Panning for music gold: The Catchers, by Xan Brooks, reviewed

They were known as song catchers: New York-based chancers with recording equipment packed in the back of the van, heading south in search of hill country music that could make the record company (and, relatively, the recorder) rich. The singer would get a flat fee of $30. Among themselves, over a beer, the catchers called it panning for gold, diving for pearls, trapping fireflies in a jar. Their territory was the far beyond, where ‘people played banjos and fiddles, washboards and dulcimers… Songs poured through the hills like migrating salmon.’

Xan Brooks’s second novel focuses on one young catcher, John Coughlin, as he heads south to Appalachia in April 1927, fascinated by rumours of a black boy with an extraordinary voice. When Coughlin is brutally attacked by thugs in an Alabama fairground, he’s carried to a nearby mansion, all fluted columns and balconies, to be looked after.

Further south, in Tennessee, after weeks of torrential rain, the river is rising fast. At one imperilled levee, Mounds Landing, black workers and convicts work day and night to shore up the crumbling banks, frantically piling up sandbags and planks. Moss, a skinny black 18-year-old with wire-mended glasses and a two-dollar guitar, is employed unloading barrels of hooch, ladling out a daily tot to the convicts and labourers, the rest appropriated by white bosses. But, inevitably, there comes the dreaded moment when the flood defences are overwhelmed.

On 27 April, the Mississippi bursts its banks, surging over fields and homes, ‘a wall of water six feet high, too fast to outrun, too broad to outflank… it struck the buildings broadside, with an oil tanker’s blunt force’. It is the worst flood disaster ever experienced in America. Dogs scramble into treetops; bears grab at driftwood; hundreds of thousands are left homeless.