by guest author Bennett Kelly
The author of Sensation Blues, Bennett Kelly, set out to write a blues novel to honor the blues and mythological figures that excited him as a kid. The music and simply the names of performers like Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf and others always thrilled him as an inspiring combination of wisdom and coolness.
Set in the contemporary Mississippi delta, the novel introduces precocious practitioner McKinley Robinson in pursuit of his “It.” With beloved older brother Paul off to play college football across the country, McKinley pours himself into his blues passions, hustling from the juke joints of Clarksdale’s Delta Avenue to the neon marquees of Beale Street in Memphis. Under the auspices of their hell-raising uncle Ira, McKinley cavorts with blues legends and courts unavoidable trouble with would-be authority figures on his clear-eyed leap over the cliff of self-discovery. Mckinley is a well-meaning blues punk who picks up trickster passions from his favorite bluesmen and from his uncle’s music instruction along the way.
Sensation Blues is like Catcher in the Rye but steeped in blues music, and set in the birthplace of the blues in Clarksdale, MS.
A lot of early blues hagiography is baked into the novel by the author. In addition to blues histories, other inspirational source materials for this novel were the lives of Paul Robeson and the Beatles.
The author is an award-winning music journalist from New Jersey and reports on the New Brunswick music scene for New Brunswick Today.