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December 20, 2022
Michael Parker's Playlist for His Novel "I Am the Light of This World"
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.
Michael Parker's compelling novel I Am the Light of This World is both moving and haunting.
Library Journal wrote of the book:
"A heart-wrenching story compounded by misguided decisions and bad luck, Earl’s life could form the basis of the blues songs he and Arthur so loved."
In his own words, here is Michael Parker's Book Notes music playlist for his novel I Am the Light of This World:
Any song worth listening to is driven by longing and desire, as is any story worth reading. Much of my work uses music as a both a means to convey emotion and establish a narrative trajectory. In my new novel, I Am the Light of This World, music is for Earl Boudreaux, the teenaged protagonist, a way to ratify his feelings and to connect with the world beyond his rich but limited sensibility. Music isn’t the only way out of his small-town Texas life, but it certainly feels like it to Earl when his father takes him on a walk to a pond in the piney woods and teaches him the words to “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Shortly thereafter, listening to his father’s transistor radio, Earl falls in love with pedal steel guitar, which he describes as feeling like being “draped by a blanket and shocked by a cattle prod,” and sounding like “the plaintive shiver of leaves lining trees on a riverbank.”
Since the first section of the novel is set in 1974, much of the soundtrack is rock of the stripe now called “classic,” yet the songs Earl listens to are less time marker than a psychic presence in his emotional life. After a wrongful conviction for murder, he spends four decades in prison. When he is released, he is shocked and pleased to find that the music of his youth has come back in style among the young people he meets in coastal Oregon, where he resettles. Records have also resurged, though they are now, to Earl’s slight confusion, called “vinyl.”
Music is playing constantly in this novel, either on the radio, the stereo, or in Earl’s head. I’ve chosen just a few of the songs that I hope suggest the shifting mood of the novel.
“I am the Light of this World,” Rev. Gary Davis
Obviously this merits top billing because it is the title. Like me, Earl would have heard the song on Jorma Kaukonen’s lovely album “Quah.” Though the title of the song comes from the Bible, Earl’s attachment comes from the lines “Tell everybody in this world/I am the light of this world,” which, before he loses his place, and after he briefly recovers it, suggests his understanding of his world as new, fresh, mysterious, meaningful.
“Goodnight Irene,” Leadbelly
Everywhere he goes as a boy, Earl carries with him a copy of Lead Belly’s biography. Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter was from just across the Louisiana state line from Stovall, Texas, and Earl is originally from Bossier City, Louisiana. So there is the local connection, but Earl is more interested in the story of Lead Belly’s incarceration and his parole due to his musical talent. Like all great songs, the lyrics are both inscrutable and mysterious, and Earl spends a great deal of time pondering the meaning of certain lines. What does Lead Belly mean when he says he will “get” Irene in his dreams? Earl, so attuned to his waking dreams, thinks of the song as a slightly terrifying lullaby.
“I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” Hank Williams
Earl’s father is absentee, which makes this song that Earl learned from him all the more important, but its imagery—lonesome whippoorwills, whining trains, moons crying behind clouds, weeping robins, falling stars lighting purple skies---would have stimulated Earl’s tendency to romanticize the melancholy. And there is also the transcendent pedal steel playing of Don Helms that makes this song so unforgettable.
The entirety of Tres Hombres, ZZ Top
When Earl tells his mother that his father said Tres Hombres was recorded right up the road in Tyler, Texas, which Earl later cites as a good place to drop an atomic bomb, and his mom expresses doubts (much of what Earl’s father says is dubious) Earl decides that his father might lie about having another family in Arkansas, but never about ZZ Top.
“Love in Vain,” Robert Johnson
As in the case of the title song, Earl would have heard this version second hand—from the Rolling Stones rendition on “Let It Bleed.” And as with “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” Earl is drawn to the melancholy poetry of the song, especially the lines “The blue light was my baby/the red light was my mind.” Increasingly convinced that his mind is lit red by what happens to him, Earl repeats these lines throughout the novel.
“Ride, Captain, Ride” Blues Image, “Brandy (you’re a fine girl)” Looking Glass
Earl hears these songs when he arrives at Barton Springs Pool in Austin, where a pivotal scene in the novel takes place. Earl, like most music lovers, is a bit of a snob. Disposable pop songs he has a special term for—"garbage food from a chain store”—though like most music lovers, he has his guilty pleasures among the garbage food. That he hears these songs at a place that is immediately lovely and mysterious to him makes their peppiness both more infectious and less disposable.
“Gimme Shelter,” Rolling Stones
Some of the songs that are most dear to me I used in this novel in ways that underscored actions that were difficult to write about and difficult for some people to read. I did not want the songs to be sullied, for me or for the reader. But finally it is a technical decision, this pairing of song with action, and I remind myself to think of it in the same way as I think about point of view, or narrative rhythm. And despite its oft-cited description as the death-knell of the 60’s and the anthem ushering in darker days, this song is incapable of being tainted. Because: Merry Clayton. Because: Best intro in rock music. Because: ineffable, haunting, inexhaustible.
“I’d Love to Change the World,” Ten Years After/”(Don’t fear) the Reaper,” Blue Oyster Cult, /“Reeling in the Years,” Steely Dan
The early seventies advent of FM radio was a major development for those of us who could not afford an eight-track player in our cars and were thus left to the tyrannical tastes of the D.J. This song sequence in a commercial-free set sends Earl--stoned and riding across Austin on a sunny afternoon in a convertible Karmann Ghia—into a near rapturous state.
“Sway,” “Time Waits for No One,” The Rolling Stones
Earl quotes the lyrics of “Sway”—unwisely, to his lawyer’s mind—in his confession to the police. “Did you ever wake up to find/the day that broke up your mind/destroyed your notion of circular time” is not likely to play well in front of a jury, according to Earl’s lawyer Arthur.
Instead of passing time in prison by scratching days on the walls on his cell, Earl wrote out guitar solos on sheets of sketch pad. “Mick Taylor’s solo (on ‘Time Waits for No One) was a staircase. You got to the top and then started up again. When you reached a landing, down you came.”
“After Midnight,” J.J. Cale
Arthur mostly shares Earl’s taste in music, and they are prone to protracted discussions of the Tulsa Sound that produced Leon Russell and J.J. Cale. Arthur falls on the Leon Russell side; Earl, in keeping with his more subtle, quiet nature, sides with the lesser-known but equally talented Cale. Their discussions about music, biscuits, words, sexuality and family become a lifeline for Earl; Arthur takes him seriously in a way no one in his family ever has, and the two stay in touch until Arthur dies before Earl is released from prison.
"Samba Pa Ti,” Santana
This instrumental closes the novel, and—as I hope all the songs do--follows the mood of the scene: slow and wistful as Earl drifts off to sleep, then faster and more frenzied as the action turns violent.
The author of seven novels and three collections of stories, Michael Parker has been awarded four career-achievement awards: the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature, the R. Hunt Parker Award, and the 2020 Thomas Wolfe Prize. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Oxford American, Runner’s World, Men's Journal, and others. He is a three-time winner of the O. Henry Prize for his short fiction and his work has appeared in dozens of magazines and several anthologies. He taught for twenty-seven years in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and since 2009 he has been on the faculty of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. He lives in Austin, Texas.
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