Part of my conversational riff or rifflet with Marcia Ball and her crew included name-checking “Inside Llewyn Davis” while speaking to bass player Bennett, who hails from a part of Texas depicted in Joel and Ethan Coen’s film, based on a Cormac McCarthy story, “No Country for Old Men.” (the logical leap works for me). He hadn’t seen the movie. Noting on the back of one of the titles for sale and mercy table that Marcia had worked with Stephen Bruton, I tried to change the subject to the 2009 movie “Crazy Heart” in which Jeff Bridges plays a struggling singer-songwriter. Bruton, who produced Ball’s cd, has several of his songs in “Crazy Heart” but it’s protagonist was not really based on him. (He died in 2006 sometime while the movie was in production). I didn’t quite catch it, but it sounded like Bennett or Ball were saying that the “Crazy Heart” guy was based on a particular person, they may have known.

Or she might have just been changing the subject to “Tender Mercies” the 1978 movie written by Horton Foote in which Robert Duvall sang a batch of songs, mostly covers but some written for the film (and or sung by Betty Buckley). I don’t recall seeing this film; certainly it was before music opened up for me, or cinema even.

Meanwhile, another thread of my continuing studies, kinda sorta crosses here: in David Shields’ and Shane Salerno’s experimental biography of Salinger, I learned that a 1948 short story of his “Blue Melody” is a fictional treatment of a rumor about the dire circumstances involved in the death of blues legend Bessie Smith.

But that anecdote also reminds me of a story told to me by a Dartmouth alumni who took a class there from Lucky Thompson, in which Mrs. Thompson supposedly was denied treatment or given bad medical advice by a white doctor while traveling the South.

I’m getting a wee bit ahead of myself here because this is Gary Nicholson playing the Stephen Bruton song “Fallin’ and Flyin'” that Jeff Bridges sings in the movie “Crazy Hearts” — Nicholson who produced and co-wrote four tracks on Marcia Ball “Roadside Attraction”

There’s also an Edward Albee play that deals with death of Bessie Smith: