazy**!”
And here, he adlibbed: “Unless they’re gospel lyrics***.”
Crooked Hallelujah, my debut novel-in-stories, comes out on July 14. (Cue Ron Howard’s narrator voice.) It is, of course, full of references to both popular music and gospel hymns. Several stories are named after song lyrics or titles! Oh, to be reminded of the things of which we were once certain.
I’m not sure when or why I had a change of heart. Maybe I’m just not annoyingly judgmental in this particular way anymore. I’m not sure! I do know this: Characters I want to read about – characters I might even be able to care about – have music in their lives. And if they don’t, that might be interesting too, but not as some sort a writer must have a code thing.
Music permeates the lives of Crooked Hallelujah's characters. I couldn’t imagine them or the book any other way.
Mahalia Jackson – “In the Garden”
In the first story, we meet fifteen-year-old Justine who is struggling to tell her very religious mother, Lula, that she has been sexually assaulted and is pregnant as a result. It’s the first time readers learn about the Holiness church that Justine’s family is a part of.
Instead of telling her mom, Justine chooses avoidance. She asks to visit her deadbeat father who is living in another state with his new family. If she is to go, she’ll have to make it through the church’s Wednesday night service and altar call.
The whole congregation makes a spectacle of Justine as they tearfully try to convince her to get saved, to stay home and avoid sin. The church band plays “In the Garden,” which is Justine’s grandmother’s favorite song.
Justine almost breaks, but a perfectly timed assist from her cousin lightens the mood.
Waylon and Willie – “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys”
Waylon and Willie couldn’t have written a more perfect song for an eight-year-old growing up in a small town in Oklahoma in the early '80s. That’s how old Justine’s daughter, Reney, is in “The Year 2003 Minus 20.” (And hi! This was my favorite song when I was eight!)
In this story, Reney has pilfered the Waylon and Willie album that someone from her mom’s good-time, party crew has left at their house. Reney hides it under her bed like a secret treasure, until, “like a cowboy from Waylon and Willie come to life, in saunters a jockey from Texas” who falls for Justine. Immediately, Reney grows attached to him right away, but Justine seems to know that “if you don't understand him and he don't die young, he'll probably just ride away.”
I considered using another song from this album, wondering if this one is too on-the-nose. But 1) on-the-nose is probably the literal worse phrase and 2) on-the-nose is just what a song from a story about an eight-year-old should be.
Prince – “Little Red Corvette”
Prince – “1999”
Sinead O’Connor – “Nothing Compares 2 U”
Sinead O’Connor – “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got”****
In “Greater the Mass, Stronger the Pull,” we catch back up with Reney, who is almost old enough to drive. Justine and Pitch are fighting, so Reney and Justine have returned to Oklahoma to stay with Lula.
As teenagers and parents are wont to do, they fight over the radio the whole drive. Reney wants to play her Sinead O’Connor tape. Justine won’t stop listening to the Prince 1999 tape she bought at a truckstop on the way up. We see Reney struggling with who she is in this story, wanting to grow into her own as a person, while recognizing that she and her mom are, in ways, two halves of the same whole.
Of course, Prince wrote Sinead’s biggest hit! So even as Reney pushes to assert her own identity through her choice of music, she’s following right in her mom’s Prince-loving footsteps.
At the end of the story, Reney seems to give in as she pops in “1999,” “a song about a future that people must have felt would never come but was now upon us.” Though I think this is a nice moment between the mother and daughter, the song does some heavy foreshadowing of the apocalyptic future that awaits them.
I also included “Little Red Corvette” and “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” although their presence in the story is spiritual, not literal. Justine has always dreamed of driving a ‘Vette, but all she could afford was a used “Mustang that wasn’t ever going to be a Corvette.”
As Reney explains, Justine had “taken over payments on the Mustang before we left. The thing sounded like it’d been run into the ground, but I think it had her thinking about possibilities again, the future maybe.”
While they are in town they run into Justine’s rapist who is Reney’s biological father. The man, who has no interest in seeing either of them, runs away before Reney can get a good look. Despite her shame, Reney cannot help but feel curious, so she secretly goes looking for him later.
I feel like this story’s spiritual title could be “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.” Reney would certainly tell her mom and herself this regarding any curiosity she might feel about the man. But those words—like the song on Sinead’s album, perhaps—might be a case of a girl protesting too much.
