Nashville. 1953. On a hot summer evening the charismatic young singer Stranger Madison kills his best friend and former bandmate in a barroom brawl and then vanishes into the night, never to be heard from again. Stranger had been on the cusp of national success at the time of his disappearance. Instead he falls into obscurity, becoming a curious musical footnote known more for the events of that one night than for the intense performances and mysterious songs which had so captivated audiences over the previous few years.
A half century after that fateful night, Ben Greene – a witness to Stranger’s last performances and now a writer and professor – remains haunted by the singer’s tragic story. Hoping to find answers to the questions which still nag at him, Greene turns to Stranger’s former friends and colleagues. Everyone he speaks to swears that they alone know what really happened, but is there any truth behind all these tall tales and scraps of gossip?
In investigating Stranger’s past, Greene uncovers a lost world of Appalachian lumber towns and rough and tumble honky-tonk bars, of tent revivals and dark ballads seemingly as ancient as the mountains which spawned them. It is a world where the age-old, communal forms of making music are giving way to the slick, cynical ways of show-business and the old South, full of darkness and mystery, is giving way – reluctantly at times – to the new. And at the heart of it all is Stranger Madison himself, the “murder balladeer”, whose life would come to mirror the tragic songs of love and loss with which he made his name.
