Another Good Loving Blues

Another Good Loving Blues is a 1993 novel by African American writer Arthur Flowers, a native of Memphis, Tennessee, and previously author of De Mojo Blues. The book is set in the Mississippi River Delta of eastern Arkansas, Memphis, and Mississippi.

The novel begins with an invocation of the storyteller’s art: “I am Flowers of the delta clan Flowers and the line of O Killens—I am a hoodoo, I am griot, I am a man of power. My story is a true story, my words are true words, my lie is a true lie—a fine old delta tale about a mad blues piano player and an Arkansas conjure woman on a hoodoo mission.”

The story begins in the spring of 1918 when Lucas (Luke) Bodeen, a “silver-tongued delta bluesman” from Memphis, encounters Melvira Dupree, a “conjure,” on the streets of Sweetwater, Arkansas. They fall instantly in love, and rather than moving on as he had intended, Bodeen moves “into her little place out there on Sweetwater Creek” and plays at a local juke joint.

After a year in Sweetwater, Lucas begins to imagine leaving, hoping to do a “blues that will still be here touching folk long after I’m dead and gone.” Meanwhile, Melvira finds herself drawn to the mystery of her mother, Effie Dupree, “a known hoodoo of some power” who had arrived in Sweetwater pregnant and left her child in the care of another hoodoo named Maggie. Melvira eventually learns that her mother is in Memphis and invites Lucas to accompany her there, which he does.

The second chapter begins thusly: “Like all the really good things in life, Melvira Dupree and Lucas Bodeen finally made it to Beale Street.” The two get a room on Hernando Street, just off Beale, and Lucas gets a job playing at the Hole-in-the-Wall. He finds that the blues to which most people are listening has evolved, in that few are playing solo anymore, and he offers to play for blues legend W. C. Handy’s band in return for Handy teaching him to read music. However, life in Memphis, especially Lucas’s late nights and his recourse to liquor and drugs, drives a wedge between him and Melvin, and he leaves her one day. Lucas is at first relieved, but after a month he is miserable. Melvira refuses to take him back. After a year without her, he is reduced to drunken despair and hops a train out of town. Looking for her mother, Melvira is directed toward a conjure man called the Hootowl, who sees in her “his last chance to serve the colored race.” Melvira has “been hit with the Hoodoo Curse, the vision to see what must be done and the knowledge that you are capable of doing it.”

Lucas goes home to the shotgun house on the farm where his parents live in rural western Tennessee. While he is home, he tries to help out on the farm but starts playing the blues again, going farther afield for work, until one day he comes home to his father’s funeral. His mother leaves the farm for Chicago, and Lucas starts traveling again.

A man named Phineas T. Stokes signs him to a deal with Okeh Records. He arrives in Memphis just as Melvira is leaving the city to try to find a place called Taproot, Mississippi. She starts walking, and eventually Lucas picks her up in a car he apparently owns, having been directed her way by a well-dressed hoodoo with a top hat and scars carved into his cheeks. In doing so, he abandons his chance to record at Okeh. On the way to Taproot, with Lucas trying unsuccessfully to win her back, they stay with a local family, encounter the burned body of a lynching victim hanging from a tree, and lose their car in a Mississippi River flood. Lucas comes down with a fever, and Melvira lodges him at a local brothel until he is better. When finally they arrive at Taproot, all they find are “trees, bush and winding delta road.”

Lucas leaves Melvira at the door of her mother’s cabin. Melvira is not there for long before the Baron (Death) arrives to take her mother. After the Baron departs, Lucas returns, and they bury Effie before deciding to see a bit of the world, after which they jump over a broom and walk “hand in hand off into the wooded sunset.”

Flowers, who described himself as a “contemporary griot,” regularly performed sections of Another Good Loving Blues (and other works) with African instruments rather than doing a strict reading. He appeared for such a performance at the Delta Symposium at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro (Craighead County) in 1997. Reviews for his book were mixed but positive, with Publishers Weekly describing it as “alternately playful and solemn,” while Kirkus Reviews said it was best “in its blues scenes and delta moods, most disappointing in its lack of depth and continuity, with Melvira a shadowy character next to her man.”

For additional information:
Flowers, Arthur. Another Good Loving Blues. New York: Viking, 1993.

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas