Chapter Seven

Sounding Horror
Ballads, Ring Shouts, and the
Power of Music in Black Horror

Erik Steinskog

MUSIC

I remember opening Victor LaValle’s novel The Changeling (2017) when I

bought it, only to be filled with joy by the epigraph, as the novel opens with
a quote from Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” a song from Wonder’s 1972
album Talking Book: “When you believe in things you don’t understand you
suffer.” As a musicologist working with Black music, I could hear the song
for my inner ear, and that even if one could argue that the epigraph only
focuses upon the lyrics. I am sure I am not the only one, however, that also
hears the song with its recognizable clavinet riff, in addition to remembering
lyrics. And then, obviously, the lyrics—even when quoted before the novel
begins, and thus in a sense “outside” of the novel—these lyrics still echoes
while reading, opening up the question about the relation between the song
and the novel. The song (lyrics) is not simply a paratext; it becomes a part of
the interpretational frame, perhaps as a warning. A similar experience with
music being almost outside of the narrative I experienced with the end credits
of Jordan Peele’s Us (2019), with Minnie Riperton singing “Les Fleur” from
her 1970 album Come to My Garden. Riperton’s song has very little to do
with doppelgängers, with subterranean existence, and other topics of Us, but
as the literal end of the movie—not to say an afterthought, after the end—the
presence of the song invites us to listen to it differently while also reflecting
differently on the movie we have just watched. These two examples, then, at
the same time frame and help me think about music in relation to horror or

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102 Erik Steinskog

horror stories. Given music’s less concrete meaning, there seems to be fewer
discussions of music related to speculative fiction, including horror, than
other forms of art such as literature and film. Music seems not to be thought
of as being related to fiction in a similar way, and there are good reasons for
this. At the same time, and especially in film, music is often used to establish
atmosphere, to mark history (also when used anachronistically), or to high-
light emotional content. Sounds or music in the background can get us as film
viewers to anticipate horrors or shocks in the narrative, we hear then before
we see them, so to speak.
References to pre-existing music is key to much film music, as a different
strategy than having music composed for the particular film. Sometimes the
pre-existing music is part of the action of the movie, diegetic, other times not
so much, and there is even a third possibility where it is not clear whether
the sounds are diegetic or non-diegetic. An example could be the end credits
to Us (2019). Such uses of music can also, slightly differently, be found in
literature, with the important difference, obviously, that music in literature
more often than not is unheard, whereas in film it is heard. The “unheard” or
described music can still be put to similar uses in literature to the ones found
in film. Thus, listening to literature may bring about other dimensions of
interpretation than seeing music (or sounds) as just one topic within the nar-
rative. This is how I would read the epigraph to The Changeling. One could
make an argument that it is primarily the title and the lyrics that are important
here, and thus not “the music” in a narrower sense, but I do not think this is
the case. Rather, I would argue that even as an epigraph, and thus almost “out-
side” of the text, this reference partakes in establishing both an atmosphere
and a frame for interpretation of the novel. As readers, we hear the silent
echo of Stevie Wonder’s song, as we turn the page to begin reading. And
while Wonder’s song is a classic, it will also resound differently to different
audiences, although the song will arguably be of significance to a Black read-
ership, highlighting Black music. There is also, arguably, something happen-
ing in the use of history when using music. Wonder’s 1972 meets LaValle’s
2017, but then also the historical time of the novel, which may be more or
less precise. The reference to Black readership is also meant to invoke the
intimate relationship between music and lived experience in Black communi-
ties, as for example in the introduction to Tavia Nyong’o’s “Afro-philo-sonic
Fictions,” where he writes: “Music has long been understood to be central to
the lived experience of black people” (Nyong’o 2014, 173).
In this chapter I will discuss Victor LaValle’s novella The Ballad of Black
Tom (2016) and P. Djèlí Clark’s novella Ring Shout (2020) with a focus upon
music in the novellas. By this I mean both how music is a part of the respec-
tive stories, but also how music is part of the very meaning of the stories.
Music, then, is more than simply a topic in the novellas. The Ballad of Black
 Sounding Horror 103

