Apocalyptic fiction has long been championed by those who yawn at the dreary optimism of a sanitized life out among the stars. For those writing it in the shadow of the atomic bomb, perhaps at a typewriter in their suburban fallout shelter, apocalyptic fiction was a viable option, at least for fiction. In the 1950s SciFi was reaching an apogee, consumer goods, science and chemistry were going to make living better for everyone, send us into a remarkable future, but there also hung over it all the threat of the atom bomb.

Enter the futurist thinker R. Buckminster Fuller. Automation and advances in materials science suggested a resolution to the problems humanity face. On the other hand, was the solution of mutually assured destruction. Fuller got sucked into this way of thinking and laid out his own take on this binary with just two possible options for the human species in his 1963 book Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity. While he wasn’t the first to invent that meme, he did set it further into motion as his ideas were taken up by long haired freaks and hippies, among other countercultural types who gravitated to his thought.

Certainly, science fiction, isn’t all utopian. As the SF New Wave settled into place in the sixties, and cyberpunk on its heels in the beginning of the 80s, science fiction began to grapple with the less savory aspects of technological progress. Following the 80s, SF and Fantasy got ever more watered down in the decades that followed, to the point where much of the newest stuff is unreadable. It either waffles between the hopeful tropes of infinite expansion into space where there will be enough resources for everyone, on the one hand, or to dystopian surveillance states, and deadly game show riffs following in the footsteps of George Orwell and Richard Bachman.

That has left some big cracks in speculative literature. The New Weird briefly blossomed before its bloom was just another fleur du mal. Its eldritch trace can still be discerned in some small presses (where all the best energy is anyway). Horror remains, as ever, perennial, even if, in written form, it is a more rarified taste. Fantasy, long suffering under the spell of the epic, has forgotten the short and the sweet. It too has suffered from this dystopian cast in all its grimdarkness. Meanwhile, the fledgling sprouts of climate fiction and deindustrial fiction have clambered up through those cracks in the corporate made mixing cement of the publishing industries broken sidewalk.

If hard SF presupposes our ultimate destiny on Mars, with AI driving our brutalist cyber trucks, and fusion energy at our atomic command, as utopia, then apocalyptic fiction presupposes rag and bone men crawling amidst the ashes of our fallen towers as they fight mutants and AI driven brutalist attack cyber trucks for canned peaches.

What about a life on earth, that is neither dominated by machines, or the sole hope of a plucky band of bomb hardened survivors?

Climate fiction takes the real revelation that the world will be different, and not always in ways for the better, but none-the-less finds us making useful adaptations. For sure, climate change had a place in some SF, especially in the New Wave and later cyberpunk writers. J.G. Ballard and Bruce Sterling come to mind, for starters. So called Cli-Fi, as a term, is somewhat new, but as with many other genres, gets retroactively applied. Some of the new stuff, the self-conscious Cli-Fi, is pretty darn good, but much else smacks of self-righteousness when it isn’t plain old self- flagellation. Working in a large library system I get to see a lot of new books, many of them marketed as a kind of activism. The issue I have with them is that they seem to have forgotten about the art. This tendency has made me not be able to finish many of the newer books I start, because not only is the writer flagellating themselves, but also the reader. I don’t mind at all having social issues and environmental issues or mental health issues or issues any kind front and center in a book, except when those issues, and we all have issues, take the place of the art of storytelling. If I want journalism or an opinion piece, I can read essays and non-fiction instead. It’s unfortunate that this tendency to berate the reader has been adopted in Cli-Fi, to the point where activism is listed as a prime motivating force for those promoting this kind of writing.

As Robert Anton Wilson said in the documentary Maybe Logic, “I think the joy of art is trying to convey what you perceive so that other people will perceive it more or less the same way. Art is a form of seduction. I mean, there are rapists in the intellectual world. They become politicians. The seducers become honest. We try to seduce people into our reality tunnels instead of leading them there with a gun.” Fiction that is only activism often fails to enchant and seduce.

This leads us to Deindustrial fiction. Deindustrial fiction is the redheaded step-child of Science Fiction, because it is future centered, it’s the redheaded step-child of Apocalyptic Fiction, because it imagines a world during or after the fall or collapse of our current civilization, and it is the uncouth cousin to Cli-Fi, because it shares the knowledge with Cli-Fi that much of our future world is shaped by the ravages of climate change and environmental chaos. Deindustrial Fiction remains at odds with Solarpunk and Hopepunk, because so much of what gets put into those categories amounts to having our cake and eating it too. Hopepunk was conceived as opposite of the grimdark tendency in so much speculative fiction. I get that the grimdark scene gets old. I don’t read much of it myself. But the sickeningly sweet stories of hopepunk are themselves a kind of artificial saccharine disguising a sinister strychnine. Having become the opposite of grimdark, it provides just another polarized worldview on the opposite end of a spectrum. Hopepunk and Grimdark are just two sides of the same Utopia or Oblivion coin.

