Flannery at the Grammys

FLANNERY

at the

GRAMMYS

Irwin H. Streight

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

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Cover concept: Irwin H. Streight and daughter Flannery Evangeline

Cover design: Jennifer Mixon

Copyright © 2024 by University Press of Mississippi

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Streight, Irwin Howard, 1959– author. | O’Connor, Flannery.

Title: Flannery at the Grammys / Irwin H. Streight.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024011658 (print) | LCCN 2024011659 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496825940 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496850218 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781496850225 (epub) | ISBN 9781496850232 (epub) | ISBN 9781496850249 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496850256 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: O’Connor, Flannery—Criticism and interpretation. | O’Connor, Flannery—Influence. | O’Connor, Flannery—Musical settings. | Music and literature. | Popular music—History and criticism. | Popular music—Philosophy and aesthetics.

Classification: LCC PS3565.C57 Z876 2024 (print) | LCC PS3565.C57 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20240424

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024011658

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024011659

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

In Memoriam

R. Neil Scott

1952–2012

O’Connor Scholar Generous Mentor Good Friend

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1Bruce Springsteen: The Flannery O’Connor of American Rock

CHAPTER 2Lucinda Williams: Chasing Flannery’s Peacocks

CHAPTER 3Mary Gauthier: The Brutal Hand of Grace

CHAPTER 4Kate Campbell: Equal Parts Emmylou Harris and Flannery O’Connor

CHAPTER 5Sufjan Stevens: In Flannery’s Territory

CHAPTER 6Nick Cave: In the Bleeding Stinking Mad Shadow of Jesus

CHAPTER 7PJ Harvey: Uh Huh, O’Connor

CHAPTER 8Wise Blood, Punk, and Heavy Metal

CHAPTER 9Everything That Rises

CODA Gonter Rock, Rattle and Roll

BONUS TRACKStage Names from O’Connor’s Wise Blood and Characters

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

CREDITS

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

Flannery at the Grammys

Flannery O’Connor had little interest in or appreciation of music: "All classical music sounds alike to me and all the rest of it sounds like the Beatles, she once memorably remarked. On another occasion she referred to herself as possessing the Original Tin Ear, completely unattuned to the pleasures and purposes of music, and added, I like music that is guaranteed good because I have no way of finding out for myself. O’Connor would surely be surprised and perhaps enjoy the irony that she has had a marked influence on the works of some notable contemporary American and British singer-songwriters and bands, among them Bruce Springsteen, Lucinda Williams, Mary Gauthier, Sufjan Stevens, PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, R.E.M., U2, and Tom Waits. These artists have individually received numerous awards and accolades from American and British music academies—enough to be guaranteed good."

Titling this book Flannery at the Grammys on the one hand recognizes that, to date, among the major artists discussed are two multiple Grammy Award–winning songwriters who widely acknowledge the shaping influence of O’Connor’s fiction on their art and vision, Springsteen and Williams, multiple Grammy-winning supergroups R.E.M. and U2, and four Grammy nominees: Gauthier, Stevens, Cave, and Harvey. Added to this list is double Grammy-winner Tom Waits, who acknowledges O’Connor’s influence on his songwriting. The title also alludes to the fact that O’Connor has indeed been mentioned at the Grammys, the annual televised awards ceremony for the American music industry. At the 1988 Grammys, the Irish rock band U2 was awarded the Album of the Year for The Joshua Tree and a second Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Group. In his acceptance speech, after several thank-yous, U2’s guitarist The Edge read out a list of inspiring individuals the band wished to thank, beginning with Nobel Peace Prize honorees Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King Jr., followed by Bob Dylan and—fourth from the top—Flannery O’Connor. As for O’Connor’s influence on the lyrics of U2’s celebrated recording, it is at least evident in an allusion to one of O’Connor’s story titles, The Enduring Chill, in the first line of the elegiac One Tree Hill, which refers to mourners at a funeral who turn away to face the cold, enduring chill of lives doubtless filled with some degree of guilt and sorrow.

