The Gospel Singer

By Harry Crews

This is Crews first book, a well told story of a man who can sing well, really well. Well enough that people are moved to convert to Jesus by his voice alone. The difficulty is that the singer himself is less than godly and must reconcile this with himself and ultimately with his community who want to make him more than he really is. As Crews says at the beginning of the book, "Men to whom God is dead worship one another."

"Enigma, Georgia, was a dead end. The courthouse had been built square in the middle of highway 229 where it stopped abruptly on the edge of Big Harrikin Swamp like a cut ribbon. From the window of the cell on the north side of the courthouse, Willalee Bookatee Hull could see the whole town. He swayed gently, shifting his weight form one foot the other other. Behind him on a wooden table a plate of peas was congealing in a gauze of pork fat. Two biscuits lay at the side of the plate. There was a slop bucket in one corner of the cell and above it at eye level a sheet of tablet paper on which someone had written in pencil the regulation s of the Lebeau County jail.

Willalee Bookatee, in the breathless heat of the cell, swung before the brilliant square of windowlight like the pendulum of a clock. There was no sound except the steady drone of flies, stuck and sticking on the gummy edge of the plate behind him.' Page 9

"When Willalee Bookatee turned on that Muntz television and the Gospel Singer's voice slipped out into his cabin, it was balm poured into a wound. Nothing mattered. The world dropped down a great big hole. Everything - whether it was a razor cut, or a tar-scalded eye, or a burning case of clap off a Tifton high-yellow whore - everything quit but that voice and it went in his head and down his flesh to where his soul slept. And it could stand whatever it was for another week." Page 11

"'To get back to the point, though, 'Foot said. 'Because our gifts are obvious does not mean that Gerd does not have one, or at least that he doesn't fancy he does. Every Catholic knows that he could have been Pope, had circumstances just worked out right; and every criminal, even the prettiest, knows in his heart that he is really Pretty Boy Floyd or John Dillinger. Every man knows that his gift will set him free if he is just lucky enough. Or unlucky enough, depending on your point of view. '" Page 209