They were known as song catchers: New York-based chancers with recording equipment packed in the back of the van, heading south in search of hill country music that could make the record company (and, relatively, the recorder) rich. The singer would get a flat fee of $30. Among themselves, over a beer, the catchers called it panning for gold, diving for pearls, trapping fireflies in a jar. Their territory was the far beyond, where ‘people played banjos and fiddles, washboards and dulcimers… Songs poured through the hills like migrating salmon.’
Dogs scramble into treetops; bears grab at driftwood; hundreds of thousands are left homeless
Xan Brooks’s second novel focuses on one young catcher, John Coughlin, as he heads south to Appalachia in April 1927, fascinated by rumours of a black boy with an extraordinary voice. When Coughlin is brutally attacked by thugs in an Alabama fairground, he’s carried to a nearby mansion, all fluted columns and balconies, to be looked after.
Further south, in Tennessee, after weeks of torrential rain, the river is rising fast. At one imperilled levee, Mounds Landing, black workers and convicts work day and night to shore up the crumbling banks, frantically piling up sandbags and planks. Moss, a skinny black 18-year-old with wire-mended glasses and a two-dollar guitar, is employed unloading barrels of hooch, ladling out a daily tot to the convicts and labourers, the rest appropriated by white bosses. But, inevitably, there comes the dreaded moment when the flood defences are overwhelmed.
On 27 April, the Mississippi bursts its banks, surging over fields and homes, ‘a wall of water six feet high, too fast to outrun, too broad to outflank… it struck the buildings broadside, with an oil tanker’s blunt force’. It is the worst flood disaster ever experienced in America. Dogs scramble into treetops; bears grab at driftwood; hundreds of thousands are left homeless. Throughout, Brooks intertwines historical reality with his characters to vivid effect.
Far from the devastation at the plantation house, Coughlin is slowly convalescing, and mentions the pain in his lower back – his ‘tailbone’. A pause. His gracious hostess looks up from her needlework: ‘Why Mr Coughlin, you are quite the John Scopes.’ The pause should have warned him. One word, ‘tailbone’, and the ground shifts beneath his feet. The novel says no more, leaving it to the reader to summon up a Tennessee milestone: the Scopes monkey trial in 1925. Darwinism and evolution vs fundamentalist faith. That remark will have consequences.
News of the flood has reminded Coughlin of the Tennessee boy with the special voice and he’s gripped by an obsession to track him down. Moss, ingenious and determined, has clung to life, and Coughlin succeeds in finding him, though the boy is rightly suspicious of his saviour’s motives. And when the catcher returns to the mansion with Moss in tow, his welcome is disturbingly ambiguous: a savage twist on noblesse oblige and a trio of psychopathic siblings upend all expectations.
The Catchers is a spacious, sweeping novel whose canvas covers the wilds of Appalachia, raw poverty coexisting with luxury; but the author homes in on the figures in the landscape and makes you feel for the opportunistic catcher and the mistrustful boy who could bring him his big hit. There’s gallows humour and menace at a time and place when being black was to be classified as subhuman. The two share an odd-couple road trip which becomes a rite of passage. What starts out as a professional fortune hunt deepens into a fragile friendship that will be painfully tested on the road north to safety.
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