Oh my, it’s good. In fact, it’s so awesome that I have half a box of copies that I keep near the desk in my home office. I remember thinking that it was going to be too autobiographical, but I find it surprisingly fictionalized. That’s good, I think.
The Appalachia in it is the one in which I grew up, but Gabriel’s Runion doesn’t really exist (although such a place did exist once). The novel’s Runion is part Marshall, part Mars Hill, with maybe a dash of Hot Springs added in. Gabriel’s Nashville is the one in which I spent most of my 20s, only hints of which remain in today’s Nashville.
Gabriel Tanner was born on 8 March 1959. He’s a fictional character, of course, so you needn’t worry about sending him a card or buying him a gift. (If you’ve read Gabriel’s Songbook, however, I’m sure he would like it if you gave the novel a rating–or even wrote a word or two about it–at its page on Amazon and/or Goodreads.) I know a lot about Gabriel that wasn’t in the novel, like what grade he entered in 1971 (7th) and the date he and Eliza remarried in 1992.
In January 1995, late in my Master of Arts program at Western Carolina University, I traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to present a paper on Salman Rushdie at the Annual Conference of the Southern Humanities Council. My drive back home to Asheville included a stop at William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak, his estate near Oxford. I was inspired by the way in which he plotted the chronology of his novel A Fable (1954) on the walls of his study.
At some point during the writing of Gabriel’s Songbook and the collection of short stories that is now nearly complete (working title “A Twilight Reel”), I decided that I needed to keep track of the people and events about which I was writing. Granted, Leesa would likely have frowned on my writing all over the walls of my study, so I decided to keep a written timeline in a computer file titled “Runion & Its People.” Although the timeline gets much busier later in the chronology, at the time of Gabriel’s birth it looks like this:
Why the 8th of March for his birthday? Some few of you might know the history of my song “Thunder & Lightning”: its original 1984 recording for the never-released album Waiting for the Night, the inclusion of a Cody band “T&L” on Asheville’s 1991 local band compilation River Rock, lots of airplay on KISS-FM, and so on. It was on the 8th of March in 1984 that the song came to life, recorded almost as an afterthought, at Bullet Recording in Nashville. An important day for me, and so I decided to make it an important day for Gabriel as well.
Anyway, I thought a lot about him yesterday on the eve of his birthday as I was playing some of his songs at Cindy Saadeh’s Fine Art in Kingsport–“Catch That Train” and “Siren Sing,” for example. I thought I should record these and other new songs for an album–probably a last album for me. And I wondered about his story beyond the end of Gabriel’s Songbook and how that might look as a new novel.
So, happy birthday, Gabriel Tanner! Celebrate well, my friend!
Gabriel’s Songbook by Michael Amos Cody
