When the music changed the story
In previous writing, I used music sometimes to set mood, or to give my writing energy, or to daydream. With Our Child of the Stars, the music marched in, expecting a bigger role. Here’s how the music changed the book.
It came to me… A scene was small town America, the end of the Sixties, and fall sunlight lit up her patchwork quilt of bright leaves. Molly was sewing her son Cory’s Halloween costume against the clock, and she’d had to lock him out of the room to get it done. How Molly and Gene loved him, and how they feared for his safety. Only a handful of people knew that Cory existed.
Music was playing on a record player… Molly’s favourite singer, a specific image of a folk singer with long dark hair. It took me weeks to figure out it was Joan Baez singing Farewell Angelina – an elusive song of love and loss.
“… the LP worn from years of enjoyment. Joan Baez filled the house with music, that extraordinary voice making mournful love to the air so the whole house became sad and beautiful.”
Molly’s favourite singer – that had to mean something. I knew far more of Baez’s CV than her work. I soaked myself in her music and many others known and new to me. Baez was and is a musician who uses her talent to fight injustice with beauty… a focused anger and compassion from that era of bright promise, and endless war.
Music became more important as I wrote the book. Gene always had a guitar I think but the music grew and he became more of a musician. Molly remembers their marriage day.
“Gene stood grinning in his best suit, with the flower in his lapel crooked. He was the one for her. The people they loved had come to support them and neither of them tripped over the words. Then off to dance, to his choices and hers: ‘Stop! in the Name of Love’, the Temptations and the Supremes. Peter, Paul and Mary, the Byrds, the Beatles and the Stones.”
The one song cited is ironic, foreshadowing. The beautiful marriage enters stormy waters – tragedy, depression, alcoholism. Gene strays but how far? I played those songs and others about broken hearts, as I decided, how far could he go and the marriage still be healable. Again, the choice of song was unconscious but sharp in its meaning. Gene Stops! He changes his mind at the motel door…
In American Pie McLean shows as so many did the growing disenchantment at the end of the Sixties, entering the Seventies. You cannot understand the time without seeing how many people did not have flowers in their hair. The majority of young people voted for Nixon in 1972. Unpicking this, and hearing other voices from that era, helped me understand. It flowed naturally to me that Molly and Gene had friends they disagreed with – they would find decency in unexpected places.
The Meteor brought fire and destruction, and a wounded boy – the only survivor of a tragedy in space – a boy they call Cory. He learns English and Earth music with enormous enthusiasm. Cory fizzes – he is childhood turned up to 11 – eager to learn, make friends, and explore – he brings delight back into Gene and Molly’s life. Yet he finds Earth’s cruelties are challenging – his world has no war, no starvation.
It was important to me that he did not look human and that we should overcome our prejudices. He is traumatised by the loss of his mother and his friends. In the early weeks, he adopts Where Have All The Flowers Gone as a ritual song of letting go his dead mother and the many others of his kind who died. For him it becomes a night-time song to remember and heal.
We shall overcome keeps turning up– a song of many roots – fashioned by a Black preacher, then a song of the labour movement, then civil rights and the opposition to war… Gene plays it to Cory when they first meet because it’s a party piece and Gene has run through the obvious children’s songs. It’s a song Baez also sings for a very serious purpose at a crucial point in the book. I found writing about the Sixties was also writing about the challenges of our time.
Gene and Molly wrangle about Gene’s passion for science fiction and support for space travel – Molly thinks caring for people on earth should take priority. Of course, the irony is, Gene’s ‘stupid space stories’ turn out to have a purpose. I loved the humour and anger in Gill Scott-Heron’s performance piece, Whitey’s On the Moon – it didn’t end up in the final edit but there’s a taste of in Molly’s argument under a full moon.
Many of the songs across the two books are ones I invented, as artists respond to the events that do not happen in our version of history. In Our Child of Two Worlds, the family face bigger dangers, and everything they take for granted is under threat. For if Cory’s people come and take him away, they will break Molly’s heart.
The world is both beautiful and sometimes unforgiving – humanity rises to love and loyalty and courage and compassion, yet we add to the inevitable darkness too. Yet we have hope and humour and music. Our Child of the Stars (and Our Child of Two Worlds) make a single story about family, friendship and what we owe each other – how love grabs us and makes us vulnerable – about how love in all its forms has a price. This ordinary and extraordinary family make a song of hope about how things could be.
Joan Baez – “Farewell Angelina”
Joan Baez “We Shall Overcome” (at the March on Washington with MLK)
The Supremes “Stop in the Name of Love” –
Gill Scott-Heron – “Whitey’s On The Moon”
Don McLean – “American Pie”
Pete Seeger “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”