This book presents chapter-length critical commentaries on six major singer-songwriters and a seventh of some repute whose song craft and artistic sensibilities bear an evident and acknowledged arc of Flannery O’Connor’s influence. Rock music icon Bruce Springsteen, country-blues artists Lucinda Williams and Mary Gauthier, folk gospel singer Kate Campbell, and indie composer and singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens have each acknowledged O’Connor’s considerable influence on the content and, for Springsteen and Gauthier, the narrative form of their songwriting. Australian Nick Cave and Brit PJ Harvey each deliberately draw on O’Connor’s art in creating their own. Individual works by these songwriters either consciously reflect or present the "startling figures" and Christ-haunted misfits found in O’Connor’s fiction. A further chapter examines the curious case of O’Connor’s first novel Wise Blood, a grotesque satire on contemporary irreligious American society that has had an ironic influence on songwriters in punk, heavy metal, and alternative rock genres. The penultimate chapter is a gathering of short commentaries largely on individual works by both major and minor players that borrow content from O’Connor’s fiction or are inspired by her artistic vision. The closing coda spotlights the one rock ’n’ roll rebel found in O’Connor’s fiction: the delinquent fourteen-year-old Rufus Johnson in The Lame Shall Enter First, one of her Christ-haunted prophets-in-waiting and thus a kind of metonym—a symbolic stand-in—for the likewise Christ-haunted, truth-telling singer-songwriters and pop groups discussed in the chapters that follow.

The significant presence of Flannery O’Connor in contemporary music and in other products of popular culture begs and perhaps beggars explanation. A celebrated—and in some quarters controversial—American writer, O’Connor was a devout Catholic whose active faith informed everything she wrote. A native of Georgia, she had an uncanny gift for creating compelling fiction about the world of the southern Baptist Bible Belt spanning the postwar years leading up to the civil rights advances of the mid-1960s. She died in 1964 at age thirty-nine from complications of disseminated lupus, a debilitating immune-deficiency disease that claimed her father when she was a teenager and from which she suffered for the majority of her writing life. In her brief lifetime, O’Connor published two short novels featuring southern religious fanatics, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960); a collection of ten short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955); and seven personal essays, mostly on the art of writing fiction—her brand of fiction. O’Connor’s second collection of nine stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), was published posthumously. Her corpus of short fiction, including published chapter excerpts from her novels and stories from her MFA thesis, was issued in 1971 as Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories and won a National Book Award for Fiction—an exceptional conferring of this honor for a work by a deceased author. O’Connor’s complete corpus of published fiction, along with selected essays and letters, is available in the Library of America series (no. 39) in a single volume, Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works, one of the publisher’s best-selling volumes.

Why a devout Catholic woman writer of southern gothic stories and novels, featuring largely unlikable characters and with plots invariably marked by violence and murder, would have such strong stock and visibility in contemporary popular culture is surely a matter of considerable curiosity and significant import. O’Connor’s religious orthodoxy and seemingly regressive views on matters of race and gender, so counter to the ideologies of present times, would tend to make her more a cultural pariah than a kind of contemporary prophet figure as some regard her. Why then have highly influential and successful pop music stars—Bruce Springsteen, R.E.M., and U2 among them—invoked her as an influence on their art and vision? The chapters in this book attempt to answer this question.

Christ-Haunted

Flannery O’Connor published her literary manifesto The Fiction Writer and His Country early in her career in an edited book of statements by writers on their art, The Living Novel: A Symposium (1957). In this essay, O’Connor states her case as a writer who holds strongly to theological truths: "I see by the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption in Christ and that what I see in the world, I see in its relation to that." O’Connor recognized that this was not an easy position to take in a post-Christian era, nor one easy to make evident in realistic fiction. As she remarks in her reluctantly added author’s note to the second edition of Wise Blood, reissued in 1962, That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.

