Cristina Deptula on Jordan Dotson’s The Ballad of Falling Rock

A character in Jordan Dotson’s The Ballad of Falling Rock wonders about singer Saul Crabtree: “Don’t he understand that a story ain’t a song and a song ain’t a story, and there ain’t nothing in between?” Yet, this book becomes both a song and a story through its rhythms, motifs, and lyrical prose, telling of the many sorrows of life, past and present, and how they can be withstood through family and community.

The Ballad of Falling Rock is a deeply Appalachian novel, full of country roads, abandoned mines, big game schools, and Southern quirk, such as a town named Dante (rhymes with “ain’t”). The culture presented contains a few stereotypical elements, including snake handlers, but never descends into mocking the characters. Local residents are proud of where they live, asserting to an outsider during a storytelling contest that they belong to “Appa-LATCH-a” and pointing out to him that a “man needs to knock before he walks through a door, it’s called being polite.”

We follow a family over three generations, beginning with preacher’s son and musician Saul Crabtree, who bucks the social climate at his tuberculosis sanitarium to befriend Sid, its only Black resident. When a place opens up at the Black sanitarium, Sid has to leave, but gives Saul a parting gift of a guitar. Playing it enchants the other residents, particularly the ethereal and vivacious Betty.  When the entire place joins Saul and Betty in sneaking out at night for fits of secret romantic passion, health officials decide everyone’s well enough to go back home. Saul and Betty return to town and marry, but Betty dies tragically during childbirth.

After her death, Saul, his sister Annie, and their young son, Lee, mysteriously disappear, and neighbors spread rumors of seeing their ghosts. An old high school friend, Peggy, comes over to visit and clean up the place, discovering that the stories of the house being haunted are true. As she reflects, while weeding the bloodroots in the lawn and rinsing out the old washtub, to Saul’s consternation,  it’s not “age or doom” that has brought the house and family close to ruin, but “inexorable sorrow.” Physical death is not required for a person to become a ghost: A grief too great for a person to bear can also bring about this transformation.

Peggy’s compassion and eventual romantic love for Saul, and the friendship of old Luther, who shares Saul’s passion for music, eventually bring him and the nearly feral Lee back to life. Saul is still haunted by his losses, but Lee finds grounding through faith, church ministry, and his eventual marriage. The rest of the novel focuses on Lee’s son Eli, also a musician, who sings the national anthem before football games at his high school before inexplicably losing his voice. This drives him to seek out the mystery behind his family and his grandfather’s incredible but spooky musical abilities.

Music, whether sung by church choirs, played on jukeboxes, or performed by troubadours or traveling revival preachers with guitars, takes center stage as a theme and motif. Songs are tied in with love, death, and the supernatural, with church and Christianity, the uncanny and ghostly, and traditional Cherokee tales. Tunes have the power to inspire passion for one’s lover or for God: The memory of Saul’s music leads to a regional religious revival, inspiring even pigs to get “baptised” by running into the trough during a rainstorm. Later, Lee brings young Eli onstage at church to sing, and his hymn inspires “thirty-six souls to commit their lives to the Holy Ghost, three ladies’ perms to turn white, and two babies to say their first words.”

Yet, the same music can end lives as well, depending on the circumstances and state of mind of the singer. Saul’s father announces that he “thinks he’ll die” one day while grieving the death of his wife, and passes away “singing a hymn none of his children had heard before, a hymn about reunion.” The doctor lists the cause of death as a broken heart. Many years later, Eli nearly kills his high school sweetheart, Reagan, by sneaking off to snatch his grandfather’s guitar and playing her an enchanted love song that drives her into a coma.

The prose reaches heights and depths of exquisite beauty, inspiring readers to go back over much of the text multiple times. In a dusty attic, “sunlight slanted through a bubbled, wavy window. It turns the dust whorls floating in the air into a beam of fine, subtle gold.” On another day, evening “arrayed itself with the sound of moonlight. It soaked in the quiet of creeping catalpa and kudzu leaves on the ground.” This lyricism, and the repeated chorus-like motifs of singing, grief, hymns, and guitars across multiple generations of characters, make The Ballad of Falling Rock feel more like a song than a novel.

Near the end of the novel, Luther, the band director at Eli’s high school, whom Eli thinks is a strange old man, takes him aside and explains the origin of the “cursed” song that is rumored to be so sad it can literally break people’s hearts.  It’s the titular “Ballad of Falling Rock,” given to a Cherokee man after death by his ancestors, hoping it would give him the power to find and reunite with his wife and child, who had been murdered by their fellow settlers who were unhappy about their marriage. Falling Rock now travels the world as a spirit listening for the song that represents deep love and matchless grief, and stops where he finds bits of that soulful tune, including right here in Appalachia, where he once lived. Through this ending, Dotson pays honor to its Appalachian characters by asserting that their songs and feelings are among the world’s most true and meaningful. Ever since the early days of the Cherokees, love, music, and sorrow have intermingled in the region.

Two verses of the song Falling Rock received read:

With harmony it conquered death
And wrote its names in stars.

 

...

 

But sung alone it turned life into
Death, and broke men’s hearts

And we see that music, like grief, can break hearts and lives when we are isolated, but can bring life and joy when we come together. The Ballad of Falling Rock ends with a family and neighborhood gathering, a celebration of love, family, community, and culture. Reagan, well out of her coma, joins Eli and a few generations of his relatives for a large shared meal, jokes, and stories. The “curse” has been lifted, and people are free to enjoy the music and each other. As Saul learned from his friend Sid in the sanatorium, “friendship is more powerful than any curse.”