Review: Music In The Gumbo
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 28, 2011
Doc Smith knows New Orleans. You can feel it in this book. Doc knows the ins and outs of the human mind. The places and spaces he takes you to prove that. But the real soul of The Drummer is not the desperation of Mearle's course at the end of a life. The soul of the book is the unheard music. It's the beat that rumbles under your shoes, so real and strong while you're reading, that you keep looking down to see where it's coming from. The story is as real as the right-between-your-eyes smack of Gumbo, thick and black as bottom mud out of the river. But that's not the thang of it, brother. The thang of it is: Leadbelly, Bessie Smith, Armstrong, Willie The Lion, Neville (all of them Nevilles), Doctor John and too many other blues/jazz/zydeco/cajun/blackwater/slave/voudon voices to list. Broke down and broke out, it's the music of the town that Doc Smith plays for you. All the music, all of it in history, playin' in your head while you're reading about dirty deeds and desperate people in a definitive city. Doc writes New Orleans from a real knowledge of that broken glass place. Like Big Bill Broonzey used to say about Jack Daniels Black Label: "Man don't like that? He gotta be crazy."Same thing for The Drummer.