In reality, empires do come and go, just as the Romans and the Mayans are now gone from our past. When we study history from the point of view of our Oswald Spengler's and Arnold Toynbee's, we see that the fall of civilizations and empires actually happens as a ragged, uneven decline, punctuated by periods of crisis and calamity. SF writers of the past weren’t afraid of grappling with these writers, and incorporating the consequences of such a view of history into their prose, grim, dark, hopeful, or at the twilight or dawn times when there is more of a mix of both hope and grimness. Anyone who has been paying attention to current events should know that the United States days are numbered as a global hegemony. That will unspool all kinds of issues, many of them good, but many also challenging. Beyond that, the greater technological civilization the US is a part of is itself only here for a limited time, just based on the fact that fossil fuels, by their very nature, are a limited resource. Deindustrial fiction takes these themes, and the limits imposed on us by nature, as starting points.

As such, it has things in common with apocalyptic fiction, sci-fi, and cli-fi. It differs from either grimdark or hopepunk, in imagining a middle ground, though individual authors may be more optimistic or pessimistic. It does not believe in infinite human expansion, on our own planet or to the stars, and as such seeks to look at retrovation and low-tech solutions to the predicaments faced by humanity.

​So where to start with reading any of this? Perhaps a round-up of the best of the genres discussed is in order.
Since much of the original era of Apocalyptic fiction is concerned what happens after a nuclear Armageddon I’ll look first at a few of the best books along those lines.   

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank is the Cold War standard text, and the book had a huge impact on me when I read it in high school. Perhaps I related to it so well because I had been brought in an end-times church (some say cult - The World Wide Church of God for those who are keeping score). I heard so many end-times sermons by the time I was 14 and dropped out of the church that I can even still microwave scavenged tins of Dinty Moore Beef Stew just by radiation exposure. Let’s just hope the metal in those cans hasn’t been exposed to radiation. The title of the book is even lifted from a verse in the Book of Revelation and the tale concerns the survival efforts of a town in Florida after a nuclear attack on the U.S. The town gets cut off and they are thrown upon their own resources. As a legitimately post-nuclear attack novel, it remains quite good.

For shear literary prowess however, look no further than Riddley Walker by Russel Hoban. Hoban does here with language something similar to what Anthony Burgess did in A Clockwork Orange. In Hoban’s vision of life in England after the bomb, most people no longer know how to read and everything in the book is spelled out phonetically by the main character who has had a bit of lerning and tells his tale as a scribe. The style takes some getting used to, but it is not to be missed. I read it during my initial heavy obsession phase with the music of Current 93, and it is a favorite of David Tibet’s books. I enjoyed how the Punch and Judy shows became a kind of gnostic religion in the future. There is also a lot of hash smoking and packs of wild dogs.

The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson is the first book in his Three California's trilogy where he gives us three different futures set in Orange County. This volume takes place after a neutron bomb goes off in the U.S. America has been quarantined following this attack and people have had to reskill with a quickness, living off the land, off the ocean, preserving knowledge. Into this is a story of ships coming around from who knows where -at first and reinitiating first contact with the outside world in some time, all built on top of a coming-of-age story. The second book in the sequence, The Gold Coast, remains my favorite of them, and it is set in an extremely hypercapitalistic consumer driven society (quite like the one we seem to be living in) but not cyberpunk. The last book, Pacific Edge, has made itself over to live ecologically. It is something of a utopia, but not quite. The characters still have problems in this last one, and there are a lot of conflicts over water, a precursor to the first book on the Cli-Fi list. The characters in Three Californias all feature in three very different future scenarios making this one of the most unique trilogies ever.

(I’ll put in A Boy and His Dog as an honorable mention in the nuclear wasteland category. It remains a favorite. It’s hard to beat the prose of Harlan Ellison, and he is a master of pulp adventure.)

Now let us turn to Cli-Fi. Despite my somewhat harsh words above, I still like a lot of what I’ve read from authors who have consciously set out to write this “Eco Fiction” which it is sometimes also called. I don’t want to retroactively assign the genre works that otherwise would have just have been classified as apocalyptic SF in the past, so here are some that grappled with the issue of climate change just as the term Cli-Fi was starting to get bandied about.

