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November 15, 2021
Bobbie Ann Mason's Playlist for Her Novel "Dear Ann"
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.
Bobbie Ann Mason's novel Dear Ann shows the talented storyteller at her best, bringing to life the late sixties in this unforgettable tale of first love.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"Deeply moving. . . . A beautifully written homage to the 1960s by a mature writer at the top of her literary power."
In her own words, here is Bobbie Ann Mason's Book Notes music playlist for her novel Dear Ann:
The Beatles’ revolutionary album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, is at the heart of my novel Dear Ann. In the acknowledgments at the end I wrote, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, perhaps the principal unifying musical event of 1967, has been a constant in my life since then and was necessary to this story.” I was in graduate school in the years of the novel, about 1966 to 1968, and like Ann I didn’t have a boyfriend. No boyfriend and the Vietnam War going full tilt—the future looked blank and bleak.
Sgt. Pepper was a major event in my life, and it was a cultural event, really, arriving as fresh news to an anxious generation that was threatened by the draft and by the general turbulence of the sixties. All at once, the Beatles songs gave voice, meaning, possibility, and hope to a world where identity crises littered the main highway and young people were ready to experiment down any avenue.
In my novel, I used the album as an emotional focal point for that kaleidoscopic, Tilt-a-Whirl terrain in the lives of youth. I wanted to recreate a sense of what it was like to hear Sgt. Pepper when it was brand new, in June 1967, and how it felt to hear it—and the excitement surrounding it— just about everywhere you went. No rock-and-roll record had ever included a symphony orchestra improv—or the cluck of a chicken. Who are the figures in the cover collage? The lyrics are on the cover! What in the world is a sitar? Let’s play with the Sgt. Pepper cutouts included like a Cracker Jack prize in the album gatefold.
Technically, nothing had ever sounded like this before, and musicians were leapfrogging back to the studio. Scholars were plumbing the album’s depths. For students, the discovery that popular songs could be smart, arcane, multilayered, world-shifting, and revelatory, was thrilling. We felt in the know.
My central character, Ann, is remembering, fifty years later, falling in love with Jimmy. On their acid trip, Ann and Jimmy live this album. I wanted, through Sgt. Pepper, to show their sexual freedom, their creative impulse, their liberation from old rules and expectations. Of course what young people are really after is eternal. It’s not just sex. They are lonely hearts; they want love.
This is the Beatles’ genius, to capture these universal features of youth in an elevated, new musical art. In her innocence, Ann heard the exhilaration, the humor, and the joy of the record. And yet it holds an undercurrent of apprehension and uncertainty.
Ann hears the album anew, with Jimmy, on a day when time is mixed up and physical sensations are jumbled—a synesthesia like ambrosia. Perceptions are out of context. Lyrics are commands. Questions are wisdom. She hears the songs as a variety of stories, fetching the past to illuminate the present.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Ann and Jimmy start out their “trip” with a simple nostalgia for a pretend band of the past— before the troubles, before the Vietnam War.
With A Little Help from My Friends
Ann, in her altered state, pictures Ringo amusingly trotting up to the microphone, with a new identity, Billy Shears. He sings out of tune, with no embarrassment. Ann “would get by with a little help from her friends! They were looking out for her. She had never felt so secure, so loved.” Finding a sympathetic group seems essential. Young people are tribal, which is hard on the introverts.
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds is hallucinogenic, with its plasticine porters and looking-glass eyes. Picturing herself in a boat on a river, Ann stares through a kaleidoscope and watches “the geometric dazzle through Lucy’s eyes.” She is outside herself, in an Alice in Wonderland arena, enthralled. On a psychedelic journey, everything is out of context. Each sensation exists in and of itself.
Getting Better
The psychedelic dream erupts into a cheery, optimistic yearning toward wholeness and health. Young people are confused and adrift. Adulthood is not promising. In the song is an acute awareness of adult experience—the threat of growing up and facing consequences of bad behavior. This threat lurks, but hey, it’s getting better all the time. Let’s rock.
Fixing A Hole
Here comes another song questioning adulthood. The narrator is dreamily doing some repair work around the house. He is trying to be normal, responsible, and steady, but his mind wanders. Jimmy in my story tussles with the meaning of manhood. What is a man’s role? He feels there’s an “empty bucket” inside him, despair over what society expects him to be.
