“Artfully combining fact and fiction, this is storytelling at its best, with a plot that surprises at every twist and turn.”
–Fortean Times Magazine
“Poignant. . . Insightful. . . A heartening read for blues fans as well as anyone interested in the history of American music and civil rights.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Fast, powerful, and entertaining. From upstate New York to the Mississippi Delta, Cross Dog Blues is a thrilling journey through the American landscape that spans from 1903 to 2002 and plays out over the wails of the birth of the Delta blues.
1915: In a moonlit room in a boarding house in Texas, Charlie Patton–the enigmatic “inventor” of blues music–founds a shadowy alliance with Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter and Blind Lemon Jefferson. A pact is made, and the seeds of revolution are sown. Back at the Dockery Plantation in the Mississippi Delta, with the help of the likes of Son House, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, and others, Charlie’s plan spreads across the South, and then across the country. But these bluesmen have no way of knowing where this dangerous road will lead–or who is watching.
2002: Franklyn O’Connor–an adventurous and penniless youth–sits at the lonely train station in his small upstate New York hometown holding a one-way ticket to the Crossroads in the Mississippi Delta. There he hopes to track down his father, who disappeared when Frank was five. With nothing but his rucksack and the unsolicited assistance of a little old man called Furry Jenkins, Frank soon unwittingly drifts into the middle of a combustible racial feud at the intersection of a still divided society, a shocking truth waiting down the line.
With the rambling pioneers of blues music leading an unforgettable cast of characters, this raw, rousing, and adventurous debut novel delivers a breathtaking view of life, livin’, love, and hate in America in the 20th century, and the mysterious beginnings of the music that provided the soundtrack for it all.
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