In Yoknapatawpha Blues: Faulkner's Fiction and Southern Roots Music, Tim A. Ryan stages an “intertextual dialogue between Faulkner[’s fiction] and the blues” (21), placing the two discourses side by side in order to demonstrate how these two seemingly divergent cultural forms jointly speak to the realities of southern social life during the 1920s and 1930s. As Ryan makes clear in the book's introduction, the goal here is less an effort to demonstrate the existence of some kind of productive exchange of artistic influence between blues artists and producers of literary fiction (symmetrical or otherwise), but rather to place these chosen objects in a larger historical dialogue with the material conditions that underwrite their production. If trying to read intersections and common themes across Faulkner's prolific output and the staggering and diverse catalogue of blues music released during the author's lifetime sounds too ambitious to be tenable, Ryan keeps this project at more manageable scale by limiting himself to a small corpus of texts and songs that are paired together in each chapter according to a common theme or topic. In order, these are: the Mississippi flood of 1927, the “specter of racial lynching,” the politics of masculine identity, and the gradual postwar social transformation of the striated racial landscape of the American South.

While Ryan's primary credentials are in literary criticism, his skills as a musicologist are also deployed with ease throughout much of Yoknapatawpha Blues, and the book productively intervenes into both blues and Faulkner scholarship in more or less even strokes. At its core, then, Yoknapatawpha Blues offers up a somewhat understated effort to read literature and popular music as reciprocal forms of culture that attend to a common set of sociohistorical circumstances, a project that should excite anyone with even a passing interest in the variegated cultural landscape of the American South between the Great Depression and just after World War II. In drawing out some intersecting lines of flight between Faulkner's fiction and vernacular blues music, Ryan's book fits right in with the wave of media-studies-oriented Faulkner scholarship that has recently begun to find a renewal with the essays collected in Julian Murphet and Stefan Solomon's edited volume William Faulkner in the Media Ecology (2015). Yet while Ryan is certainly interested in framing his chosen materials in relation to some of their social and historical underpinnings, there is nevertheless an ongoing effort to read generous platitudes out of his objects – a tendency that occasionally threatens to eclipse a more sustained effort of critical coordination. In his own terms, Ryan loosely describes his governing approach as an “amphitextual” (24) admixture of different critical practices drawn selectively out of cultural materialism, New Criticism, New Historicism, and identity studies. To be sure, Yoknapatawpha Blues is less theoretically nuanced than such a mouthful of professed orientations might presume, though to be fair the book aims to be accessible to “literary scholars and music fans alike” (24) and thus avoids saddling the reader with specialized terminology or the minutiae of insular disciplinary debates.

This is not to say that either Ryan's scholarship or his analysis is insubstantial by any stretch, though a larger sense of coherence behind the various social and historical narratives that govern each section is ultimately absent, giving the book something of a disjointed and uneven sense of development from chapter to chapter. The opening pages establish the stock market crash of 1929 as a context for the rise in popularity of both Faulkner and the blues, and one cannot help but feel like this economic backdrop could have been expanded on to provide a more purposeful sense of advancement for the book. To indulge a music metaphor here, the experience of reading Yoknapatawpha Blues is more akin to that of listening to a singles anthology than to that of listening to a more conceptually unified LP. Even if a clear argumentative through line seems lacking at times, however, there are nevertheless some engaging and memorable highlights, such as a chapter which reads Faulkner's “Old Man” and Charley Patton's “High Water Everywhere” around reciprocally staged motifs of narrative voicing and self-articulation that speak meaningfully to one another through their shared proximity to the calamitous situation of the 1927 Mississippi flood. Here, and at other places where Ryan is at his most purposeful and precise, Yoknapatawpha Blues achieves a genuine sense of dialogic exchange between a set of objects that otherwise might seem to have very little to say to one another on the surface. Moreover, while Ryan's enterprise ultimately requires him to read the blues on a textual level more often than not, there are nevertheless moments where he is able to frame a striking harmony between literary and musical form. In this regard, Ryan usefully frames the constraints of print and sound media as productive limitations that can be seen to enable both writers like Faulkner and blues artists like Patton and Robert Johnson in innovative and dynamic ways.

On occasion, however, things fall somewhat out of balance. Where larger framing details are concerned, Faulkner is generally taken up in his received status as one of the giants of American literary modernism while the virtues of the blues are offered up in a more defensive manner. That these cultural legacies betray racialized logics of reception and prestige would seem to be an important qualification for this project, but they are unfortunately not framed in such terms for large sections of the book. Moreover, while Ryan offers up some highly useful descriptions of the larger industry surrounding blues music, such a consideration of the publishing business is largely overlooked where discussions of Faulkner are concerned. This feels like a slight betrayal of the book's efforts to recuperate the scholarly legacy of blues music from high-flown and misguided critical prejudices surrounding its mass-market status, as the fact of Faulkner's own, self-professed efforts to capitalize on the demands of popular literary markets is only briefly alluded to in a chapter on male sexual dysfunction in Sanctuary and Johnson's “Dead Shrimp Blues” (and nowhere is his career as a Hollywood screenwriter mentioned). On this note, the takeaway point here should not be an appeal to take the blues seriously on an aesthetic level in spite of its commercial character, but rather a recognition that both Faulkner's career and the corpus of contemporary blues music coexist in a historical framework where one cannot practically separate the artistic product from the commercial one.

If these minor faults seem to indicate a slight textual bias at work in his methods of comparison, then the bias is fruitfully redeemed by an appendix of transcribed blues lyrics at the end of the book. This additional section not only provides a valuable archival resource by collating all of the variant transcriptions for three of the songs from his study in a single place (Patton's “Mississippi Boweavil Blues” and “High Water Everywhere,” and Geeshie Wiley's “Last Kind Words Blues”), but the application of editorial strategies for referencing textual variants between different editions of Shakespeare to the anthologizing of vernacular music lyrics equally stands as testament to Ryan's methodological talents. All things considered, then, Yoknapatawpha Blues manages to strike some critically engaging and usefully interdisciplinary chords that will undoubtedly excite Faulkner and blues scholars alike, but may equally ring out as well to those with a broader interest in the exchanges that can unfold between literature and popular music at large.