Fordham University Press will publish Rockin' The Bronx on March 3rd, 2025
The novel, Rockin’ The Bronx, came directly from the Black 47 song, Sleep Tight in New York City (https://youtu.be/-7yt6zKLjZs?si=HHFjt-ROuSQQlJri ). In the song, Sean Kelly, a young man in rural Ireland is addressing his girlfriend, Mary Devine, who has emigrated to The Bronx. He can’t understand why she doesn’t write or call, they had been so close. He senses something is terribly wrong and in the song he visualizes what that might be. When they were together in Ireland Sean always looked out for Mary, but now he feels that someone, or something, has taken his place, and he is bitterly resentful.
I got the inspiration for the song while traveling through NW Donegal, marveling at the beauty of the coastline and comparing it to the concrete fields of The Bronx. Performing this song was very intense, for you had to become Sean, and feel what he felt; such is the way with character-driven songs and Black 47 had many. Words alone couldn’t nail all the emotions, so we often stretched out the instrumental passages and found Sean’s loneliness and loss within the improvisation.
As we performed the song over many years, the story began to solidify, until I began to divine Mary ’s secret and the dramatic ending of the story that I would eventually write as the novel, Rockin’ The Bronx.
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