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September 14, 2022
GennaRose Nethercott's Playlist for Her Novel "Thistlefoot"
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.
GennaRose Nethercott's novel Thistlefoot is an epic and imaginative fairy tale.
Library Journal wrote of the book:
"Replete with beautiful metaphors and lyrical prose, poet and folklorist Nethercott’s debut novel deploys her poetic storytelling powers to spotlight the struggle against oppression. This modern-day fairy tale will ignite greater understanding of an individual’s ability to incite change with the stories they tell."
In her own words, here is GennaRose Nethercott's Book Notes music playlist for her novel Thistlefoot:
Oyfn Veg Shteyt a Boym – Yiddish folk song
In this Yiddish lullaby, a boy wishes to become a bird, but is rendered flightless when his mother wraps him in heavy, warm winter clothes. I imagine it’s the sort of song Baba Yaga would hum to her two daughters, Illa and Malka, as she rocks them to sleep. In my version of the Baba Yaga story, the legendary crone from Russian folklore is instead a young Jewish mother living in a shtetl in 1919, in the months leading up to a pogrom. Despite the changes to the old stories, one thing remains the same: she still inhabits her infamous house on chicken legs. And so, what could be more fitting than a song of shape shifting birds and old Jewish melodies? Of a mother’s powerful but stifling love, wishing only to keep her child safe…?
Red Right Hand – Nick Cave
I had just binged Peaky Blinders when I started writing Thistlefoot—and I wanted my character Isaac to have a bit of that same sociopathic bad-boy flare as Tommy Shelby. So whenever I needed Isaac to behave really badly, to make a choice I myself would never make, I’d play this song (also used as the Peaky Blinders theme) get in a more…unhinged mindset. Sometimes, I’d play it on loop as I drafted, just to keep Isaac in the mood for trouble.
Valhalla – Ditrani Brothers
In the book, the protagonists end up joining forces with a trio of traveling folk-punk musicians called the Duskbreaker Band—self-described as “the sweetest end times folk-swing junket you’ll ever have the pleasure to dance to.” They live in a black spray painted school bus with a horse skull zip tied to the grill, and drive around America playing apocalyptic banjo tunes and fighting for righteous causes.
Now, the Duskbreakers may be fiction—but their bus isn’t. The black school bus they drive belongs to a real-world band called the Ditrani Brothers, who are friends of mine. And like the Duskbreaker Band, this would make a perfect soundtrack for the end of the world.
Dyin Day – Anais Mitchell
Like myself, Anais Mitchell is an artist who re-imagines myths and folktales, breathing new life into old stories. From her Tony award winning musical Hadestown (modernizing the Orpheus and Eurydice myth) to the beautiful duo album Child Ballads which she recorded with Jefferson Hamer, ancient tales are alive and well in her hands. She’s a huge inspiration of mine, and if you like Thistlefoot, you’ll probably like Anais Mitchell too.
This particular song, “Dyin Day,” retells the Biblical story of Jacob readying to sacrifice his son Isaac. Given that Thistlefoot is a story about ancestral trauma passed down through chains of challenging parent-child relationships (also featuring a fella named Isaac), it felt like the perfect Anais song to pair with the book.
Blame it on Cain – Elvis Costello
This song plays at a jukebox diner midway through Isaac and Bellatine’s road trip—and hearing it catapults Isaac into memory from days gone by. Consider this one of those examples of an author’s life leaking into the text; while I was in my early drafting stage, my boyfriend at the time and I were listening to this album a lot. It was in the early days of Covid lockdown. We’d drive around crooning along and looking for empty parks, overgrown with blackberry briars where we could be outside and away from other people. Of all the songs on the album, “Blame it on Cain” seemed to be constantly stuck in my head. So, when Bellatine sauntered toward the jukebox, quarters in hand—I wasn’t surprised at the song that came out.
Hares on the Mountain – Shirley Collins
Like the previous track, this is another song that trickled from my own life directly into Thistlefoot. I drafted the first third of the book while living in a little shotgun house in Algiers Point, New Orleans. My roommate was a farmer who worked just outside the city, and I’d spend the afternoons visiting tiny newborn goat kids on her farm—a welcome break in between chapters. Come dusk, she would play guitar on our front stoop, and I’d sing harmony. This was one of our favorite songs to sing together. In the book, Bellatine sings it to Thistlefoot, the legged house, to sooth it. I always found the song soothing, too.
Blue Chime Stomp – Tuba Skinny
This is a band that Isaac would surely be familiar with from his busking days in New Orleans. And just like Isaac, Tuba Skinny is a beloved Royal Street staple, often found playing tunes for tourist dollars down in the bustling French Quarter. They’re a joy to listen to—which I know firsthand from my own days as a busker in New Orleans. That’s right—if you’re wondering where all the details of Isaac’s performing life came from, they’re poached from my own years hawking poems-to-order on Royal Street from a Hermes Rocket Typewriter. And if I were lucky—Tuba Skinny wouldn’t be far off, trumpeting tunes to type to.
Till The Cows Come Home – Lucille Bogan
Okay, I’m going to give this one a big R rated *explicit* warning—because Lucille Bogan is THE queen of dirty blues songs. I mean dirty. In Thistlefoot, Sparrow (one of the Duskbreakers) has a tendency to break into what I call the “Milkman Song:” I got a baker for bread, got a butcher for chuck, I got a husband for cash, and a milkman to— You get the idea. “The Milkman Song” is my own invention, but it’s inspired by the hilarious, delightful Lucille Bogan—who, way back in the 1920s and '30s, was singing songs that made “W.A.P.” look like “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” And if you’re wondering about the rest of “The Milkman Song” itself… well, ask me sometime. Maybe I’ll just sing you the whole thing.
I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive – Hank Williams
Isaac’s best friend, Benji plays this song on the guitar as they’re riding a hopped freight train through New Mexico together. It’s exactly the sort of music I imagine Benji playing—old country songs that transport him to another time, another place, another life. So much of Thistlefoot exists suspended in time. The past leaks into the present. The characters are modern and thrumming yet anachronistic, too. Ancestral memories twist and tangle with current events in ways both soft and violent. That’s why, I think, this playlist is such an eclectic blend of times and places, spanning a century. Thistlefoot doesn’t inhabit just one lifetime. And neither can its music.
GennaRose Nethercott is a writer and folklorist. Her first book, The Lumberjack's Dove, was selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series, and whether authoring novels, poems, ballads, or even fold-up paper cootie catchers, her projects are all rooted in myth--and what our stories reveal about who we are. She tours nationally and internationally performing strange tales (sometimes with puppets in tow) and composing poems-to-order for strangers on an antique typewriter with her team, the Traveling Poetry Emporium. She lives in the woodlands of Vermont, beside an old cemetery. Thistlefoot is her debut novel.
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