Tom takes place in Harlem in 1924, and tells the story of Tommy Tester, a
hustler who sometimes is a street musician, and who in the beginning of the
novella is taking a book to Ma Att. While in Queens he also meets the mil-
lionaire Robert Suydam, who wants him to play at a party. The novella is a
retelling—I am tempted to call it a remix—of H. P. Lovecraft’s short story
“The Horror of Red Hook” (1925), and the first section is from the point of
view of Tommy Tester, whereas the second section is Detective Malone’s
perspective. The references to Lovecraft’s story is even more important given
the discussions on Lovecraft’s racism, and how rereading Lovecraft from a
Black perspective becomes crucial in The Ballad of Black Tom—just as in
LaValle’s preface for the novella: “For H. P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted
feelings” (cf. Hudson 2022). Ring Shout also takes place in the 1920s, more
exactly 1922, in Macon, Georgia. The story follows Maryse Boudreaux who
hunts “Ku Kluxes,” supernatural demons summoned by the Ku Klux Klan.
An alternative history, filled with magic, thus also establishes a context for a
reading of the racist past, including references to D. W. Griffith’s 1915 movie
The Birth of a Nation. In both novellas, music is central.
Where we can, so to speak, hear the echo of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition”
when we are about to begin reading The Changeling, in The Ballad of Black
Tom, music is “heard” and felt throughout. At the very beginning of the
novella, as Charles Thomas Tester is leaving his apartment on West 144th
Street, he hears his father, Otis, plucking a guitar and singing “John the
Revelator” (LaValle 2016, 10), a traditional gospel blues call-and-response
song, recorded by Blind Willie Johnson in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 20,
1930. While this date of recording may give some readers a slight problem,
as the story of the novella takes place in 1924, I think the recording by Blind
Willie Johnson should primarily be seen as recording an already existing
traditional song. Thus, in this sense, the song signifies a cultural context
where music is crucial. As a call-and-response song, it also signifies a com-
munity, and in the opening of the novella the relation between Charles and
his father, Otis:

“Who’s that writing?” his father sang, voice hoarse but the more lovely for it. “I
said who’s that writing?” Before leaving, Charles sang back the last line of the
chorus. “John the Revelator.” He was embarrassed by his voice, not tuneful at
all, at least when compared with his dad’s. (LaValle 2016, 10)

The lyrics are relating to John of Patmos, as the author of the Book of
Revelation, and thus also signals the end of time, and thus already at this
humble opening of a man sitting in his bedroom singing gospel blues, as read-
ers we learn about the possibility of an apocalyptic event. Thus, even more
than Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” in The Changeling, signaling that the
104 Erik Steinskog

“writing is on the wall” and “the devil is on his way,” here, the narrative of the
novella can be said to unfold from the call-and-response of the gospel blues.
Thus, the music is not only setting the stage of 1924’s Harlem, although it
does that as well. Rather, the music is a kind of prophecy of what is to come.
At the same time there is an important dimension to how to read Charles in
this opening scene. He is embarrassed by his voice, something that is peculiar
given that he is, in a sense, a guitar player and musician. When he is about to
leave the apartment, he takes his guitar case with him “to complete the look”
(LaValle 2016, 10), but he leaves the guitar at home, the guitar case only con-
taining a yellow book he is to deliver to Ma Att in Queens. But there is more
than the empty guitar case to Charles life, as he later goes back to Queens to
play on the streets to earn money.