It is not overly reductive to say that O’Connor wrote two novels and published nineteen short stories all ultimately intended to reveal to secular readers and to nominal Christians alike that humanity is in need of redemption through Christ. Everything she wrote converges on the figure and fact of Jesus. In her widely anthologized short story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, after a crucial car accident that begins a chain of deadly events, her character Bailey exclaims, "We’re in a terrible predicament! Yes, O’Connor appears to say, an existential, ontological predicament. And Christ is at the center of it. She puts the matter into the mouth of The Misfit, her conflicted serial killer in that story: If [Jesus] did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can." For The Misfit, committing an act of meanness against someone is all the pleasure and purpose he can find in a life lived outside of experiencing the redemptive presence of Christ.

While O’Connor the writer is Christ-centered, folks in the postwar southern society she writes about are, in her phrase, Christ-haunted and thus subject to a conflicted religiosity. She was mindful that many of her readers were like Mrs. May in her story Greenleaf, a good Christian woman with "a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true. To be Christ-haunted is to be conscious of the salvation story of the Christian gospel, to have known and perhaps encountered its transforming truth, yet rejected its mystical personal imperatives (You must be born again" [St. John 3:7]) and creedal claims. The story of the incarnation was central to O’Connor’s core beliefs and fictional practice. In her art, she uncompromisingly addresses the spiritual vacuity she observed in secular society.

It is fair to say that the major singer-songwriters in this study, with perhaps the exceptions of Kate Campbell and Sufjan Stevens, are Christ-haunted, as O’Connor uses the term. Each of them has had some form of religious formation within a denominational strain of Christianity, although only Campbell and Stevens identify as Christian. The religious elements in their song art are neither dogmatic nor suggestive of a personal system of belief. While Springsteen may be the most Catholic of the lot and therefore most closely aligned with O’Connor’s religious beliefs and sacramental worldview, he does not regularly attend mass, is raising "pagan babies" (as he tells the VH1 Storytellers audience) and has constructed a personal Jesus who does not possess godly power (as he notes in his 2016 autobiography Born to Run). Lucinda Williams is the most evidentially Christ-haunted of this subset of songwriters. Her religious heritage, from a line of southern fundamentalist preachers, including some fanatics, parallels the spiritual inheritance of O’Connor’s reluctant prophet figures Hazel Motes and Francis Marion Tarwater. In explaining the perspective she brings to her songs about fundamentalist southern religion, Atonement and Get Right with God, Williams has remarked, My life reads like a southern gothic novel. It really does. In performance, she often tells her audience to read O’Connor’s fiction in order to better understand these songs. Springsteen too has on occasion referenced O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood from the stage.

Another of the Christ-haunted is Nick Cave, who might have stepped out of the pages of Wise Blood, a novel he was obsessed with while writing his own first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989). In his considerable song corpus and his biographical/philosophical prose pieces, Cave conducts a conflicted and sometimes tortured monologue directed at God—a theodicy of sorts: an effort to make sense of the fallen world and of the human condition in light of what might be known of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and how the person and work of Christ is to be comprehended. The paradoxically named "Holy Church of Christ Without Christ" that O’Connor’s charlatan preacher Onnie Jay Holy proposes in Wise Blood would be a fit place in which to expound on the gospel according to Cave.

Does O’Connor’s Christ-haunted fiction attract the Christ-haunted artist? Is this what drew Springsteen to Wise Blood and the O’Connor stories he read around the time he was telling his dark tales about desperate characters in Nebraska? O’Connor’s Christ-haunted protagonist and blaspheming preacher-gone-wrong Hazel Motes certainly attracted Nick Cave, and Lucinda Williams has declared on numerous occasions over the years that Wise Blood is her favorite book. Mary Gauthier may not be consciously Christ-haunted, yet across the soulscape of her songs wanders a tortured individual struggling with personal demons and looking for some form of lasting redemption. As an always-recovering alcoholic, assisted through AA’s Twelve-Step program, Gauthier appears to be more grounded in faith in a Higher Power than in the Christ of the New Testament.

