Play Pretty Blues: A Novel of the Life of Robert Johnson

I am reading an amazing book - Play Pretty Blues by Snowden Wright. It's a novel about Blues great Robert Johnson told from the perspective of his primary wives/girlfriends who serve as a Greek Chorus of sorts and view his life from afar.

Johnson's life is as much myth and legend as fact (he was the musician who met the Devil at the Crossroads), and Wright works in and out of fact and fiction in this novel in a way that can only be considered musical in the best sort of the way. This is great writing, inventive and smart and incredibly engaging. I've been a Johnson fan forever so I'm the perfect audience for it, but anyone interested in southern writing or a novel steeped in music history will fall hard for it. I'll be reviewing this one down the line; I'll keep ya posted on that and my continued reading of it.

Here's a bit though to give you an idea of the language:

We have lived in the shadow of a ghost. In the first few years after his demise, some of us migrated north to St. Louis and Chicago, some of us west to Texas and Oklahoma, all in trace of the path taken by his posthumous musical influence. Claudette collected a dossier of evidence of his life and death, including fingerprints, oral accounts, facial sketches, Mason jars of sampled soil, photographs and lithographs and phonographs, vials, beakers, bottles, locks of hair hermetically sealed in Tupperware and Glad-Lock. Mary Sue, the oldest of us, seduced every headliner she heard cover a Robert Johnson song. Tabitha, the youngest, spent years harassing his murderer's family with coins glued to their porch's floorboards, caps twisted loose on their salt shakers, and staples removed from their Swingline. Betty sought solace in the bottle. Helena, who never forgave herself not not bearing our mutual husband an heir, eventually married a writer of crossword puzzles and gave birth to three boys named various anagrams of "Robert Johnson."