None of the other Harlem players would take a train out to Queens or rural
Brooklyn for the chance of getting money from the famously thrifty immigrants
homesteading in those parts. But a man like Tommy Tester—who only put on
a show of making music—certainly might. Those outer-borough bohunks and
Paddys probably didn’t know a damn thing about serious jazz, so Tommy’s
knockoff version might still stand out.” (LaValle 2016, 18)

Here, then, a difference in audience—and thus in collective experiences—

comes to the fore. Tommy Tester may not be a musician in Harlem, but he
may pass for one in Queens. His music making will not stand out among
“real” musicians but playing for a—we are meant to think—white audience,
Tommy’s shortcomings may not even be noticed. Thus, the music here is not
simply signifying Black culture and the Black public sphere; it also signals
a belonging to the culture, and thus by implication also a belonging to the
music. The music Tommy is playing is Black music, but the implication is
that a white audience may not really understand. One could be tempted to
refer to Henry Dumas’s story “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” (from 1966),
where the music, or the particular sounds played, kills the white audience
members in a jazz club.1
“Will the Circle Be Unbroken” (published in Ark of Bones) is not only
important for the reference to “free music,” as Amiri Baraka comments about
the story in his “The Changing Same,” also from 1966 (cf. Jones 2010, 212).
In that essay Baraka also underlines the call-and-response, claiming “The line
we could trace, as musical ‘tradition,’ is what we as a people dig and pass
on, as best we can. The call-and-response form of Africa (lead and chorus)
has never left us, as a mode of (musical) expression” (Jones 2010, 206). An
equally interesting dimension, with reference to sounds, is one of the instru-
ments described in the story, an afro-horn that the main character, Probe, has
 Sounding Horror 105

gotten his hands on. This is a rare instrument, on many levels, and it has a
long history, as it has ancient origins.

There are only three afro-horns in the world. They were forged from a rare metal
found only in Africa and South America. No-one knows who forged the horns,
but the general opinion among musicologists is that it was the Egyptians. One
European museum guards an afro-horn. The other is supposed to be somewhere
on the West Coast of Mexico, among a tribe of Indians. Probe grew into his from
a black peddler who claimed to have travelled a thousand miles just to give it to
his son. From that day on, Probe’s sax handled like a child, a child waiting for
itself to grow out of itself. (Dumas 2003, 109)

The power of Probe’s instrument is immense. And it turns out, at the end of
the story, that it is deadly. “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” is also of interest
as a way of describing not only sound in literature, but also a sound that must
be imagined. It would be deadly, at least for quite a few of us as readers, if
we actually got to hear this sound. Thus, the power of sound is invested in
letters, that in many ways provoke the reader. This speaks to an interesting
dimension of sound: literary sound. And I want to distinguish this from the
literary voice, as there are similarities. Paying attention to these similarities
could also help in discussing how the use of the trope of the literary voice
may not be a metaphorical voice—as so often is the case—but in one way
or another grounded in the material singing voice as much more than literary
studies perhaps wants to acknowledge. Discussing sounds in literature, on
the other hand, points to something different than this voice, and might also
take us into a different territory. Remember as well that with the exception of
phonographs and material scores, words are the most common way to convey
sounds, even if, arguably, most people would be quick to contest that words
cannot really do this. What is happening in Dumas’s story, however, is that
literature conveys sounds that are not only unheard, but also inaudible, thus
pointing to one place where literature has an advantage over phonographs,
simply by being able to describe these sounds in one way or another, or, per-
haps better, to describe their effects.
The way Dumas describes the afro-horn is also of interest. There are some
musicologists here claiming that the origin of the afro-horn is in Ancient
Egypt, a reference also common within Afrofuturism or Black Speculative
Fiction, and where Dumas’s friendship with Sun Ra is probably also impor-
tant. But the afro-horn also echoes Salim Washington’s discussions of tech-
nology with reference to Henry Dumas and Samuel R. Delany. Washington
discusses what he calls “the Afro-technological,” thus contributing to the
importance of discussing whether there are “Black technologies” that both
sound studies and technology studies have for the most part overlooked.
106 Erik Steinskog