The Sacred within the Profane

Two circus freaks and a ubiquitous offensive lawn statue become embodied means through which the sacred is manifest in O’Connor’s art. In Parker’s Back, fourteen-year-old O. E. Parker’s vision of a tattooed man at a local fair presents him with an image of Adamic wholeness, of human completeness, though he does not know it at the time. The transformation of his soul at the story’s conclusion is predicated on his ultimately realizing and recognizing this image of wholeness in himself once the signifying presence of Christ has been incarnated in his own flesh in the sacred image tattooed on his back. In A Temple of the Holy Ghost, a hermaphrodite in an adults-only circus tent lifts their dress to display a bisexed body in like manner to a priest celebrating mass, raising the lid of a monstrance to reveal the sacramental bread of the Host within. Sacred shock is O’Connor’s preferred method of revealing the profane means of grace in her stories. For Mr. Head and his alienated grandson, Nelson, in her controversially titled story The Artificial Nigger, this shock comes as they stand in the presence of a piece of racist lawn statuary, lost in the big city of Atlanta and far from their country home, and feel touched by the action of mercy.

O’Connor shocked many of her readers, particularly her coreligionists, by suggesting in a parable-like way in her stories that the sacred may be mediated through the profane—simply defined as that which is not considered sacred or related to any form of religious practice. A nymphomaniac is the embodied presence of a divine love that desires consummation; pigs "pant with a secret life; and an artificial leg is symbolically associated with a character’s soul." The wideness of mercy and grace, the manifold, odd, and often violent ways in which the divine is encountered in human experience—these are O’Connor’s concerns as a storyteller who confesses to orthodox Christian beliefs. Art is about the human, she emphasized in her talks to students and writers’ groups, and the artist should not ignore any of the stuff of lived experience. She shows a readiness in her art to let an unlimited grace abound, and a dogged obedience to her artistic calling to tell about the meanness in this world and how it might be met with unorthodox means of redemption. Perhaps part of the attractiveness of O’Connor’s art and vision to the contemporary musicians discussed in this study is that, like her, they desire to be truth-tellers in their chosen mediums.

Whether consciously or not, all the singer-songwriters discussed at length in this study share some sense that the sacred may be revealed in the profane. In Springsteen’s Matamoros Banks, for example, the decaying and dismembered body of a drowned Mexican migrant grotesquely figures as a symbol of heavenly transformation. Mardi Gras revelers, including drag queens, prostitutes, and a voodoo priestess, form a soul parade that "winds its way down Eternity Street in Mary Gauthier’s O’Connor-inspired vision of a heaven-bound procession in Wheel inside the Wheel." In the songs of Nick Cave, sex and the sacred are intimately linked, sometimes blasphemously, sometimes not. The motif of the sacred enfleshed in or envisioned as an alluring woman runs through his extensive corpus, distilled in a song that borrows lyric substance from a Methodist hymn:

Just a closer walk with thee

Come back, honey, to me

Then I’ll be moving up close to thee

O let it be, O Lord, let it be

While O’Connor’s stories have a limited range of character types and settings, her intent is to show that the action of grace is boundless. Accessing the sacred is not limited to codified sacraments, though the act of baptism and hunger for the elements of the Eucharist figure strongly in her narratives. She invokes St. Augustine for a principle that informs her own sacramental art: "that the things of the world pour forth from God in a double way: intellectually into the minds of angels and physically into the world of things." Like the mystical English poet William Blake to whom she has been compared, O’Connor saw the mystery of the divine on every face and in every grain of red Georgia soil. Perhaps this aspect of her art also attracts the spiritual but not religious singer-songwriters included in this study.

A Prophet with Honor in Her Own Country

I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man’s fall and dishonor.

—THOMAS MERTON

From the beginning of her writing career, Flannery O’Connor had a sense of a divine source and purpose behind her writing. A prayer journal she kept from January 1946 to September 1947 while attending the University of Iowa’s prestigious Writers’ Workshop reveals her mindfulness of the spiritual grace informing whatever abilities she might have or might develop as a writer. You have given me a story, she writes prayerfully. Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument of Your story. She would later come to identify this spiritual gift as prophetic vision, a necessary quality of the writer concerned with plumbing the mystery at the heart of human meaning, what she refers to repeatedly in essays and letters as ultimate reality. In several of her letters, O’Connor intimates that her writing proceeded through a kind of divine enabling. Ultimately, you write what you can, what God gives you, she tells one correspondent. In another letter she alludes to seeking divine assistance while working in the realm of the impossible on her dramatically and structurally complex second novel, The Violent Bear It Away.