The Water Knife by Paolo Baciagalupi. In an American Southwest crippled by drought, Nevada and Arizona get into it over the meager supplies of water left in the Colorado River. California watches, deciding if it should just take the whole river all for itself. One of the things I liked so much about it, was his use of arcologies, a term developed by architect Paolo Soleri and put into action at his famed desert community Arcosanti. The battle for water creates the conflict in this highly readable thriller. Apparently writing this kind of thing mentally and emotionally exhausted Baciagalupi. I hadn’t heard of anything new from him since this book, and but when I looked him up just now, see he has a new one out just this past summer, a fantasy called Navola. 

Kim Stanley Robinson is the giant in terms of spreading the concept of Cli-Fi, so there is no getting around listing another of his books. I have to recommend, New York 2140. The best writers not only bring their readers new ways of envisioning the world, but new vocabularies for talking about the world. Sometimes the neologisms and words they coin break out and become part of the larger culture. Robert Heinlein gave us the word grok and aging hippies still bandy it about at outdoor music festivals to show how deeply they understand one another. George Orwell's term newspeak about the propagandistic use of language by Big Brother is now a subject for newspaper op-ed pieces. Writing this, the word repaleolithization comes to mind. It's from Kim Stanley Robinson's earlier book on climate change, Fifty Degrees Below. It is something I could have used a bit of today as it refers to a lifestyle shift used to reestablish sanity for the human body and mind, and consists mainly of activities mostly abandoned by the urban denizens of late industrial capitalism. As I sit here typing I think about how nice it will be to take some time off soon, and walk out on the land with family and friends, talking and cooking under the stars, staring at a fire instead of a screen. These are some of the things repaleolithization consists of. Kim says it can be thought of as a form of "landscape restoration for the brain” and the landscape, both inner and outer, is something he returns to again and again throughout the arc of his novels, New York 2140 being his eighteenth. It features a Manhattan that has become a kind of Venice, with canals instead of streets. It’s hopeful in that sense, but deals with some crazy economics. 

Stormland by John Shirley takes things in a grittier direction. That’s because Shirley is a cyberpunk veteran (they get a pass on using the word punk). Stormland is a sprawling, largely abandoned region of the southeastern coast of the USA, where a more or less permanent hurricane continues to churn and stew. Into this nasty vortex of rain and trash a former US Marshal and a stone cold serial killer head into Charleston, South Carolina where only squatters and the mad continue to live. There is a cult subplot here, which I like. Cults are an abiding interest. See book one in the apocalyptic section above.

Now on to Deindustrial Fiction. There aren’t a ton of novels that qualify as such as yet. It was John Michael Greer who coined the term, and his work is the best place to start.

It got started with a novel he wrote called Stars Reach. “More than four centuries have passed since industrial civilization stumbled to its ruin under the self-inflicted blows of climate change and resource depletion. Now, in the ruins of a deserted city, a young man mining metal risks his life to win a priceless clue. That discovery will send him, and an unlikely band of seekers, on a quest for a place out of legend, where human beings might once have communicated with distant worlds…to a place called Star's Reach…” It’s back in print in a new edition from Sphinx Books this November.

Greer’s other novels have the cast of Deindustrial. In his vast seven part fantasy with tentacles, the essential Weird of Hali, the deindustrializing world is part of the backdrop, but its not the foreground. His latest novel Hall of Homeless Gods, is set closer to the present but still Deindustrial. I’m looking forward to getting my copy. Here is the blurb:

“a tough, two-fisted fixer who works for the boss of Habitat Four, one of five Japanese refugee communities built on abandoned oil platforms off the coast of the United States in a hard-edged dystopian future of technological decline and climate chaos. His beat is Shoreside, the bustling, brawling, anything-goes temporary port on the beach two miles from the Habitats.

​He's trying to bust a robbery ring that's preying on Shoreside gambling money when he encounters a mysterious woman with strange mental abilities. Before long he's having to dodge hoods sent after him by Shoreside's crime lord, agents of the US government, and spies from its archrival, the European Union. Does all this have anything to do with rumors of a secret supercomputer project in the now-abandoned country inland from Shoreside -- a project that once left a string of corpses behind it, and now might yield a fabulous trove of old world technology? Jerry's going to find out...if he can survive long enough.”

Where Deindustrial fiction has so far flourished is in anthologies and two magazines, one the successor to the other. The anthologies started with the After Oil series, focusing in on fiction that was able to wrap its head around the fact that 1) we are running out, and 2) fusion power isn’t going to come online to “save us” by allowing us to keep up business as usual and our current energy intensive lifestyles. Four came out from Founders House publishing. They were followed by another anthology (in which I had a short story) Love In the Ruins, applying similar logic to the much maligned genre of romance fiction. Sadly, there were some snafus in the way Founders House operated, and those anthologies are no longer available new. While Greer has taken his fiction over to Aeon Publishing and their fiction imprint Sphinx Books, who are doing a fine job, the anthologies haven’t followed.

