“Black Country” is one of those stories that I pull out when I just want to enjoy words at their most direct. The clean, crisp stuff that grabs you right away. Relentless movement can clear a lot of garbage out of your head.
Also, pretty much every time I read it, I buy some jazz CDs afterward.
“Black Country” is a jazz story and Charles Beaumont is all hopped up on it. His prose darts this way and that. There’s ferocious energy to it, a luminous joy even, as it deals with difficult people.
Our narrator is a drummer in a jazz combo, which is perfect. His words are blunt, but always musical. He sees everything. He’s always there, keeping time, driving the rhythm. The people in this story never have heart-to-heart conversations–at least not in words. They communicate with music and, thanks to this guy, we don’t miss a thing.
I’ve always loved the beginning. Listen to it:
“Spoof Collins blew his brains out, all right–right on through the top of his head. But I don’t mean with a gun. I mean with a horn. Every night: slow and easy, eight to one. And that’s how he died. Climbing, with that horn, climbing up high. For what? ‘Hey, man, Spoof–listen, you picked the tree, now come on down!‘ But he couldn’t come down, he didn’t know how. He just kept climbing, higher and higher. And then he fell. Or jumped. Anyhow, that’s the way he died.
“The bullet didn’t kill anything. I’m talking about the one that tore up the top of his mouth. It didn’t kill anything that wasn’t dead already. Spoof just put in an extra note, that’s all”
The story begins at the funeral for Spoof Collins, tortured trumpet genius and band leader, and never really leaves it. Even as the years pass, even after saxophonist-turned-trumpeter Sonny Holmes assumes the leadership role in the group, Spoof’s vision and the memory of him–no matter how downright mean he could be–remains a part of everything that they do.
Music is everything here. No one has a family. Everyone has given up on any semblance of a normal life. It’s not on the table. No one even talks about it.
Charles Beaumont gets WAY into that. He’s interested in sound and where it comes from, not just from instruments, but from souls; and not just from souls, but from history (black history); and not just from history, but from some calling that leads people down the bohemian path. Beaumont’s jazzbos would die for their music. They don’t care about fame or money. Nailing an elusive sound in a rural nightclub is victory enough.
Beaumont is known mostly as a science-fiction writer. His most high profile credits are for scripting several episodes of The Twilight Zone in its old school heyday.
There’s a macabre twist to “Black Country” that I won’t spoil except to say that no, it doesn’t involve anything supernatural. Also, it’s the perfect way to end a story of people devoted to working endlessly toward a perfection that will always be just out of their grasp. Unless they take desperate measures.
These people will never be normal. Their stories will always be strange and sad… and beautiful.
TRIVIA: “Black Country” was the first piece of original fiction published in Playboy magazine. 1955. Appropriately, it’s the very first story in the stunning Playboy Stories collection (1994, Dutton Signet, editor: Alice K. Turner) alongside works by the likes of James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Haruki Murakami and too many other luminaries.