Killin’ Floor Blues: A Music & Murder Mystery
From 1929 to 1942, real-life father and son John and Alan Lomax journey through the American South to search out and record blues artists. During the worst of the Great Depression and recovery into WWII, the Lomax team visits cotton plantations, prison yards, booze joints, and big city performance venues. The Library of Congress eventually puts John under contract, and the Lomax family becomes America’s preserver of Black folk music.
This book features many trailblazing blues performers, their brutal treatment by the law, by whites in general, and even by their record producers. Too many die young from drinking, car wrecks, fights, and other misfortunes.
Martin invents new causes for the deaths of ten artists. How they die remains true to the actual events. Why they die turns into a fictional serial killer mystery. So, a car wreck results not from mere drunken speeding but from a tampered brake line. In those days and places, the police don’t care about dead Black men and women. Hence, in the murder mystery story thread, the Lomaxes become amateur sleuths and potential next victims.
Martin’s knowledge of and admiration for the talented, mostly self-taught musicians earning a few dollars against great odds shows through. The details of places, instruments, voices, and physical appearance are very well done. Whether the artists perform on a street corner or in a recording studio, readers can almost see them and hear their voices. The serial murder theme does not match the richness of the real-life stories, but it does build to an honest page-turner. All together Killin’ Floor Blues works well as an unusual mystery folded into a powerful fact-based blues historical.
