Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America
By Tom Piazza
A review by James Scott Cullen
Tom Piazza wants to show you something… something “just underneath the surface,” and maybe “a little too close for comfort.” Take you somewhere. Through “small makeshift barrelhouses” populated by “itinerant musicians” that suggest all the protean possibilities, the optimism, of the Great American Experiment. A vast new continent with dispossessed kings, Moses-like, gazing on the Promised Land that they know they can never enter. A savior who offered no “answers” but instead “pointed to larger questions about the nature of life,” fully knowing his salvation lay in leaving “the garden.” Into the darker alleys of experience where the emulsion of America has, “in the centrifuge of the accelerating world… separated out,” the tensions, which held it “in solution,” now promising to “blow off the roof.” And literally it was, “as Katrina tore roofs and walls off houses and scattered people’s most personal belongings… into public view,” along with issues of race, poverty, inequity, and “a government that had broken its promises.” Murky waters filled with “new and unfamiliar information” where “provisional sense” was the only sense possible, but where “the faith to hang” in leads, thankfully, to a measure of “grace.”
If Devil Sent the Rain is New Orleans writer Tom Piazza’s own personal “fever chart of the past fifteen years,” it could be argued that it is our Nation’s as well. He improvises, feints, and jabs, struggling with the questions that our nation has always struggled with: the role of art and artist in society; individuality and “the fluidity of identity” in an increasing monotone world; whether to “Trust the song” or “the singer”; the tensions of race and class held tenuously together; the understanding of place and acceptance within that place, and what it means to the individual, and to society; what happens when that place is lost; how do we – can we ever really – start over or attain grace? Alternately – and often concurrently — incisive, funny, obsessive, elegiac, and ultimately optimistic, Piazza’s collection sings the body electric in the best tradition of Whitman, and commands place and time in a way that would surely make Mailer smile.
Piazza begins the collection in Part I by examining the dual depression era stories of Jimmie Rodgers, a white country singer, and Charlie Patton, a Mississippi Delta blues musician. Contrasting, in separate essays, the fluid and popular Rodgers, with Patton, “who left an aftertaste that burned,” Piazza’s sets the tone for everything to follow. We are introduced to the individual and the cult of personality. To the sacred and the profane. To the prescient element of danger, the “dark, rough, uncut sound” that would become rock and roll. The understanding that all this energy left to “percolate under the surface” was inevitably headed “to a boil,” a subterranean gas that was a lit match away from all hell breaking loose.
As we roll through the South, freight train-like, we encounter a series of Promethean characters, all, in some strange way, promising salvation, authenticity, and a salve for a civilization that seems increasingly opaque. We meet Reverend Morganfield, Muddy Waters’s cousin, who notes with no irony that “when (he) went on and started preaching… everything began to fall into place” as he opens the door to his Lincoln Town Car. In one of the best stories of the collection, we are introduced to Jimmy Martin, the “unknown” King of Bluegrass, preternaturally gifted yet the proverbial fart in church, the “corn liquor at a polite wine tasting,” bereft of his kingdom, and the acceptance of the Grand Ole Opery community. And we are charmed by Carl Perkins, “The Lost Man of Rock and Roll,” who never suffered from fame, yet managed to find grace.
At the physical and spiritual center of the collection, Piazza treats us to a series of essays on Bob Dylan, the embodiment of “possibilities for both personal and societal transformation” as well as a unique idiom of “American artist(ry).” The struggle of the artist — the individual — replete with all of the consequences “of choice” and “judgment” is central to this discussion. This is where the song and the singer become inexorably linked, where “the human heart is revealed, striving after that which will heal it, ennoble it, and, finally, save it from itself.” The genius of Dylan, and what makes him a seminal figure, is not simply his artistry, but his humanity. This is something Piazza will bring into sharp focus in Part III in “The Devil and Gustave Flaubert” as he examines Flaubert’s “weakness of character” despite his “literary genius.”
Devil Sent the Rain really becomes electric, however, in Part II, as Piazza tries to navigate a world gone wrong, frantically searching for connection and order in a post-Katrina world. The steady backbeat of New Orleans that anchored Piazza’s social and artistic improvisations had stopped. The exoskeleton had been torn asunder, replaced with “new and unfamiliar information,” and order was whatever you could make of it. In “Charlie Chan in New Orleans” Piazza mordantly recounts his attempts at “provisional sense” by obsessively watching Charlie Chan videos. Two musical pieces, “Blues Streak” and “Going Back to New Orleans,” the stories of Jelly Roll Morton and Joe Liggins, respectively, give voice to the not only the historical but continuing importance of New Orleans. Morton is the “Johnny Appleseed of jazz,” cross-pollinating American music with a style forged in “the hothouse environment of Storyville.” For Liggins (and seemingly Piazza) “as for so many, New Orleans was a place where he could connect all the different parts of himself.”
The intensity and outrage continue to build in subsequent pieces on post-Katrina New Orleans as Piazza defends “a small model of all the best of America” against the cries of those who wish to blow the trumpets at her walls: religious zealots; sophists; tax-concerned citizens who clearly forgot the “United” in States of America; eugenicists; and profiteering politicians and corporations wanting “a shiny monument to their own power and ego.” Throughout these attacks Piazza “wields his politeness like a sword,” revealing the truth about not just about New Orleans, but the state of our nation, still in our infancy and filling our collective “diaper” without the sense to realize we are sitting in our own excrement.
If all this is too much, and I can see how it might be, take heart. Tom Piazza is an optimist. I need no other proof of this than his continuing residency in the City of New Orleans. And Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America is far from despairing, because even at its darkest moments, it is always rife with the possibility: the possibility of grace in unlikely places. This is illustrated poignantly in “Norman Mailer: A Remembrance” from Part II and “Note in a Bottle” from Part III. While I don’t want to give too much away, the former starts with a letter, and ends in a friendship, while the latter explores the connection between love and understanding, faith and grace against the backdrop of old 78’s. Together, they are a kind of coda, a way of understanding friendship and love, a “thank you” for “grace” that “no one has a right to expect in life.”
If, Flaubert’s fatal flaw is “his cynicism” that has “left a wound in all of us who followed him,” Piazza’s saving grace is his boundless humanity. Devil Sent the Rain is rich with detail, perspective, and place. Its true richness, however, is its empathy, its understanding of our common condition, as we, as New Orleans, as a Nation, try to reclaim the path to grace.