She’s Leaving Home
Here is another young person cut loose, a teenage runaway, but the story is told through the sadness of parents losing their children to inexplicable attractions. Ann sees herself in this story, for she has left home in a radical way, too, leaving the family at the farm in Kentucky for the golden promise of California.
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite
That adventure of leaving home leads into another story, playing on the familiar threat—to run away and join the circus. Ann is suspicious of the man in the motor trade in the previous song. The girl’s parents were right, she thinks. Maybe the girl ran off with him to the carnival, where Mr. Kite, the headliner, sails through a hogshead of fire! This song is a radical refashioning of whatever qualifies as a pop song. The Beatles were turning tradition and norms upside down. A song can go anywhere.
Within You Without You
You flip the vinyl on the turntable, and Side 2 abruptly turns inward. George, on the enigmatic and exotic sitar, is roaming around in a strange land. Ann feels the song “ambled slowly, a brittle sound, with sparkles. The song lasted for about two months.” The meanderings of the mind, unmoored, transcend time. Bring on Ravi Shankar, water buffalo sandals, the scent of curry from Ann’s Indian neighbor’s apartment. The song embraces the universe.
When I’m Sixty-Four
Ann “couldn’t fathom being sixty-four. It was such a funny idea.” Only a young person would see that age as so far into the future as to be ludicrous and nearly impossible. But the Beatles, lovers of irony, tapped into such subliminal worries of the young. Perhaps kids in their twenties wondered deep down if they’d make it to sixty-four. In 1967 they weren’t thinking yet of toxic chemicals, air pollution, tobacco, diseases, environmental disaster, but they saw hypocrisy, the war machine, the civil rights struggle, and the stultifying nature of middle-class white suburbia.
Lovely Rita
Another playfully inventive story that defies the typical content of a pop song, yet retaining its catchiness and charm—falling in love with an appealing character, lovely Rita, an emancipated woman in her professional getup with her shoulder bag. Comically, Paul imagines having tea with her. As an insecure graduate student who is often the only female in the class, Ann would of course admire jaunty, self-possessed lovely Rita, meter maid.
Good Morning, Good Morning
The cock crows at dawn. The farmyard sounds of this song remind Ann of the farm back home—the henhouse, gamboling calves, chickens. “Home was far away.” The song seems joyful, pastoral, but its story is rough, adult, scary. The good morning greeting is ironic—someone is headed for a deadend job. The day closes with hope—tea! A show! Skirts! And the song trails out in a mix of barking dogs, meowing cats, squealing pigs, and finally, a clucking chicken. The song gets to Ann because she is a runaway. She has rejected the natural world, but she may come back to it eventually.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band returns for a brief reprise, reminding Ann that the jolly Pepper’s bunch is only a pretend band, tongue in cheek, calling on older traditions from vaudeville and the British music hall. There are no breaks between any of the songs, and the reprise repeats the word “lonely” several times before launching into the lengthy melancholy, mysterious, evocative “A Day in the Life.”
A Day in the Life
John sings of death and mystery—the 4,000 holes like seats at a concert— and then Paul brings it back to the everyday—running his comb through his hair before dashing off to catch the bus, in the workaday morning routine of ordinary life. Both parts of the songs ask what is worth doing. Fame and success are meaningless if you’re killed in a car wreck, so what should you aim for? Should you sink into mundanity in an ordinary life? Are the images of the 4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, like graves? Are they fixable?
It’s a song about the meaning of life, and the ending chord lingers in Ann’s mind as she emerges from “a phantasmagoric journey.” Later in the novel, the song is playing when she thinks of bringing a new life, a baby, into the world, but when the song ends on that long, fading note she feels “the breathing stops.” It is a note of foreboding in her own story and an ominous warning that something is indeed happening.
Nevertheless, the album is crazy fun and still timeless, after all these years.
Bobbie Ann Mason is the author of a number of works of fiction, including The Girl in the Blue Beret, In Country, An Atomic Romance, and Nancy Culpepper. The groundbreaking Shiloh and Other Stories won the PEN Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and the PEN Faulkner Award. Her memoir, Clear Springs, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won two Southern Book Awards and numerous other prizes, including the O. Henry and the Pushcart. Former writer-in-residence at the University of Kentucky, she lives in Kentucky.
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