The short stories spawned by the first four anthologies spawned the quarterly journal Into the Ruins. When the editor closed up shop after four years, he gave some advice to Nathanael Bonnell who started New Maps. I had written some book reviews for Into the Ruins and one short story. Now I am writing a column for New Maps, called Cheap Thrills, and two of my stories have been published so far in its pages. New Maps focuses on the kind of futures we are actually to get as the decline of industrial civilization continues. It's a fine magazine in print with great stories from a slew of writers coming to you four times a year.
Bonnell sums it up:

"New Maps is a quarterly journal of short stories that take place in the Earth’s realistic future. Not a paradisiac or apocalyptic end of days, nor an easy continuation of the last few decades’ business-as-usual with somewhat different fashions, but an era in which our ecological and energy bills have come due, and we and our descendants have proceeded to do what people always do: figure out creative ways to keep doing all those things that make up life, the loving and hating and laughing and crying and all the rest, in the times we’ve been given.
 
This is fiction of real life in an age of limits—an age that, like every other, will mix the tragic and the comic and the who-knows-what-just-happened, and leave it to us to make sense of it all. This is fiction full of cobbled-together and home-brewed technology, reinvented culture with sacred cows butchered and new ones bred, and mourning and celebration of the old world’s end mixed with hope for renewed health and integrity within a homespun patchwork of new ways of life."

So if you are tired of the both utopia and oblivion, why not give the middle road of Deindustrial fiction a try?

We have a black cat named Tokie, named and given to us by our daughter. We didn’t know until a few years with this cat, and this name, that our cat shared the name with a famous banjo player, who uppicked and downpicked her taught strings in clawhammer style. As my wife and I are fans of old-time music this was a pleasant discovery. Yet, we only came to discover the music of Matokie Slaughter (known as “Tokie” to friends and family) through the work of Margaret Kilgallen, who we’d learned about in turn from reading Bill Daniel’s Moslty True: The World’s Most Popular Hobo Graffiti Magazine, sent to me as a lovely gift from our friend DJ Frederick Moe. Then we watched the documentary “Beautiful Losers” to learn a bit more about Kilgallen who features in the film with her husband Barry McGee, and a slew of other artists. Boy did watching that evoke all kinds of memories from my adolescence and young adulthood as a skateboarder, of the world of graffiti, punk music and hip hop. Memoires of watching Gummo (Harmony Korine was in the film for better or worse). I was still coming up as a teenager when all of these people were making a scene of so much that was to be an influence on me. 

Margaret Kilgallen was a born again folk artist who combined graffiti with her love of traditional sign painting styles, freight train monikers, Appalachian music, and letterpress work. She grew up around bluegrass music, played banjo herself, and used the name Matokie Slaughter in many of her works. Once an artist references another artist, it always gives me a reason to explore. I have always loved the practice of listening upstream and reading upstream. When there is someone whose work I really like, I want to see what influenced them, and I will read and listen to things they say shaped them as a creative person. When I was in my twenties, that person was David Tibet. I loved, and still love, Current 93, but at the height of my obsession with Tibet’s music I went and listened to and read as many of the things he talked about loving as I could. That got me into Thomas Ligotti, Shirley Collins, the Incredible String Band and so many others, like the venerable weirdo Count Stenbock. The Nurse With Wound list is famous in a similar way for long time heads hunting down obscure music. When there is a writer who I really like, I try to do the same and see what they read, what influenced them, who they liked the best. What they touted as the crème de la crème. Following the influence of one artist to another, in whatever medium, is just a kind of standard practice for me, and it without question leads to finding the good stuff.

I’m writing about Matokie Slaughter today, one because it’s been in the back of my mind to do so since I first learned about her, and two, because she was infecting my dreams. I woke up with the name ringing through my head the morning I started this piece, and I knew it was time to hit the keyboard with her in mind. I’ll circle back around to Margaret Kilgallen in another entry.

Matokie Worrell Slaughter was born in the farming community of Pulaski, Virginia on December 21st, the day of the winter solstice. It makes sense to me because she was light bringer to a world of traditional music. She was born to a family with its ears bent towards music and she was born into a big family. Big families often have “big ears” because in that time period, people had to make their own entertainment and music was one of the cheapest and most satisfying ways to do it.

By the 1930s, as a teenager, she was playing her banjo on the local radio station, with her kin. A lot of folks who heard over the air thought she was a man, because she was bit mic shy with her voice, a lady of few words over the air. I get the feeling she just liked to hammer away at the banjo. By all accounts, Slaughter could saw a mean fiddle too.