Mahalia Jackson – “How Great Thou Art”
The title of the story “Then Sings My Soul” comes from this old hymn. The song is really quiet until the refrain, which soars:
Then sings my soul,
My savior God to thee,
how great thou art,
how great thou art.
In the hands of someone like Mahalia Jackson, this part of the song has the power to change my life, even if just for a moment. In this story, the main character experiences one of these moments. Maybe it’s merely physiological. He’s hot and dehydrated from a day of hard work, but in that soul-singing instant, everything makes sense for him. He comes out of it determined to be a stronger man.
Rilo Kiley – “A Better Son/Daughter”
This song has a way of breaking me down and then building me right back up. I think relationships with difficult loved ones can be like that. I guess that’s why “You’ll Be Honest, You’ll Be Brave,” takes its name from “A Better Son/Daughter.” I feel like if Rilo Kiley had a time machine and could somehow enter this story (a storytime machine?) and give young Justine access to this song, her whole life might be completely different. At the very least, she would fucking kill it at the VFW’s karaoke night.
In “You’ll Be Honest, You’ll Be Brave,” Justine has gone back to her mother’s house in the Cherokee Nation because her mother is very ill. Reney is grown and gone at this point, so Justine is traveling alone now. Going home is always hard for her. She carries the weight of her upbringing in everything she does, and much of that weight comes from being raised by an unwell mother who found her lifeline in an extreme form of Christianity. Regardless, Justine continues to care for her mother—and not just out of a sense of duty. She loves her mother greatly, is protective of her, even. Despite these two things, Justine can’t stop anger toward her mother from seeping out.
That’s where the song comes in. In this story, Justine recognizes a moment when she has fallen short, a small act of kindness she refused to perform. Ultimately though, she is there, she is showing up. And there is always tomorrow.
Palace Brothers – “You Will Miss Me When I Burn”
“You Will Miss Me When I Burn,” (the story) takes its name from the Palace Brothers song of the same title. The song is a pretty dreary hang, but one thing I like about it is the way the title line is posed as a question for most of the song: Will you miss me when I burn? Toward the end, though, the phrase becomes a statement, a defiance: You will miss me.
I think that defiance is part of what defines Ferrell, Justine’s father-in-law and this story’s main character. Ferrell’s an elderly cowboy who’s seen better days. In his selfishness and ineptitude, he has lost nearly everything he has loved. But he still has his prize mare, and on the day that a fire is bearing down on his homeplace, he is certain that a fresh start is just what he needs.
I think readers will see him as a pretty despicable character. But I hope that I’ve been able to portray some of the character’s humanity too. We learn in the next story that he doesn’t get far in his quest for a new start.
Rebirth Brass Band – “Tornado Special/Ooh Nah Nay”
AC/DC – “Hells Bells”
Don Henley – “The End of Innocence”
In “What Good Is an Ark to a Fish?” we catch up with Reney and Justine at the end of the world, or at least what seems to be an end of the world weather event in Texas. In a flashback, Reney tells readers about her second wedding day when the small-town-Texas crowd didn’t take to the playlist she made that contained things like Rebirth Brass Band. However, in a version of your-mother’s-always-right, the crowd got down and boogied when Justine played AC/DC.
Early in the story, Reney is driving cross-country to get to Justine in hopes of convincing her to leave her Texas home for safety. A radio station is celebrating Don Henley’s birthday on the car ride there, and Reney gets a string of Don Henley songs stuck in her head.
She spends her time in the Texas apocalypse being bored, worrying about Justine, and belting out some Henley. “We’ve been poisoned by these fairy tales” is a line that, to me, echoes what Reney, who was never raised in an oppressive religion, might say to her mom who is haunted by questions of faith and belief.
*who is, generally, a lovely human being
**In my defense, I think when I was an undergrad someone in a workshop once used Tom Waits to equate cool place, cool guy, and I was both scarred and offended.
***Shots fired; shots landed!
****Four songs, one story! My take-away here is never have ideals, or at least forget about them when necessary. One day you will wake up and be 45 and everything you thought you knew will be wrong, so live it up, kids.
Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, the Everett Southwest Literary Award, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Award at Bread Loaf, a National Artist Fellowship by the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, and the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, among other places.
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