He expands on the Afro-technological, calling it an impulse as well, and

argues that it has been “manifested in music” by “the inventions of instru-
ments themselves” (Washington 2008, 236). In addition to the instruments
themselves, there are, he argues, also particular “black techniques applied to
conventional European instruments” (Ibid.), and he focuses first on percus-
sive elements, and second on extended vocal techniques. He also claims that
“in part because of its West African aesthetic inheritance, African American
music frequently makes use of sounds that are considered extramusical in
the Western art music tradition” (2008, 242). And thus music, among other
things, becomes “a technology for transporting minds, bodies, and souls—the
very being of black folk—away from oppression and viciously circumscribed
living conditions” (2008, 237) and thus “a vehicle for either personal or cor-
porate transformation” (2008, 239).
The Egyptian dimension of Dumas is not only found in the origin of the
afro-horn, but also in the album he collaborated with Sun Ra on, The Ark and
the Ankh also from 1966. It is also, however, possible to find an “Egyptian”
dimension in The Ballad of Black Tom, with the already mentioned Ma Att.
She is “linked to the otherworldly and poses a threat to Tommy,” but her name
also echoes “Maat, the Egyptian goddess of justice” (Witzel 2018, 566). “It’s
an Egyptian name, isn’t it?” (LaValle 2016, 86). This reference to ancient
Egypt at the same time also puts “the Supreme Alphabet” of the story into
a broader context often found within Afrofuturism, where ancient Egypt is
crucial, while also giving LaValle the possibility of connecting the 1920s of
Lovecraft with the Five-Percent Nation—the Nation of Gods and Earths—
thus adding yet other layers to his remix of Black culture. The Supreme
Alphabet is mentioned throughout the novel and is related to Ma Att and thus
Ancient Egypt as well as magic. It could also be seen as a cue to interpreta-
tion, where hidden meanings are found in ordinary script. Another layer of
hidden meaning, perhaps, is found in music, as well as in the historical refer-
ences to musical meaning as “hidden” from (white) outsiders.
While “John the Revelator” was first recorded by Blind Willie Johnson in
1930, the development of the story of The Ballad of Black Tom makes it even
more likely that the reference is to Son House’s version from 1965. While this
may be less important for the overall story, to me this possibility signals an
ongoing relation to music, where new versions of the same songs are played
or heard, a sign that music is a constant in the cultural fabric the novella takes
place within. It is not unlikely that this also signals the importance of music
within Black culture, and as such is more likely to be found in this remix of
Lovecraft than in Lovecraft’s own writings (although see Machin 2012).
Preparing for the party, Tommy is practicing a song taught him, and which
Otis describes as “Conjure music” (LaValle 2016, 36). Having practiced it for
three days, Tommy is getting closer to playing it well:
 Sounding Horror 107

“Conjure music, Otis called it. As he began, he felt his father and mother were
closer to him, right there with him, as real as the chords on his guitar. For the
first time in Tommy’s life, he didn’t play for the money, didn’t play so he could
hustle. This was the first time in his life he ever played well.” (LaValle 2016, 70)

We get a bit of the lyrics, when Tommy is singing “Don’t you mind people
grinning in your face” (LaValle 2016, 70), and at least for me this sounds
an echo of Son House’s “Grinnin’ in Your Face” found on his album Father
of Folk Blues (1965). Son House (1902–1988) also recorded “John the
Revelator” (found on the same album), making him a likely soundtrack to
the novella and the events of The Ballad of Black Tom. And “Don’t you mind
people grinning in your face” is also what Black Tom (in the novella’s sec-
ond part) sings to Malone when they are fighting, and Malone almost dies
(LaValle 2016, 131f).
Another but related use of music in speculative fiction is found in P. Djèlí
Clark’s novel Ring Shout (2020). Here the title is in itself a reference to music,
or more precisely to a ritualistic use of music and movement. But music is also
an integrated part of the narrative. In his Slave Cultures: Nationalist Theory
and the Foundations of Black America, Sterling Stuckey argues that “the ring
shout was the main context in which Africans recognized values common to
them. Those values were remarkable because, while of ancient African prov-
enance, they were fertile seed for the bloom of new forms” (Stuckey 2013,
15). And in his article “Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and
Black Music Inquiry,” Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., following Stuckey, argues that
“the shout was an activity in which music and dance commingled, merged,
and fused to become a single distinctive cultural ritual in which the slaves
made music and derived their musical styles” (Floyd 1991, 266) and also
claims that “Stuckey regards the Negro spiritual as central to the ring and
foundational to all subsequent Afro-American music-making. He noticed in
descriptions of the shout that, in the ring, musical practices from through-out
black culture converged in the spiritual” (Floyd 1991, 267).
And the ring shout is central in the story of the novel, as is music on several
levels. The story opens with a Klan march on Fourth of July 1922, in Macon,
Georgia. There are fireworks and, as the narrator, Maryse Boudreaux, tells
us: “A brass band competing with the racket, though everybody down there I
swear clapping on the one and the three” (Clark 2020, 11). This march, then,
is clearly “white music,” and the whiteness is underlined with the clapping
on the one and the three. This is in explicit contrast to the music heard in
Frenchy’s Inn, where the main characters are together for drinks, dancing,
and music:
108 Erik Steinskog