In searching for the answer to the question “who was Matokie Slaughter?” I had to investigate the world of old-time music players, record collectors and boosters. This brought me to the work of Charles Faurot who helped the larger world discover Slaughter in the midst of the folk revival that had begun in the fifties and sixties.

Now who was Charles Faurot, you ask? He was another banjo player and music fanatic who liked to collect 78 rpm records of hillbilly music. Faurot was born on October 3, 1935 in Midlothian, Virginia but had moved to New York where he worked at a Manhattan bank. That’s the kind of work I expect makes you appreciate folk music even more, after dealing with the money of citified riffraff all day long. His obsession led him to becoming a song collector when he traveled back to Virginia to record rip roaring banjo riffs for many albums of music for the County Record label started by David Freeman.
​
Faurot recalls how he met David Freeman, who was a serious collector, booster, and historian of bluegrass and old-time sounds: “I was married, working for a major bank in Manhattan, living in Brooklyn. I was buying tapes of 78s from Dave Freeman (of County Recordings) but hadn’t met him. One nice Sunday morning I’m going for a walk, out to get the paper. As I’m walking by a rowhouse, the apartment on the first floor had its window open and I could hear someone playing the dobro. So I stopped and…I couldn’t reach the window but said; Hey in there, I hear you playing the dobro. I like that kind of music. Can we get together? And the guy comes to the window and says: We just got out of bed. Why don’t you come back in a couple of hours? So I did and that guy was Bill Vernon.”

Now who is Bill Vernon, you ask? He was the New York son of a corporate tax attorney. He also happened to share the love for this style of music. His father had a career as a lawyer all planned out for his son, who he wanted to follow in his footsteps. Who knows? It might have happened if his son had never turned on the radio and had a chance encounter, a fated encounter, with the music of Flatt & Scruggs. He scrounged his way through a bit of college, and ended up working as a clerk on Wall Street, somewhat in the shadow of his daddy’s line of work, but it was only to support his habit of collecting hillbilly 78s. Record collecting sure is habit forming, a kind of sickness that hardly sleeps and never stops.
Music is a gateway drug, and Vernon soon moved on from just collecting, to writing about bluegrass for the British rag Country News and Views. It didn’t stop there. Music needs to be shared like it’s the gospel, and he got himself a radio gig on the Pacifica station WBAI (home to other great programs like the hacker stalwarts of Off the Hook). It was a great place for him to showcase his growing collection of music. This set him up to get yet another gig writing for Billboard magazine, where he helped them compile the weekly country music chart. He was a busy man, all while moonlighting on Wall Street to pay the music bill. If you are a collector, it’s a bill that can make it difficult to pay the water bill and the electric bill. It might have also had something do with any bills he may have had for alimony. His love of music had, in his reckoning, cost him three marriages.
 So Faurot had met this cat and got to be friends with Bill Vernon and his first wife Mary. Bill was in on the scene there in New York and introduced Faurot to David Freeman, who then started taking his new friend to concerts organized by Loy Beaver. Beaver was another music fan who had to work day gig to support his habit. In his case, he was a mortician and one of his claims to fame was the distinction of being the man who embalmed Franklin Roosevelt. 

Come November of 1964, Charlie got the opportunity to record the music of Wade Ward from Independence, Virginia. Ward had previously been discovered and recorded by John Lomax, the father of the folklorist Alan, after he’d discovered him at the Galax Fiddlers Convention in 1937. Alan went on to record Wade Ward as well, getting him on tape several other times at the end of the thirties and into the forties. It must have been something for Faurot to meet these storied and feted players.

The next summer Faurot himself made the pilgrimage to the Galax Fiddler’s Convention and he had his tape recorder with him capturing the old time sounds of George Stoneman, Kyle Creed, and Fed Cockerham. They all had different styles, but they all sounded so good, he wanted to get the music out on vinyl and approached David Freeman with the idea. Freeman thought it was a good one and the project went ahead. Freeman even got Bela Bartok’s grandson to do the mastering on the tapes.

In 1967 Charlie headed back to Galax, this time with Richard Nevins. They rented a house in town to use as their base of operations on their mission to record. Everyone who was anyone with a banjo dropped in to record: Kyle Creed, Dan Tate, Tommy Jarrell, Oscar Jenkins, Fred Cockerham, Gaither Carlton, Sidna Meyers, Esker Hutchins, Oscar Wright, Willard Watson and Matokie Slaughter. Faurot and Nevins were thus able to make their own link in the chain for reviving old-time music, and the first record of this material came out in 1965 on County Records, simply called “Clawhammer Banjo”.

​Matokie’s hit number, “Big Eyed Rabbit” features on the later album “More Clawhammer Banjo Songs & Tunes From The Mountains” from 1969. This one also features her version of “Stillhouse.” It might be something you’d want to sip a bit of shine while listening to. All of these traditional tunes, she’d picked up from listening to her father play music, songs passing from generation to generation.