Living as a literary anchorite with the habit of art, O’Connor was in every respect a servant of the word/Word. She did not outline her novels or stories before beginning to write but wrote to discover what she had or was meant to say. I certainly have no idea how I have written some of the things I have, as they are things I am not conscious of having thought about, she confesses in a letter. Hers are understandably ghostwritten stories, perhaps Holy Ghost–written and inspired. A mystery at the heart of their creation may account for the preternatural power of her fictions that the late esteemed literary critic Harold Bloom identifies.

In her youthful prayers, O’Connor appeals to God to make her a mystic and to enable her to be the best artist she can be. Perhaps the singer-songwriters in this study recognize that mystic, prophetic voice in O’Connor’s art and are compelled by it. It might be that Bruce Springsteen said something to this effect when he exclaimed of O’Connor, She’s just incredible!

Bruce Springsteen, more so than other songwriters examined in this study, shares a spiritual formation with O’Connor. Like O’Connor, he is a cradle Catholic, raised in the teachings and rituals of the Church. For O’Connor, the facts and acts of her faith informed her artistic vision—so much so that she claimed she would not be a writer were it not for the shaping and directing influence of her Catholicism. Springsteen too has a Catholic way of understanding the human condition. Though he confesses not to hold to Catholic orthodoxy in his personal life, Springsteen the writer indisputably thinks in theological terms, as the considerable biblical imagery and religious language in his songs attest and numerous commentators have observed. What he calls the internal landscape formed by his Catholic upbringing has shaped his artistic outlook and sensibilities. Certainly, this includes the doctrine of original sin for a boy well catechized in the early 1950s at St. Rose of Lima parochial school in Freehold, New Jersey. This fundamental Christian doctrine Springsteen discerned as central to O’Connor’s fictions. In a revealing interview in the now-defunct arts magazine DoubleTake, he talks about O’Connor’s influence on the content and craft of his songwriting: There was some dark thing—a component of spirituality—that I sensed in her stories and that set me off exploring characters of my own. She knew original sin—knew how to give it the flesh of a story. Human drama, O’Connor once wrote, usually bases itself on the bedrock of original sin, whether the writer thinks in theological terms or not. She saw her own stories as being about free-willed human souls in action, struggling to find satisfaction and meaning in the sway of what she called the general mystery of incompleteness. She described the initial manuscript of her first collection of short fiction, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, as Nine stories about original sin.

So, along with a Christ-hauntedness that may draw him to O’Connor’s art and vision, there is for Springsteen in particular an artistic/theological influence grounded in her fictional dramatizations of the reality of original sin. He wrote the dark-spirited Nebraska songs and a number of songs that appear on The River after being profoundly affected by reading her stories and viewing John Huston’s film adaptation of Wise Blood. O’Connor once reflected in a letter that on the journey of faith, "You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. The older Springsteen has likewise asserted, I always wanted to base the heart of my work in the dark side of things and then find my way. His lyric explorations of a something or a more" that gnaws at the souls of the troubled characters who appear in songs on The Ghost of Tom Joad, Devils & Dust, and Western Stars continue the themes and characters he began to explore in Nebraska. Chapter 1 follows Springsteen as, with O’Connor as his guide, he writes song after song about characters who descend into the American heart of darkness. As in O’Connor’s often dimly redemptive narratives, even in Springsteen’s dark songs the careful listener can as well discern a hopeful pin point of light.

Lucinda Williams has the distinction of being the only songwriter in this study to have met Flannery O’Connor. She was four years old when her family moved to Macon, Georgia, thirty miles down the road from the O’Connor farmstead outside of Milledgeville. Her father, Miller Williams, who would become an acclaimed poet, was then making a meager living as a traveling book salesman, which gave him the opportunity and excuse to call on O’Connor. Lucinda Williams remembers waiting with her father on the porch outside the farmhouse until O’Connor flashed the blinds on her study window—a signal that her morning writing session was over and she was free to receive visitors. While her father enjoyed one of his monthly conversations with the author, young Lucinda would chase the many ducks and peacocks that roamed freely on the O’Connor farm property, known as Andalusia.

