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September 22, 2021
M Shelly Conner's Playlist for Her Novel "everyman"
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.
M Shelly Conner's novel everyman is a bold and crisply told debut that melds personal history with communal history to great effect.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Conner's inviting debut unearths a young Black woman’s family history...Conner weaves plenty of details of African American history throughout, such as the founding of the Tuskegee Institute and Martin Luther King Jr.'s alliance with a Chicago street gang, seamlessly connecting these events to the characters' lives. Overall, this wonderfully evokes a sense of place, and a palpable curiosity about the past.
In her own words, here is M Shelly Conner's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel everyman:
My novel everyman takes readers on an epic journey of discovery that parallels the Great Migration in reverse. From 1972 Chicago to 1920s Georgia, music weaves through the narrative and was instrumental in creating the work. Some of these songs appear directly in everyman while others correspond to themes, characters and/or specific scenes and events in the novel. In addition to the everyman playlist that can be found on Spotify, here is a list of songs that serve as an accompaniment to the novel.
“Georgia On My Mind” by Ray Charles
The novel’s prelude opens with Eve Mann traveling by Greyhound Bus to Georgia. The song is a soulful soliloquy that romanticizes the state and, in the vocals of Charles, belies the state-sanctioned harm against Black folk (Charles included). The lyrics speak of a return to home and that is exactly what Eve is doing in a sense--returning to a home for which she has longed but never known.
“1960 What?” by Gregory Porter
From the uptempo bass and catchy chorus refrain, this jazz-deep house track serves as a musical montage of the first chapter flashback to Eve’s childhood in the '60s that saw the assassinations of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.--the latter mentioned in the song. Porter’s song is as much a call to social action as it is a call to physical movement and dance. In a word, it’s a bop.
“I’ll Take You There” by The Staple Singers
This song is directly referenced in chapter two and situates the reader and the story in 1972 Chicago, the novel’s most contemporary period. The Staple Singers hailed from Chicago with roots in the south, like Eve.
“A Change Is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke
There are several artists whose music is relevant to many scenes in the novel. Sam Cooke, another child of the south raised in Chicago, and his 1964 political ballad against racism most closely relates to Eve’s mentor Brother LeRoi and his own narrative. In the novel, his grandmother’s funeral is held at A.R. Leak Funeral Home, the same one that buried Cooke one week prior.
“Cigarettes and Coffee” by Otis Redding
Soul ballads are my jam and gravelly-voiced singers whose vocal range measures from pain to passion and trauma to triumph are the soundtrack to this novel and the process that created it. Cigarettes and Coffee, even as a phrase, conjures the image of a serious conversation and that is exactly what occurs when Brother LeRoi meets with Amy in a coffee shop.
“Were You There?” by Three Mo’ Tenors
Many of the songs that drive everyman can be described as “hauntingly beautiful.” This rendition of the classic spiritual is directly referenced in the novel and actually serves to narrate a very specific scene.
“Boulevard of Broken Dreams” by Post Modern Jukebox (ft. Maiya Sykes)
Post Modern Jukebox remakes contemporary popular songs into jazz and classical remakes. everyman revisits past eras with a contemporary sensibility. So apparently I feel like we’re doing the same thing in our different art forms. Their rendition of this original Green Day track, slows. Everything. Down. Sykes’ vocals caress every word and imbues each syllable with palpable emotion. This is the song that represents Professor Woodridge and the interesting metanarrative about his literary lineage. (According to Roderick Fergueson’s Aberrations in Black, Woodridge was a character in an earlier draft of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man).
“Ne Me Quitte Pas” by Lauryn Hill
Although Nina Simone is certainly in the soul of everyman, Hill’s rendition of this French classic (with its musical crescendo) mirrors the conflicts between several best friends: Eve and Nelle; Johnita and Claudette; and Mercy and Geneva. These are Black women who love each other and struggle within their love.