From my digging, it seems that when the banjo material recorded by Faurot eventually got re-released on CD in the form of a three-volume set simply called “Clawhammer Banjo.” Faurot recorded and put out a ton of other records for County, and it’s possible some of the other material comes from those compilations.

With all this looking around for traces of Matokie Slaughter, I’m not much further in knowing who she was as a woman, as a Virginian, as a person. I do know she liked to participate in all kinds of musical get togethers, workshops and festivals and that she later formed the band Matokie Slaughter & The Back Creek Buddies. Her sister Virgie was involved with that project as was Alice Gerrard. Their only release was on cassette, an album called Saro in 1990. Luckily for us Alice Gerrard has a bandcamp page and she put the album up there, where it has also been re-released on CD (for all you collectors out there).

Now who is Alice Gerrard, you wonder? For her efforts as a musician and old-time music booster she was nominated for a Grammy in 2015 and inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 2017. (Bill Vernon the son of the tax collector was another Bluegrass Hall of Famer, honored for his radio and writing efforts.) Gerrard plays guitar, fiddle and banjo, and worked as a duo with the late singer and songwriter Hazel Dickens as the Strange Creek Sisters. They put out four albums on Rounder and Folkways and their influence pushed bluegrass deeper into mainstream country when Emmy Lou Harris took up their arrangement of “Hello Stranger.” At the time, Gerrard and Dickens had just made history as the first women to record a bluegrass album (as opposed to just appearing on compilations put together by song collectors).

As I mentioned at the beginning, I first got hip to Slaughter reading about the work of Margaret Kilgallen, who had started putting up a Matokie Slaughter moniker on freight trains as a homage to her banjo playing hero. Kilgallen fictionalized, or folklorized her in her other art work.

Our daughter had given the name of our cat Tokie, because she looks like a rabbit (she had lost her tail when she was a kitten). She tells me that “Tokki” is Korean for rabbit. I think it’s a nice synchronicity that the song Matokie became most famous for is “Big Eyed Rabbit.”

Slaughter died just over a week after her eightieth birthday, on the last day of the previous millennium, December 31, 1999.

​This was the world Matokie Slaughter was a part and parcel of. I wish I could find out even more about her. In the meantime, at least I have her music to listen to as I ask the question, “Who was Matokie Slaughter?”

As I promised in previous posts on the Songs of the Five Elements, and Songs of the Nine Planets, I am continuing the series with the music of the Zodiac -which will itself now become a series. There is no better place to start then Mary Lou Williams. 

Mary Lou William’s was born under the sign of Taurus. The sign of the bull is ruled by Venus, the planet of beauty, so it is no wonder she was able to hear the music of the constellations and transform them into her sensual and expressive modernist jazz composition, Zodiac Suite.

Born on May 8th, 1910 she was a child of Atlanta, Georgia but a product of the Midwest, growing up in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Playing piano was something of a survival strategy for Williams. Her hostile white neighbors liked to throw bricks at her house, but this animosity was alleviated when she started playing piano for them. Music really does soothe the savage beast. Perhaps it can even soothe the racist beast. By the age of six she’d graduated to playing parties, and by seven was dubbed “The Little Piano Girl.” I suspect even the infant Jesus smiled down on her playing, just as he did on the “Little Drummer Boy” because she later converted to Catholicism, but not before passing through an exciting life as a traveling performer and arranger for some of the great names in jazz history.   

This phase started at age twelve when she was swinging through the Orpheum Circuit chain of vaudeville and movie theaters. The nineteen-twenties were roaring and she got to see it from the vantage point of a precocious adolescent performer. She must have been a musician in a former life to come back into this one with her fingers ready and poised to channel the music of the spheres onto the black and white of her cosmic keyboard. In this time she moonlighted in Duke Ellington’s band the Washingtonians. Then, a few years later, while in Cleveland, she met her first husband, the saxophonist John Overton Williams. She followed him and his band the Syncopators back to his town of Memphis before hitching a wagon with him out west to Oklahoma where he’d been invited to be a part of Andy Kirk’s group, Twelve Clouds of Joy.

Something about this band and the number twelve must have followed her around for her life. Some quality about the number twelve must have resonated in her soul. After all, the twelve signs of the zodiac are numbered twelve, as are the apostles of Christ, of whom she later dedicated herself to. In numerology twelve is connected to the starry heavens, as suggested by the constellations. It is also the combination three (ternary logic, triolectics and the trinity) and four (the number of the directions and their elements).

