Songs rising from a well of pain

When June Carter Cash died May 15 at 73, obituaries appeared in every major publication in the United States. Her tale was told: wife of Johnny Cash; daughter of the guitarist and singer Mother Maybelle Carter, of the legendary Carter Family of the Virginia mountains -- who, from 1927, the year of their first recordings, would define country music, and American music, for the nation and then the world.

But while June Carter Cash's and Johnny Cash's own spiritually uplifting autobiographies were noted, as was Mark Zwonitzer's 2002 "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?: The Carter Family & Their Legacy in American Music," I saw no mention of a book that, far more than any work of nonfiction, goes to the heart of the world so many others have so determinedly written around: Lee Smith's 1992 novel, "The Devil's Dream."

Was that because Smith -- author most recently of the 2003 novel "The Last Girls" but also of "Saving Grace" (1995), "Fair and Tender Ladies" (1988), "Oral History" (1983) and "Black Mountain Breakdown" (1980) -- is from the Virginia mountains herself, lives in North Carolina, sets her books in the South and is thus dismissed as a regional novelist and ignored elsewhere, unlike those novelists who, though their literary terrain may be restricted to certain neighborhoods of Manhattan, are taken to speak for the country at large? Or is it because "The Devil's Dream," whose Bailey family is clearly inspired by the Carter Family, is no country roman a clef but a story that burns off piety and uplift not to reveal any real person's story but to find the story American music really tells -- tells, that is, less because of its singers, composers and players than in spite of them?

"The Devil's Dream" still lacks readers conversant with the country music story, those conversant with literary fiction and those who want nothing more from a book than to fall into it as if it were itself a dream, but the book's reach has only grown since it first appeared. In 1992, the six generations of Baileys who march through Smith's pages seemed almost too much to take in; today the book feels too short. If in 1992 Smith seemed to be telling the musical secrets the Nashville machine was created to keep hidden, now one is most of all aware of what secrets Smith chose not to tell.