The glass begins to clear sure enough when aged E.F. Bloodworth, the grandfather Fleming has never met, returns to Ackerman's Field in central Tennessee after 20 years as a rambling bluesman -- packing little more than a banjo and a head full of "songs that sounded like invitations until you thought about them a while and then they began to sound like threats." E.F.'s sons, blinded by rage or numbed by alcohol, don't care whether he's come home to make peace with them, or himself, or simply to die on the only piece of earth he ever owned. But young Fleming, who is neither blind nor numb, finds through his grandfather's return a way out of the family's self-destructive legacy.

Provinces of Night is William Gay's second novel, following The Long Home. The comparisons to Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy may be predictable, but that doesn't mean they aren't apt. Yet Provinces of Night owes as much to the rich musical legacy of the South as it does to the region's literary tradition.

If Provinces came with a soundtrack, it would be culled from the epochal "Anthology of American Folk Music," Harry Smith's eccentric compendium of pre-WWII blues, folk, and gospel originally released, coincidence or not, the same year E. F. Bloodworth returns home, 1952. Gay mines "Anthology" for old Bloodworth's haunted repertoire, and Bloodworth -- his banjo, his mountain blues, the chord his music strikes in people, as well as the renown of his appetites and his way with lawmen -- is himself more or less modeled on Dock Boggs, a Virginia coalminer and moonshiner who recorded in the late 1920s some of the most chilling songs ever waxed (two of which are collected on Smith's "Anthology").

E.F. might have crossed paths with R.C. Bailey and The Grassy Branch Girls at one record company audition or another in Knoxville or Bristol or Norton, except that the latter are characters in another novel, The Devil's Dream by Lee Smith.

Smith is a North Carolinian who shares Gay's ear for Southern folk music, though it inspired in her a tale of triumph rather than tragedy. The Devil's Dream is both the story of six generations of a singing family out of Virginia (the Bailey clan, based loosely on the "First Family" of country music, the Carters) from holler to town to mansion, and a history of country music, from the back porch to the Bristol Sessions to the Grand Ole Opry. Like a country songbook, it's rich with love and death, adultery and drink, faith and fate.

R.C.'s hard-shell Baptist grandfather, Moses Bailey, believed "that fiddle music was the voice of the Devil laughing," and in the black blues tradition there are those who claimed to have sold their souls to the Devil to learn to play.

Ace Atkins is not the first to build a novel around the short life and long legend of one such claimant, Robert Johnson, known as the "King of The Delta Blues Singers" (cf. Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues and RL's Dream by Walter Mosley).

However, Crossroad Blues might be the best of the bunch. It dubs Johnson “the holy grail of blues,” largely a phantom save for the 29 sides he recorded before his strange and sudden death in 1938 at age 27.

When rumors of previously unheard "lost" recordings make it down the Mississippi to New Orleans, some interested parties think they're worth killing for. Protagonist Nick Travers, a former pro footballer who's become a blues historian -- a private investigator of sorts -- isn't sure they're worth dying for, but hopes they hold the key to the essential mystery of Johnson's life...his death.

Crossroad Blues crosses James Lee Burke with Peter Guralnick, and gets both sides of the equation right. Atkins also imagines the nastiest avatar of Elvis in American literature.

But that's a whole other story.