​It wasn’t all easy listening for her out there in Tulsa. It wasn’t a smooth jazz ride. Any working musician knows there are hours of toil and other jobs taken just to keep the bread and bacon the table. She found herself hauling corpses for a local undertaker for a spell while her husband got to play. The band moved to Missouri, Kansas and there she found herself sitting in with them at last. Here her own compositions started to flow into the mix of Kirk’s repertoire. The song’s “Mary’s Idea,” “Roll ‘Em” “Little Joe from Chicago, and “Froggy Bottom” all came from her creative mind. 

​Her recording career promptly followed beginning in 1929 with arrangements for the group, and the following year she cut her own solo piano to wax with “Drag ‘Em” and “Night Life.” She was getting hot and the records started selling, opening new doors for her in the music world as her star rose to prominence. She became Kirk’s permanent second pianist, had solo shows lined up, and found herself sought after as an arranger by the likes of Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Earl Hines. 

With fellow Twelve Clouds of Joy bandmember Dick Wilson she produced “In the Groove” in 1937. The cigarette companies were even lining up to work with her and she wrote “Camel Hop” to the delight of Turkish tobacco enthusiasts and sellers across the land. (I wonder if they paid her in camel cash.)

Benny Goodman at this point wanted to keep her under his wing, but she liked being able to be the queen of her own world, and work with whoever the muse directed her to. Around the same time, the muse, or at least cupid, had bailed on her marriage, and she left John Williams in 1942.

This might have something to do with why she quit the Twelve Clouds of Joy. Harold “Shorty” Baker also quit with her. The two were in a new relationship together. They hooked up with drummer Art Blakely, at least musically, and formed a six-piece ensemble. Six is half of twelve, a number of the sun, but this group didn’t stay out in the daylight long, and the band dissolved. Soon she had a showcase for herself as a member of Duke Ellington’s group, but that didn’t last terribly long either.

Planting herself in New York City she got a taste of the radio bug, hosting her own show on WNEW, a Class A clear-channel radio station that had begun operation in 1922. The aim of her show was instructive, to pass the torch and inspire younger musicians. Mary Lou William’s Piano Workshop is the kind of thing I’d like to hear on radio today. This corresponded with her role as a mentor at the time to heavyweights Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie. The jazz world was poised for bebop and she was right there when it happened. In an interview for Melody Maker the songstress recalls, “During this period Monk and the kids would come to my apartment every morning around four or pick me up at the Café after I'd finished my last show, and we'd play and swap ideas until noon or later.” As for the radio station, Boris Karloff would later ride the airwaves of WNEW in the following decade, with his 1950s children’s radio program. I bet there was nothing like cuddling up to Karloff’s voice as kid.

It was after this that Zodiac Suite poured out of her being. The zodiac is a common word for those of us interested in astrology and astronomy. But what is it exactly? The word comes from the ancient Greek, zōdiakòs kýklos (ζῳδιακός κύκλος), which means a “cycle or circle of little animals.” From there it went into Latin, zōdiacus, and then slipped into English. The zodiac can be considered as a belt around the Earth that extends about eight degrees north and south of the ecliptic, or the path of the movement of the sun around the celestial sphere. Because many of the constellations of the zodiac appear as animals or mythological figures, that’s how it got the name, circle of little animals. Not all of them are animals, but enough are to make it stick: Leo the Lion, Taurus the Bull, Pisces the Fish, Scorpio the Scorpion, Cancer the Crab are all examples.

In composing the Zodiac Suite she followed ancient tradition. Musicians have long sought to communicate the nature of celestial bodies through the medium of modulated sound waves. Her suite is one of the most successful and pleasing to the ears of our times. It rightly consists of twelve interconnected pieces, one for each sign. It starts with Aries and ends with Pisces, the same way the zodiacal year begins and ends with the Vernal Equinox, the point of its eternal return in spring.

The piece is as much modernist classical as it is modernist jazz. The year was 1945 and the whole midcentury thing was ready to burst. This music was a part of that, and the era can be heard when you listen to the original Asch recording. The music evokes those times so perfectly

The idea had first come to her in 1942 when she’d gotten hold of an astrology book and was inspired to write pieces for her musical friends. She had the first three written when she set about playing them on air at WNEW, and improvised the remaining nine. Al Lucas backed her on bass and Jack Parker on drums. Later she went into the studios of Asch Recording. Moe was always hungry for something new to press to record, and he championed Williams. She brought in Lucas and Parker to record the suite with her as a trio for Mr. Moe.

William’s work prefigured the later work of jazz and classical composers who sought to fuse the two together. The sound here is also distinctly American. Though it has twelve as a number, it has little in common with dodecaphonic music. There may be some influence, but it is slight, and while she liked the trio Asch recording, she wanted to do up Zodiac Suite with an orchestral backing and she started to re-sculpt the pieces into that for such a format.

