Lay Down Your Weary Tune - Couverture souple

"An examination of art, fame, and authenticity." —The Boston Globe

"[A] richly textured novel about folk music...Belcher brings the folk music scene to life, but best of all is his ability to craft a cast of memorable characters." —Publisher's Weekly

"Appealing...Mingling elements from both literature and the blues, Belcher has crafted a memorable tale about how the masks and myths we create can become prisons that ultimately disconnect us from ourselves." —Library Journal

"This story will pluck countless heartstrings." —Booklist

“Belcher’s book [is] wonderfully engrossing and rewarding reading...In the near-final reckoning of Eli Page, Belcher finds and reveals something well beyond validating grief-on-a-gilded-chair rock star self-pity...Until I read [this], rock critic Lester Bangs’s pithy line ‘Dylan faked his whole career’ seemed both accurate and insightful, and an odd sort of compliment from a writer who clearly recognized how real the impact of Dylan’s songs has been on his fans, however fake the shifting personas of the man who sang them. But Bangs never made me wonder what remains, 50 years later, of the person who preceded the personas. W.B. Belcher did.” —PASTE
 
“W. B. Belcher’s first novel Lay Down Your Weary Tune is the kind of book you start reading and don’t put down until you reach the last page. His writing style rings clear; it is lyrical, but at the same time confrontational...Belcher’s command of the language, his selection and use of words, and his ability to paint clear pictures of the people and locations make this story worth reading. But his taking his writing one step further and probing into the soul of his main character is the real attraction...This is definitely a page-turner and one that belongs on every reader’s library shelf.”—The New York Journal of Books

“W.B. Belcher's debut novel evokes the legend and timelessness of a true folk song. In the town of Galesville he weaves together a carefully crafted, mysterious, and epic world of characters whose stories will keep you guessing until the very end. A folkloric treasure trove and a great read.” —Jocelyn Arem, author of Caffe Lena: Inside America's Legendary Folk Music Coffeehouse

“A heartening, timeless, and stirring song for the ‘perfectly broken.’ Beautifully thrownback. Openhanded. True. W.B. Belcher is my kind of writer.” —Matthew Quick, New York Times bestselling author of The Silver Linings Playbook and Love May Fail

“As beautiful and artfully constructed as an old guitar, Lay Down Your Weary Tune feels both familiar and wholly original. William Belcher's debut is a highly readable wonder.” —James Scott, author of The Kept

"Like Russell Banks and Richard Russo, W.B. Belcher's warm, lyrical prose brings to life the upstate New York I know and love so well, and even more, he does it with the clarity, compassion, and humor of a master storyteller. A terrific debut novel." —Chris Millis, author, screenwriter, and executive producer of Small Apartments

 

It’s been two months, nineteen days, and twenty-one hours since Eli was last seen, walking alongside the road in a wild summer storm. Several witnesses reported that he was stumbling, unfazed by the headlights, detached from all earthly endeavors.

The river went over its banks that night. The town flooded, as it’s prone to do when the heavens break open. After the water receded, the village put aside its differences and worked with a common purpose: find the lost man. We employed bloodhounds to catch his scent, sifted through every inch of the Battenkill from Galesville to Easton, swept the land from the village proper to the fairgrounds. Found nothing. No sign of him. The national media grew restless. With their awkward satellite trucks, they reported on the search while peddling Eli’s legacy, prompted by obituaries written well before Eli Page disappeared. Seven weeks in, attention spans fizzled, the bloodhounds caught a new case, volunteers dwindled, and I was left wondering how it could have ended the way it did.

Time marches on and we all wait for some sort of revelation. We look for miracles in the small things. We look for answers in wool caps and leather satchels, but answers are hard to come by these days.

So here I am, slumped over the harvest table in the center of Eli’s farmhouse, a house that has been a port in the most frustrating and beautiful storm of my life, and I’m determined to write it all down, to contribute in some small way to our collective understanding of Eli Page and maybe, just maybe, provide a note of truth to a composition famously built on lies.