The Devil's Dream (review)

Abstract

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS Opinions and Reviews Lee Smith. The Devil's Dream. New York: Putnam, 1992. 315 pp. $21.95. The Devil's Dream shows again Lee Smith's talent for spinning a good yam. This, her tenth work of fiction, tracing the triumphs and the heartbreaks of a country music family through four generations, has the hearty flavor of a hot, homemade biscuit on a cold morning, and it's just as satisfying. This latest novel departs from the first-person, epistolary format of Fair and Tender Ladies (1988) and returns to the multiple narrators of Oral History (1983). A prologue set in contemporary times introduces the singing Bailey family, reuniting at the Opryland Hotel to cut an album entitled "Shall We Gather at the River," a tide that pacifies the religious zeal of country star Katie Cocker's mamma. In between this prologue and the epilogue, the reader is privileged to hear numerous voices. First is Old Man Ira Keen, who recounts how the musical Bailey family, probably modeled on the A. P. Carter dynasty, began in 1833 or 1834 when Preacherman Sid Bailey's son Moses married fifteen-year-old Kate Malone and "brung her over to Cold Spring Holler to live," taking her away from her fiddle-playing family, whose music he saw as the work of the devil. This conflict between the strict tenets of the Primitive Baptist religion and the sometimes profligate bent of the music-loving side of the Bailey family weaves throughout the book, culminating in Katie Cocker's account of her salvation in the Hallelujah congregation after her husband, bluegrass prodigy Ralph Handy, dies in an accident. Like harmonizing instruments, the individual voices in The Devil's Dream remain distinct while blending into the intricate melody of a family's history. Each voice registers authentic regional speech that transforms with the passing decades and changing locales. The multiple narrators, mosdy first-person but including an occasional third-person omniscient storyteller, reveal how K C. Bailey, a Melungeon, starts the Grassy Branch Girls, how Virgie breaks off and organizes Mamma Rainette and the Raindrops, how Rose Annie leaves her husband to join her childhood sweetheart, rockabilly star Blackjack Johnny Raines, as his Queen of Country Music. As usual, Smith gets out of the way to let the characters tell their own stories, all vibrant with sexual and romantic fervor that leads to bliss as well as tragedy, a combination that Katie Cocker wants to examine in her Grassy Branch heritage: There was a time when all I wanted to do was get out of that valley. I was just dying to get away from home. ... It took me a long time to 64 understand that not a one of us lives alone, outside of our family or our time, and that who we are depends on who we were, and who our people were. Smith's lyrical evocation of the time, place, and people ofthe Bailey family pays a fine tribute not only to the country music artists to whom she dedicates the book but to her own talent as well. The candid voices of her Appalachian characters are as fortifying as a good country song. —Rebecca Smith Cratis D. Williams. Southern Mountain Speech. Berea, Kentucky: Berea College Press, 1992. Edited, with an introduction and glossary, by Jim Wayne Miller and Loyal Jones. 133 pp. $14.95. Cratis Williams's observations on language and speech communication were first published in Mountain Life & Work (1961-1967) and in The North Carolina Historical Review (1978). Here they have been collected and edited by Jim Wayne Miller and Loyal Jones, with appendixes, a bibliography, and a useful introduction. As Miller says, Williams was not a linguist. Moreover, his was a popular audience rather than a group of specialists. Nonetheless, "his work on Appalachian folk speech is remarkably free of misconceptions." It is also eclectic, touching upon phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, and dialect history. Williams's ten essays are good starting points for the study of Appalachian speech as well as for readers more casually interested in the people of the Southern Appalachian region. Miller's scholarly introduction to this volume offers keen perspective on the...