 At the time she was in a relationship with Milton Orent. Now who is Milt Orent, you ask? Milt was a double bass player who’d received a classical musical education and had a deep knowledge of twentieth century composition. He worked as a studio musician and arranger for NBC radio. And while Williams was with Orent he played her the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, and probably some other cats who’d gone atonal. Orent gave Williams his input when she recast the suite for a large ensemble. For her own part, she put in more opportunities for the players to improvise, prefiguring the scores of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen where certain segments are left up to the players intuition. Still, Zodiac Suite doesn’t sound European at all, but clearly American, as each piece jaunts through the nature of each constellatory sign.

Her general blueprint did remain and most of the pieces are dedicated to people who were born under a particular constellation. She dedicated “Aries” to Billie Holiday and Ben Webster while “Taurus” was for Ellington. Her lover Shorty Baker got “Gemini” while Lem Davis was given “Cancer.” A surprising number of influential jazz musician are born under the sign of “Libra” and she dedicated it to Art Tatum, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. The rest of the signs follow suites with the luminaries of the age.

This version was first performed at the Town Hall in New York City on New Years Eve, 1945. A couple of obstacles threw themselves in the way and part of the show was bungled, leaving Williams sick for a week. This kind of thing can happen to a dedicated artist. Meanwhile the tapes for the recording went missing and it ended up being bootlegged around in Europe.

​A number of recordings now exist including the first trio version on Asch. Aaron Diehl and the Knights have meanwhile recorded a smashing version, just out in 2023, of the orchestral/big band version. This recording is more in line with the modernist vision she had when revising it for the concert hall, and the shades of modernity in classical music are foregrounded a bit more here, than on other recordings. 

The music life can be a hard life. Everyone knows about the rock and roll casualties lost to drugs. The jazz casualties are just as great, and heroin had long been a part of its subterranean underworld. We know about the marijuana use in jazz circles, can understand it, even celebrate it by lighting up a spliff, as one may now do with full legality in many states. Yet the heroin was there all along, getting into the bloodstream of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Miles Davis among many others.

I don’t know if this was what was on her mind, but something snapped in Williams when she was on tour in Paris, France, 1954. She got up from the piano and that was it, for many years. She was done. Dizzy Gillespie’s wife Lorraine had turned to Catholicism, and Williams followed, converting and shifting the direction of her life, away from the musical service she had given her many fans, to service in the form of the Bel Canto Foundation she started to help the poor, to help poor musicians, and those suffering from the tragedy addiction so often brings its way. With the money shed earned in her career, and some gifts from friends, she opened a half-way house and thrift store in Harlem.

Charlie Parker died in 1955 and she stayed away from music after that for awhile, putting her energy into the new efforts she was making on behalf of those in need. Still, she became close to two priests who told her she could use her prodigious gifts in service to the creator, but it she wasn’t ready just yet to get back to the work destiny had in mind for her. Dizzy Gillepsie also encouraged to get back to composing at the piano. Nobody wanted her to quit playing.

Another priest named Father O’Brien ended up becoming very close with Williams and helped her as a manager in the 1960s. He even had a part in getting her to establish a new jazz club in Manhattan and she got swinging again. Gillespie had introduced her to Bishop John Wright, from Pittsburgh. With his clerical help she went back to the town where she’d first performed and started the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival.

Williams had long had the gift of teaching and Wright got her a gig as a teacher at Seton High School. Her mind had turned by this point to the sacred implications of music in worship. She was commissioned by the church to write the music for a mass and it became the first ever mass done in the style of jazz, the Pittsburgh Mass of 1964. It ended up being released by Folkways as Mary Lou Williams or The Black Christ of Andes. It had developed out of a piece she wrote in honor of St. Martin de Porres, the patron saint of mixed-race people, barbers, innkeepers, public health workers, all those seeking racial harmony, and animals, for his feast day in 1962

​The work is a visionary masterpiece of spiritual jazz incorporating the blues, avant-garde idioms, and spirituals. She had found her way back to music, and continued to teach, stressing the importance of jazz history and its place in American life.

​Her work is well worth acquainting yourself with as you take another trip around the sun.

​​.:.  /|\  .:.   .:.  /|\  .:.    .:.  /|\  .:.

(We'll get to Stockhausen and his Tierkreis cycle next. I've touched on it before briefly in the previous link and also briefly in this Brief History of Space Music as well as an early essay of mine for Brainwashed.com: Music from Sirius: The Dreams of Karlheinz Stockhausen, which I can't find on the site anymore, but it looks like someone put up on Scribd -and also has been referenced in some academic papers - who knew!?