The music at Frenchy’s so loud I feel it on my insides. The piano man up out his
seat, one leg hanging off the grainy wood and pounding the keys hard enough
to break them. He sweating so I’m wondering how that shiny conk holding
up. Whole while he wailing on about some big-boned woman he left in New
Orleans, just about jumping out his maroon suit to croon, “And when she roll
that jelly!” The crowd roars, men whooping and women fanning hands like to
cool him off.” (Clark 2020, 55)

This difference between the march and the dancing, between white and
Black, between the Klan and the Black community, is thus a difference music
is used to describe.
Related to the music in the bar, although at the same time with important
differences, is the shout, presented when the main characters for the first time
in the novella meet the Gullah people.

There’s a Shout going on. In the center of the room, five men and women—
their hair peppered with white—move in a backward circle to the floor. Them’s
Shouters. Keeping time is the Stick Man, stooped and beating his cane on the
floor. Behind him are three Basers—in overalls frayed by labor, and clapping
hands just as worn. They cry out in answer to the Leader, a barren-chested man
named Uncle Will in a straw hat, bellowing out for the world to hear.
“Blow, Gabriel!”
“At the Judgment.”
“Blow that trumpet!”
“At the Judgment bar.”
“My God call you!”
“At the Judgment.”
“Angels shouting!”
“At the Judgment bar.” (Clark 2020, 36)

The ritual follows the same pattern described by Stuckey and Floyd, and the
description clearly demonstrates both the counterclockwise movement, the
structure of call-and-response, as well as the spiritual as a foundational musi-
cal dimension. In his description of the ring shout, Floyd also notices that “the
ring shout was a dance in which the sacred and the secular were conflated”
(Floyd 1991, 268), which while not clearly illustrated in the above quote,
rings through and contributes to see the similarities of the music in the ring
shout and in Frenchy’s Inn. There is a continuity within the Black commu-
nity’s relation to music, a continuity between what in other communities may
be differentiated between the sacred and the secular. In this a key feature of
the music comes to the fore, as a force of community building where both the
sacred and the secular is at stake. It is also important for the story that the ring
shout is old. “The Shout come from slavery times. Though hear Uncle Will
 Sounding Horror 109