Thus, Lucinda Williams grew up with knowledge of O’Connor. Her father assigned her O’Connor’s stories and novels to read when she was a teenager, and she claims to have read everything the author wrote. Repeatedly, she has told interviewers that O’Connor’s Wise Blood is her favorite book and director John Huston’s film adaptation of it her favorite movie. The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll records her acknowledgment that O’Connor is a major influence on her songwriting.

Williams was raised in the shadow of the hellfire religion of southern Pentecostalism, the ethos of O’Connor’s fiction. Her two grandfathers were Methodist preachers, on her mother’s side of the rabid sort—like Hazel Motes’s waspish circuit-riding grandfather who preached with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger. And for a time Williams was fascinated with the extreme expressions of southern religious fanaticism, experiences that inform the content of the uncomfortable lyrics to her songs Atonement and Get Right with God.

Much of Williams’s life and writing resonates with O’Connor’s art. She has compared her carefully crafted, darkly redemptive songs to O’Connor’s short stories. Agonizing moments of grace that are central to O’Connor’s fictions occasionally break through in Williams’s pained song narratives, in the silence of the roses and like broken butterflies. And like O’Connor, she does not hesitate to give the devil his due. Chapter 2 explores O’Connor’s influence on Williams’s vision and craft as a songwriter and traces the overarching theme that both southern writers share, expressed in the refrain of Williams’s Grammy-winning rockabilly gospel song, You got to get right with God.

Mary Gauthier suggested the subtitle of her chapter here, The Brutal Hand of Grace, in conversation following a performance at Hugh’s Room in Toronto, Canada. Gauthier’s concerns and methods as a songwriter have much in common with O’Connor’s. Like Williams, she has read everything the author has written and acknowledges O’Connor’s influence on her own artistic sensibilities and her courageous and painstakingly crafted narrative songs. Though raised a Catholic and sent to parochial school by her adoptive parents, Gauthier does not identify with a specific religious tradition; nonetheless, a deeply compassionate spirituality informs her work.

Of the songwriters discussed in this study who acknowledge O’Connor’s influence, Gauthier comes closest in her often-confessional songs to presenting O’Connor’s sense of the expansive, all-encompassing agency of grace and divine mercy in fumbling human affairs. Grace, O’Connor indicates, is costly—imaginatively in her story art, and polemically in her published talks and essays. Gauthier knows this personally and likewise relays this truth in her songs and in her 2021 autobiography, tellingly titled Saved by a Song.

Though not as commercially successful or well recognized as other chapter-worthy musical figures in this study, Kate Campbell is a sort of inverse double to O’Connor as a songwriter. The Mississippi-raised daughter of a Baptist preacher, Campbell has been telling stories in song about the South in, to date, sixteen albums of original work since her self-recorded 1994 debut Songs from the Levee. Most of her work is folk and gospel, with a strong strain of blues featuring that Muscle Shoals sound of her close collaborator, Country Music Hall of Fame legend Spooner Oldham. Campbell’s Rosaryville collection (1999) takes a southern Baptist perspective on the piety, religious practices, and eccentricities of the South’s Catholics. Like O’Connor, whose influence she acknowledges in interviews and in the liner notes of two of her recordings, Campbell’s artistic milieu is solely the South—its social codes, its fraught history, its religiosity, its oddball outsiders. Her narrative songwriting style aligns with that of Mary Gauthier, with whom she shares a birthplace and similar latecomer status to her artistic vocation—at age thirty. Campbell is a gifted songwriter and storyteller who has toured with Emmylou Harris and the late Guy Clark, and recorded her compositions with contributions from Rodney Crowell and the late John Prine and Nanci Griffith, among other Nashville notables. Chapter 4 examines a selection of Campbell’s songs of the South with their mix of believability and darkness that echo what she sees in O’Connor’s fiction, her similar interest in southern religious eccentrics and extremists, and her O’Connoresque comic send-ups of southern manners.

