Dirty Bird Blues

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In postwar Chicago, an African American man crawls in through a stranger's window from the fire escape, in the process getting a belly full of buckshot. But the situation is not what you might assume. Manfred is a blues singer and father whose wife has run off with the preacher (the wielder of the shotgun). Man's a good fellow, but weak, with no-account buddies like the guitar-picker Solly and a predilection for Old Crow bourbon (the dirty bird of the title). Not that Man doesn't try to set himself right now and again. After walking himself to the hospitalwith a pause to help out an abused wifeand wallowing for a few weeks in self-pity, he bids a rollicking goodbye to his wife, Cleo, and abandons Chicago for Omaha, where his sister and a more sober life await. There, he finds work as a welder. Although he doesn't quite quit the booze, he convinces Cleo to join him. Things are looking up, but troublein the form of Sollyfollows, and Man gets fired. Soon, it's a toss-up whether he will dry out and keep his family together or become a carbon copy of his abusive father. In his first novel in eight years, Major (Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar) cleverly demonstrates the pervasive racism that's part of the black experience. He's a rhythmic writer with a good ear for the music of the American vernacular. Although the blues refrains that run through Man's mind ring more calculated, and hence annoying, than true, the choices this flawed hero must make are compelling and weighty. The result is a novel that's movingand highly enjoyable. (June)

Library Journal

Manfred Banks-Man to his street friends and Fred to his wife-is an itinerant blues musician struggling to support his family by working at a succession of demeaning blue-collar jobs from Chicago to Omaha in the overtly racist America of the late 1940s. At night, Man assumes a different persona, playing Chicago blues for enthusiastic audiences in bars and nightclubs. Man's reliance on Old Crow whiskey ("Dirty Bird") to fuel his blues lifestyle quickly exacerbates his shortcomings as a husband and father. Best known for a series of experimental novels including My Amputations (LJ 7/86), Major is in a more relaxed mode here. The work is marred only by an excess of blues lyrics, which seldom retain their power on the page. Major's vivid re-creation of postwar black America will appeal to fans of Walter Mosley. For larger fiction collections and libraries with an interest in blues music.-Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles

Kirkus Reviews

Major, a prolific man of letters, seems to have abandoned for good the experimental styles that characterized much of his early work (My Amputations, 1986, etc.). His latest is a quite conventional morality tale dressed up with his extensive, if somewhat academic, knowledge of Afro-American slang.

The lexicographer in Major (Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang, not reviewed) gets the better of him in an otherwise simple narrative about black life circa 1950. Manfred Banks, 25, born in Georgia, hates the winters in Chicago. An aspiring bluesman, he can't find day work and spends most of his waking hours in pursuit of the "Dirty Bird" (Old Crow whiskey). His wife has taken their baby girl to live with a preacher man, and his only friend, guitarist Solomon Thigpen, is also singing the "dirty bird blues." A violent episode with the preacher and the police encourages Man to head to Omaha, where his older sister is leading a model life; her husband even lands Man a job at a steel plant, while Man begins gigging on weekends at the local hot spot. Soon Man's family joins him, and prospects look good until some racists at work decide to harass him. He retreats further into the bottle. When Solomon comes west, Man's wife fears the worst. But a long, drunken night, during which Man sees "something deep and ugly come out" in himself, sets him on the road to sobriety. This simple tale is punctuated with long stream-of-consciousness dream sequences in which Manfred imagines what success might be like, worries about losing his wife to Jesus, and sees himself lynched. Major also employs an extensive knowledge of the blues idiom—Manfred is constantly thinking in lyrics, even if the moment doesn't seem to warrant it.

There's a powerful, persuasive use of language here, but it's suspended in too studied a tale—one that never gets cooking.