Laurie Perry Vaughen combines poetry and music
Great art can inspire more art, and ideas, emotions and experiences can expand and transmute to different forms in a perpetual succession. In the case of Chattanoogan Laurie Perry Vaughen’s poem “Billie Holiday on the Radio”—part of her poetry/jazz show with the same name—it was inspired by a sculpture which was inspired by music.
Vaughen penned the poem as a response to Whitfield Lovell’s installation “Deep River” which had a profound effect on her, after she viewed it at the Hunter Museum of American Art in 2013.
“My poems often begin with a compelling image,” said Vaughen, in advance of the April 30 performance of “Billie Holiday on the Radio” as part of JAM (Jazz Appreciation Month) Fest at Jazzanooga and National Poetry Month.
“Lovell’s exhibit included a wall of vintage Bakelite radios stacked as a sculpture beneath an exquisite portrait of an anonymous African-American soldier,” said Vaughen. “The radios were designed to be interactive, with visitors urged to physically ‘tune in’ to the radio, to physically turn the dial on their experience and hear Billie Holiday’s voice emerge.”
Vaughen is an award-winning poet whose work has been published in journals including Crab Orchard Review, Laurel Review, Kalliope and Cold Mountain Review, and she is the author of several chapbooks, including her new collection “Fine Tuning”.
Another iconic singer, the Chattanooga-born blues singer Bessie Smith, is vividly described with “the beaded sweep of a black dress, the frayed fabric flowers at her waist” in another poem, which Vaughen wrote after a visit to the Bessie Smith Cultural Center.While other poems mention other notable figures, the show goes beyond personalities and delves into a wide range of topics concerning the American South.
Vaughen met saxophonist Jeff Crompton through his work with the Atlanta group 4th Ward Afro-Klezmer Orchestra and shared her poetry with him.
“I started to ‘hear’ the possibilities right away,” said Crompton.
“Jeff responded to the poems with a composition and then another, and so we discussed doing a cohesive show,” said Vaughen.
“In my poems I am wrestling with many of the same peculiarly Southern themes and conflicts as Jeff explores in his music compositions,” said Vaughen. “We both are ethnographers of a kind, trying to document a very rapidly changing South.”“We didn’t want the clichéd ‘jazz/poetry’ hipster collaboration,” said Crompton.
For the collaboration, Crompton enlisted his jazz trio Three Way Mirror, which features Bill Pritchard on tuba and Yaya Brown on congas; Crompton assembled this group in 2015 partially inspired by Arthur Blythe’s 1977 album Bush Baby, which used that same unusual instrumentation.
“I wanted each piece to reflect and amplify the mood of the corresponding poem,” said Crompton. “And to keep things musically interesting, I varied the style, texture and sometimes even the instrumentation from poem to poem.”
The April 30 performance of “Billie Holiday on the Radio” will be its Chattanooga debut, after well-received performances at the Word of South Festival of Literature and Music in Tallahassee, Atlanta’s Eyedrum and the Georgia Center for the Book.
This show will feature a new poem, “Tuning into Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit,’” which Vaughen said explores Chattanooga’s “collective and typically disconnected relationship to the Ed Johnson story, the innocent man who was brutally lynched on the Walnut Street Bridge in 1906.”
While Vaughen’s poems are rooted in Southern themes, another thread ties them together: an exploration of the role of technology and its relation to desegregation.
“Billie and Bessie Smith mastered their art forms at a time when recording technologies were experimental and changing,” said Vaughen. “The technologies they used even had influence in our racially segregated small-town South. Technologies from the gramophone to the microphone, the automobile to the radio, all helped ensure a variety of voices were heard.”
One piece of technology in particular—the radio—has special significance for Vaughen, since her father was a radio repairman after World War II, as well as a country blues and folk musician.
One of her most personal poems in the show, “Radio Repair,” serves as a snapshot of her father in his workshop.
“In my mind, I see him with his glasses perched on his nose soldering delicate wires, and always listening to music,” said Vaughen. “When I think of my late father, it’s that man in the ‘Radio Repair’ poem that I see.”
“The poem notes that you could turn a radio dial two ways, and in one direction find Billie Holiday, and in another a Bill Monroe,” said Vaughen.
“There are many entry points to our show, and many ways to relate to an icon like Billie Holiday,” said Vaughen. “Art, especially music and the distilled language of poetry, offers a way to connect, to make us look within and without, with a fresh point of view.”
Billie Holiday on the Radio featuring Laurie Perry Vaughen and Three Way Mirror
April 30, 5 p.m., $10
Jazzanooga Arts Space
431 E. MLK Blvd, #100
(423) 402-0452
jazzanooga.org