Sufjan Stevens, once one of the darlings of indie pop music, aspired first to be a fiction writer like his idol Flannery O’Connor. While enrolled in an MFA program at New School University in New York in his mid-twenties, he produced a volume of short stories. Set in a region of his native Michigan that might be described as a northern version of the Bible Belt, Stevens’s stories feature religious extremists and undercurrents of the diabolical that strongly echo elements found in O’Connor’s tales of the southern grotesque. Despite his recognized talent as a fiction writer, Stevens found the American market for short fiction impenetrable and moved on to his Plan B—a career as a composer and songwriter that has taken him to the forefront of contemporary music and to the stage at the 2018 Academy Awards. Chapter 5 follows Stevens as he translates his O’Connor-inspired short fiction into his first song cycle, Michigan (2003), and directly references O’Connor’s works in songs on Seven Swans (2004). Moreover, as a devout Christian, Stevens shares O’Connor’s belief that all human endeavor is played out in territory held largely by the devil. His songs court that spark of incarnate evil that sometimes ignites in a serial killer and, as Stevens sings, can smolder in the heart of a successful pop artist.

Nick Cave might have stepped out of the pages of O’Connor’s fiction as one of her Christ-haunted characters. The Australian-born songwriter and successful novelist—among other writerly accomplishments—was for a time obsessed with O’Connor’s Wise Blood and its blaspheming, sin-seeking protagonist Hazel Motes. Cave’s faux southern gothic first novel And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989), which has sold more than one hundred thousand copies, borrows plot elements and character types from both of O’Connor’s novels.

Songs on The Boatman’s Call (1997; 2011 Remastered Edition, LP), the most highly regarded album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, collectively present a quest narrative, a kind of profane The Pilgrim’s Progress. Across the six songs on the A-side of the reissued record, the narrator’s position moves from unbelief in "an interventionist God to a questioning expectancy that echoes the words of John the Baptist regarding the Christ: Are you the one that I’ve been waiting for? The narrator of these songs might be understood in light of O’Connor’s affirmative statements about unbelieving searchers in her essay Novelist and Believer." He longs to believe in some transcendent truth, yet is caught in an age of unbelief, unable to find what he’s looking for—much like O’Connor’s character The Misfit. Cave’s pilgrim journeys toward the sacred through the carnal, envisioning a number of female figures as embodying the divine life or a divine presence.

Unlike Cave’s art, little critical attention has been given to the sexual and erotic imagery in O’Connor’s works. Her own prurience about this "lacking category in her fiction seems to have somewhat hushed scholarly attention to the use of sex in her stories. Yet she concurs with a scholar who finds a strong kind of sex potential" in her first story collection. Indeed, a kind of erotic theology is evident in Wise Blood and in her later stories A Temple of the Holy Ghost and The Comforts of Home, and these works make congress with the sacral-sexual themes in Cave’s songs. Chapter 6 explores Cave’s irreligious religious quest and underscores the Hazel Motes–like nature of his spiritual journey as evidenced in his song narratives and several polemical works.

British alt-rock diva PJ Harvey sought inspiration and lyrical support from O’Connor’s short fiction for three songs on her 1998 recording Is This Desire? Reviewers at the time did not notice that she drew on O’Connor’s stories in forming her song narratives. Upon close examination, the lyrics to these songs are largely pastiches of descriptive phrases and bits of dialogue from individual stories—found lyrics of a sort. No other songwriter in this study has so informed his or her work with O’Connor’s own words. Harvey’s lyrical bricolage in these songs raises interesting issues of artistic inspiration and influence. Commentary on Harvey in chapter 7 follows the discussion of Nick Cave, with whom she had an intense though short-lived romantic relationship in 1995–1996, and who presumably introduced her to O’Connor’s works.

