Gigi Sherrell Norwood--Scary Music!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Counting down the last ten days to the most frightening day of the year, we have just the thing to get you in the mood! Here's our Jungle Red friend and my very good pal, Gigi Norwood, with a rundown on the scariest of tunes!

GIGI NORWOOD: When Debs turned to me the other day, searching for blog post ideas for her week at bat on Jungle Red, we brainstormed our way through Halloween décor, pumpkin-centric agriculture, and spice cake recipes before I suggested she look at festive holiday music that is absolutely NOT for Christmas.

Like, say, that Crypt Kickers classic, Monster Mash. Or the ooky, spooky theme from The Addams Family. When I started dragging Camille Saint-Saëns and Edvard Grieg into the conversation, she said, “Why don’t you write it?” So here I am, guest blogging, and delighted to be back on Jungle Red.

When the conversation turns to Halloween music, there are a lot of popular options, from Ghost Riders in the Sky to Thriller. You want witches?  We have a whole coven, including Donovan’s Season of the Witch, Nina Simone’s I Put a Spell on You, and Bobby Bare’s Marie Laveau. Monsters? Check out Sheb Wooley’s Purple People-Eater. And ghosts? You need only dip into folk music’s murder ballads to find scores of those.  My personal favorite ghost ballad is Long Black Veil, which is eerie enough, even before you realize that the ghost is not the woman in black.  It’s the singer, watching her walk the hills.

But Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt Kickers must win some kind of prize for the most enduring goofball Halloween song of all time. A novelty song written to play off Bobby Pickett’s amusing imitation of Boris Karloff, it tells the story of the living dead, including Frankenstein’s monster and Count Dracula, dancing their Halloween away, doing some reanimated form of the Mashed Potato.  High art that combined satire, homage, and a catchy tune to become a number one hit and spend more than 60 years hanging out on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Pickett’s song might have had a lot of contemporary cultural references, but the idea of monsters, ghosts, witches and demons dancing the night away is very old. 

Folklore from many lands speaks of a witches’ sabbath, held around All Hallows or sometimes Midsummer eve, where women and men, intent on evil, met up with their demonic overlord at midnight to dance and celebrate with horrible rituals.  I should point out that there is no historical evidence that celebrations like this actually happened anywhere in Europe, Asia, or the Americas, although your friendly local pagan group will probably throw a fun party on Halloween night.

Facts don’t matter in folklore, though.  Imagination rules the night, illuminated only by bonfire light, and by the late 1800s classical composers were turning to their national folklore for inspiration. 

In January, 1875, two takes on the monster’s ball theme made their debut.  Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King was part of a suite of music he wrote for Henrik Ibsen’s play, Peer Gynt.  It underscores a scene where the legendary folk hero and trickster Peer Gynt sneaks into the throne room of the Troll King, deep inside a mountain. There he is surrounded by partying goblins, trolls, and monsters, none of whom are all that happy to see him.  He has to make a run for it if he ever hopes to survive.

That same month, French composer Camille Saint-Saëns debuted his take on the witches’ sabbath with Danse Macabre. In Saint-Saëns’ version, the clock strikes midnight, and the Devil lifts his bow to play a lovely violin solo which brings all the dead to life. They dance to the Devil’s music until the cock crows at dawn and they all go back to being dead again.  Not so far off from Monster Mash after all.

Maybe the scariest of classical takes on the all-night ghoulish dance party is Night on Bald Mountain.  Written in 1865 by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, it was stuck into a whole range of plays, operas, and chorales that didn’t work or never got staged.  Scholars believe Mussorgsky never heard it played in public.  But after his death in 1881, friends got together to sort through his papers, doing what they could to preserve his music.  Night on Bald Mountain fell into the hands of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who reworked it into the piece we know now, primarily as the scariest sequence in Walt Disney’s 1940 animated classic Fantasia. 

All of which is to say that, if you have the urge to dance your Halloween night away with ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties, go for it!  The tradition is probably at least as old as Christmas and who knows?  It might turn out to be a graveyard smash.

DEBS: Reds and readers, have we missed any of your scary faves?

Gigi Norwood was more or less doomed to a life as an arts professional. She was listening to classical music in the womb and spent her summer vacations roaming art museums the way other kids went to Disneyland. 