“Two Steps From The Blues” by Bobby “Blue” Bland
According to iTunes, I listened to this song over 100 times as I wrote “The Uses of Salt” chapter which became my lodestar, guiding the structure of subsequent chapters and the revision of earlier ones.
“Victim” by Candi Staton
As I mentioned, the most contemporary era in the book is the early 70s which also sees the birth of disco. Staton, known for singing Young Hearts Run Free, later released the song Victim which includes the line, “I told you young hearts run free, but I didn’t listen to myself...I became a victim of the very song I sing.” There’s so much that I could detail about the power of these lyrics and their connections to writing and revision: how Victim revises Young Hearts; and how everyman revises canonical Black literature like Invisible Man and its erasure of Professor Woodridge. More directly, Victim relates to the character Jean and their relationship with Nelle. Both are so strong and self-aware but have engaged in harmful (to different degrees) relationships.
“Oh It Is Jesus” and “Walk With Me” by Tata Vega
Black southern life, whether lived in the South or in regions migrated to by southerners, includes gospel and everyman is no exception. Tata Vega has one of the most notable voices in gospel and blues, largely due to her role as the singing voice of Shug Avery in The Color Purple movie. Although “Miss Celie’s Blues” would certainly apply to several relationships in the novel and “God Is Trying To Tell You Something” is always relevant in conversations about Black gospel music; those tunes are so strongly linked with the movie that it would be more distraction to think of them within the world of everyman. Still Vega’s voice is Black southern gospel and “Oh It Is Jesus” has the traditional cadence, storytelling and adlibs that can walk a church.
“Wonderful, Wonderful” by Johnny Mathis
For Hezekiah and Gertrude
In scriptwriting (I know this is a novel but bear with me), one of the major elements is called the inciting incident. Basically, your character is living their life as they normally do but then something happens that makes their life story-worthy. I’ve noticed in our stories (our meaning Black folk), especially those centered around (non-enslavement) trauma, this normal life time is usually pretty cool. Healthy friendships and cookouts. This moment, before the inciting incident usually of somebody getting shot, is what I’m calling Black idyllicism. To me, Black idyllicism sounds just like “Wonderful, Wonderful.” Before the X-Files got to it.
“Me And My Gin” by Dinah Washington (Dinah Washington Sings Bessie Smith)
For Johnita and Claudette
I mentioned earlier the fondness I have for renditions that continue a conversation. And apparently for southern-born musicians that grew up in Chicago, like Dinah Washington. So much of blues is inspired by the singer’s own experiences. Washington singing Smith’s “Me And My Gin” is a conversation about juke joints, women singers and queer sexuality (Smith was bisexual). Although the character Claudette is described as bearing physical resemblance to Billie Holliday, she is the vocal doppelganger of Dinah Washington. If you want to feel like you are at Johnita’s Place, everyman's juke joint, then sit back with our signature MANN-hattan cocktail and enjoy this medley of Dinah Washington hits:
T’aint Nobody’s Business If I Do
Ain’t Misbehavin’
Willow Weep For Me
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
Goodbye
“This Bitter Earth/On The Nature of Daylight” Dinah Washington/Max Richter which is directly referenced in the novel.
“Sunny” by Bobby Hebb and “Here Comes the Sun” by Nina Simone
The final chapter of everyman takes its title “The Warmth of Other Suns” from Isabelle Wilkerson’s book and Langston Hughes’ poem. We have come to the end of the everyman journey and hopefully it leaves you in the spirit of these two uplifting songs.
M Shelly Conner, a Chicago native, spent her summers bouncing between her grandmother in Memphis and relatives in Los Angeles, reveling in the sprawl of the Great Migration. She received her PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago. A multigenre writer, she is the creator of the Quare Life web series and has published essays on dapperqueer aesthetics, black womanhood, self-sustainable living, and their intersections in various publications, including the A.V. Club, TheGrio, Playboy, and The Crisis. An excerpt of everyman appears in the Obsidian Journal of Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. Conner is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas and lives in Arkansas with her wife and their dog, Whiskey.
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