Punk and Heavy Metal: O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood, has had an uncanny appeal to songwriters on the extremes of popular music, in the genres of punk, heavy metal, and forms of post-punk and alternative rock. This odd comic novel has had a significant though limited currency in these gothic modes of music, and probable explanations for this are just that. Though the influence is often hard to trace, mainstream metal bands Ministry and Corrosion of Conformity have released major works influenced by the novel, and the alternative music artist JG Thirlwell, sometimes known as Wiseblood, has branded with O’Connor’s book title his own Hazel Motes–like blasphemous and degenerate stage persona as well as a small, highly offensive set of recordings.

Chapter 8 develops the argument that representations of O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood and its protagonist Hazel Motes in punk and metal works reflect unironic misreadings of the book’s religious satire (or perhaps of John Huston’s film adaptation of the novel). For O’Connor, Haze’s blaspheming and dissipation and existential frustration ultimately leads him to become a kind of Protestant saint. For the purveyors of the more extreme popular music examined in this chapter (and, as well, for some censorious reviewers of O’Connor’s novel), he is a type of licentious anarchist, promoting an anti-Christian self-determinism—not unlike the antiauthoritarian doctrines widely expounded by performers and fans of these forms of music.

Everything That Rises: Everything that rises to critics’ attention as being influenced by O’Connor’s art and vision, or sharing some features of her gothic fictions, is not verifiably so. It may be that the point of similarity is "only southernness," as R.E.M.’s Mike Mills somewhat disingenuously remarked about connections between the catalog of the Athens, Georgia-based band and O’Connor’s artistic vision and works. However, a number of songwriters and groups across musical genres and at all levels of commercial recognition have deliberately referenced O’Connor’s stories and novels or person in individual songs or have acknowledged her shaping influence to some extent. Chapter 9 is a collection of short commentaries on these artists and their O’Connor-inspired recordings. It also includes analysis of songwriters and bands that have referenced O’Connor or one of her stories in a song or song title, or who have declared themselves fans of O’Connor’s fiction in published interviews. Completing the gatherings in this book is an annotated short lineup of performers and bands whose stage names are derived from the title of O’Connor’s first novel or the name of one of her characters.

Chapter 1

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

"The Flannery O’Connor of American Rock"

Most prominent among the contemporary singer-songwriters who acknowledge Flannery O’Connor’s shaping influence on their writing is American cultural icon and multiple Grammy Award winner Bruce Springsteen. To date of this publication, Springsteen has won twenty of the coveted music awards over his long recording career. In an interview with actor Edward Norton at the 2010 Toronto Film Festival before the premier of The Promise, a documentary on the making of Springsteen’s fourth song cycle, Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), Springsteen recalled his early musical influences and the widening effect of his reading at the time, which included the works of Flannery O’Connor. "All the writers we love, he reflected, put their fingerprint on your imagination, in your heart, and in your soul."

Springsteen was introduced to O’Connor’s art and vision through a copy of her Complete Stories given to him by Barbara Downey, the wife of his then new manager and cultural tutor, Jon Landau. Springsteen read a number of O’Connor’s stories and was profoundly affected. He later viewed John Huston’s film adaptation of Wise Blood when it was released in theaters in the fall of 1979. He was then in the process of recording the songs for his double album The River (1980). As a songwriter he was consciously moving into a darker vision of American life and a narrative style of songwriting that was more character-centered, away from the more expressionistic lyrics of his earlier, largely autobiographical albums. Something in O’Connor’s vision and skillfully wrought short fiction resonated with the young songwriter, who already sensed he had a story to tell and was looking to hone his craft. According to his first biographer, Dave Marsh, Springsteen was particularly in awe of the minute precision in O’Connor’s storytelling, the way O’Connor could enliven a character by sketching in just a few details. Further, there were mysteries he wanted his music to help him reconcile, mysteries grounded in the claustrophobic lower-class Catholic guilt he had been raised in that he recognized in some of O’Connor’s characters and, as Marsh implies, in himself.

In a 1998 interview with Will Percy, nephew of novelist Walker Percy, published in DoubleTake magazine, Springsteen recalls the transforming effect on his songwriting of reading O’Connor’s fiction:

I’d come out of a period of my own writing where I’d been writing big, sometimes operatic, and occasionally rhetorical things. I was interested in finding another way to write about those subjects, about people, another way to address what was going on around