Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California by Gerald W. Haslam

Abstract

B O O K R E V IE W S 395 Burning Brightly: John Steinbeck on Stage. By Orval Bronson. Nevada City, Calif.: Bronson, 2000. 116 pages, $45.00. Reviewed by Jacqueline Koenig Carefree, Arizona According to Orval Bronson, John Steinbeck’s works, more than those of any of his contemporaries, have been adapted to the stage. Two operas, two ballets, three musicals, and more than twenty plays have been performed. Bronson notes, “Steinbeck’s writing has always been attractive to adapters and composers” (100). The first Broadway show of O f Mice and Men, at the Music Box Theatre in 1937, starred Broderick Crawford as Lennie, Wallace Ford as George, and Claire Luce as Curley’s wife, and it won the New York Drama Critics Award for the sea­ son’s best play. The play has been running throughout the world ever since. Steinbeck loved Broadway and had toyed with playwriting since 1932. After marrying stage manager Elaine Anderson Scott in 1950, he especially craved a Broadway success. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen until twenty-two years after Steinbeck’s death when The Grapes of Wrath was awarded the 1990 Tony Award for Best Play and won the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Play. It also won a Tony for Best Director. More than thirty English-language premieres are included in Bronson’s book, setting forth data, cast, review coverage, and bibliographical research along with photographs of rare playbills and actual scenes. Indexed, it is an invaluable tool in Steinbeckiana. Western Stage at Hartnell College in Salinas for twenty years has been mesmerizing audiences with O f Mice and Men, East of Eden, Cannery Row, Travels with Charley, and Viva Zapata. As Bronson observes, “The curtain never falls on John Steinbeck” (100). Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California. By Gerald W. Haslam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. 380 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Marek Breiger Hayward, California We were a stone’s throw, it seemed, from John Steinbeck’s and Doc Ricketts’s Cannery Row. It was late in the evening at Asilomar and the fog was coming in from the Pacific outside the Marlin Room, where Gerald Haslam had delivered a moving, scholarly, riveting presentation— a history of California’s country music, based on his new book, Workin’ Man Blues, the best book written about the subject. Almost everyone had left when a middle-aged man, perhaps a year or two older than my forty-eight years, approached the author and shook Haslam’s hand. “I was thinking I wouldn’t come,” the man said. “My people came across 396 WAL 36.4 W INTER 2002 from Texas with my grandparents in 1938 and were in the camps outside Arvin. I teach close by there now but I can’t bear to visit the camps.” And the man, a teacher of English, heavyset, dark with the look of Indian as well as Anglo roots, retold stories told to him by his parents and grandparents of the indignities visited upon his people: the locked-in camps, the starvation wages, the baby dying— Steinbeck’s writing again given flesh from memory, the embodiment of The Grapes of Wrath. And I was reminded of another late evening when my grandfather was in Cedars-Sinai, and my father, who as a young American Jewish G.I. had been in Dachau, searching D.P. camps for relatives and relatives of friends, had listened to an elderly woman who had lived through the Holocaust tell the story of what she had suffered, understanding my father to be a witness to her history. It was her story but our story too. I wanted to tell Haslam and the teacher some of this and I did, very briefly, and perhaps not well and I felt later I should have stayed a witness to their conversation and not spoken— yet I felt compelled to make the connection that Gerald Haslam and his writing and presence had made possible. For Haslam is more than a literary artist. He is, in every way, the succes­ sor ofJack London, John Muir, John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, and Wallace Stegner. As short story writer, essayist, anthologist, novelist, historian, he...