tell it, maybe it older than that” (Clark 2020, 37). Thus, not only, perhaps, a
feature of Black music in the United States, but of older origin, thus contribut-
ing, as Stuckey also says, to something “in which Africans recognized values
common to them” (Stuckey 2013, 15). And while the lyrics are not identical,
it is not difficult to hear the above quote as an echo of Reverend Gary Davis’s
“Blow, Gabriel” from the 1956 album American Street Songs by Reverend
Gary Davis and Pink Anderson, thus underlining the continuity both between
sacred and secular, but also how the music is transported across time.
The importance of the ring shout for the story is also underlined by the
character Emma Krauss, presented as “the German widow,” who owns a
store in the town. “But in Germany she trained to study music and can’t get
enough of the Shout” (Clark 2020, 40). In many ways she functions as an eth-
nomusicologist in the story, and there are notations, almost like ethnographic
field-notes, spread throughout the novel, “transliterated from the Gullah”
(Clark 2020, 9, 53, 93, 121, 159). In these notes the “outsider’s” perspective
on the ring shout comes to the fore, but not quite totally an outsider. Given the
ethnographic dimension they function more like explanations coming from
the practitioners themselves. The novella even begins with “Notation 15”
before chapter one, and it is Uncle Will, “age 67,” who is referenced, that is
to say the man we later learn is “the Leader” of the above-quoted ring shout.
In the interview he tells about “a Shout we do ‘bout old pharaoh and Moses”
and he compares the story from Exodus with “when Union soldiers come tell
us ‘bout the Jubilee” (Clark 2020, 9). Thus, the pharaoh is compared with the
Confederacy, in a clear illustration on how the spirituals—here it is tempting
to quote “Go down, Moses”—are used to explain the lived experiences of the
Black community. Emma Krauss also brings to mind Zora Neale Hurston and
her fieldwork in Georgia and Florida with Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth
Barnicle in 1935 researching, among other things, Black music, song tradi-
tions, and relations to slave culture and African music. Hurston also wrote
about the ring shout claiming that “There is little doubt that shouting is a
survival of the African ‘possession’ by the gods. In Africa it is sacred to the
priesthood or acolytes, in America it has become generalized” (Hurston 2022,
72). What is described in Clarke’s novella thus align perfectly with Hurston’s
interpretation.
Toward the end of the novel, the march of the Klan—probably clapping
on the one and the three—and the song of Maryse, that is the music of white
supremacy versus the music of the Black community, take part in a battle of
metaphysical proportions. Butcher Clyde, the Klan leader, is on the one side,
and Maryse on the other. Here is one of her descriptions:

It’s like the night at the juke joint. A mashed-up chorus, with no real timing or
rhythm. As if it was created to unmake music. Like before it threatens to take
110 Erik Steinskog

me off balance, and I stumble under it. But no! I have songs too! I listen to my
sword, letting those chanting voices fill me up. For a moment it seems the two
are battling: my songs and his uneven chorus. But it was never a real fight. What
I have is beautiful music inspired by struggle and fierce love. What he got ain’t
nothing but hateful noise. Not a hint of soul to it. Like unseasoned meat. My
songs crash right through that nonsense, silencing it, just as my sword takes off
his arm. He falls back and I dip low, slicing away everything under one knee.
(Clark 2020, 163)

Maryse has songs of her own, and the voices she can hear are also the voices
of the ancestors. The whole culture, and a long history, sounds in her mind,
“beautiful music inspired by struggle and fierce love” (Ibid). This music is the
opposite of the “hateful noise” of Butcher Clyde, which, as Maryse writes, is
as if “it was created to unmake music.” This reference is to actual music, but
music also functions like a metaphor, a way of describing a whole way of life,
the lived experience of which the ring shout is a foundation.
The full title of Clark’s novella is Ring Shout, or, Hunting Ku Kluxes in
the End Times, and there is an apocalyptic dimension to the story, as there is
to The Ballad of Black Tom. Both novellas take place in the 1920s, and both
reference contemporary racist societies: The Ballad of Black Tom with the ref-
erence to Lovecraft and the references to the Klan as well as D. W. Griffith’s
movie The Birth of a Nation (1915) in Ring Shout. In stark opposition to these
racists dimensions is music, the ring shout, the music at Frenchy’s Inn, the
gospel blues, the call-and-response. This music at the same time standing for
the lived experiences of Black folks. This music is contrasted with “the hate-
ful noise” of Butcher Clyde on the one hand, and with “a demented music,
evil orchestration” in The Ballad of Black Tom on the other (LaValle 2016,
129), showing the power and force of music in opposition to the horrors of
white supremacy.

NOTE

1. I discuss Dumas’s story in Steinskog (2018), 62.

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 Sounding Horror 111

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