As an adult she has alternated between writing jobs and music presentations.  She is a founding partner of the independent press Weird Sisters Publishing, LLC, and has a day job back on the production side of the desk as Director of Concert Operations for the Dallas Winds. 

Writing as G. S. Norwood, she is the author of Deep Ellum Pawn and Deep Ellum Blues and is currently at work on a third Deep Ellum story plus a novel. 

G.S. Norwood--Everyday Magic

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Here on Jungle Red Writers we have few bigger thrills than introducing a friend to our readers. So it is my great pleasure today to bring you G.S. Norwood--or, as our regular readers know her, Gigi Norwood! Gigi and I have not only been writing buddies for many a year, we share a love of urban fantasy as well as mystery. And although she writes in both genres, DEEP ELLUM PAWN hits all my favorite urban fantasy notes. Here's Gigi to introduce you to Ms. Eddy Weekes and a bit of magic.

GIGI NORWOOD: I believe in magic.  Not the David Copperfield, big stage illusion kind.  Not the Harry Potter wave-a-wand-and-say-the-right-words kind.  I believe in the natural kind that arises from the energy shared by people who gather around a common belief.

You’ve probably felt that energy yourself, humming through a crowd of grandparents, parents, grand and great-grandchildren at the start of last movie in the Star Wars triple trilogy.  If you gasped along with the little ones as the snowflakes began to fall at the end of the first act of The Nutcracker, you have felt it.  It’s the energy that whispers amazing things are possible, and Tinkerbell will survive, if only we believe.

To write urban fantasy, as I do, you have to believe that kind of life-force energy hums just under the surface of even the grittiest city.  You have to peel back the layers of concrete and asphalt right down to the dirt, then call on the folklore and fairy tales, old songs and old wives’ tales that have grown up around a place. You weave in history and legend until the story has one foot in reality, and one foot in fantasy.

My novelette, Deep Ellum Pawn, began with that mix of practicality and possibility.  I had an old Charlie Daniels song stuck in my mind.  The Devil Went Down to Georgia is catchy, but I couldn’t help but wonder why anyone would want a fiddle made of gold.  Gold is a dense metal, heavy to hold, and not very resonant.  A golden fiddle—particularly one from the Devil himself—would likely sound less than musical.  So, what do you do with it?  Melt it down? Take it to a pawn shop?

The moment that thought popped into my mind a character followed.  That’s how I met Ms. Eddy Weekes, owner of Deep Ellum Pawn.  It’s a dusty pawn shop in one of Dallas’ oldest neighborhoods, but there’s more going on behind the façade than anyone might suspect.

The story flowed quickly, and I began to wonder if I’d made it up, or if some force beyond my imagination was prompting me to write it all down the way it “really” happened.  Every time I paused to research a new plot point, I found not only the answer I was looking for, but reams of additional information that made the whole idea even richer and deeper.

For example, hellhounds make an appearance in the story.  And why not?  The dance halls and street corners of Deep Ellum gave many American blues legends an early career boost.  The district is only a few short blocks away from the building where bluesman Robert Johnson recorded his song, Hellhound on My Trail.  Johnson himself gave me my first clue about how to manage hellhounds when his lyrics mentioned hotfoot powder—a folk charm used to harden the threshold of a home against supernatural invaders.  A bit further down the hellhound trail I learned that to look one in the eye three times means death.  Great stuff for an urban fantasist.

When different ideas, drawn from history, folklore, and my own imagination, all fall together to make a coherent and entertaining whole, that feels like magic to me.

So what about you, Reds and Readers?  Have you ever had a project come together “as if by magic”?  Have you felt the energy that moves through a crowd to make magic seem real?  Do you believe?

 

Deep Ellum Pawn cover art © 2019 by Chaz Kemp

Amazon Kindle Edition Link: https://amzn.to/36Z8GNT

Dance of the Snowflakes credited to the Royal Ballet

Author photo: Marcy Weiske Jordan

G. S. Norwood is the younger of two sisters behind the independent publishing company, Weird Sisters Publishing.  She has spent the past thirty-seven years getting paid to put words on paper, including work as a reporter, feature writer, and composer of program and liner notes for the Dallas Winds.  Deep Ellum Pawn is her first published fiction.