New edition of Steve Cannon's riotous 1969/71 erotic novel Groove, Bang and Jive Around, "an underground classic of such legendary stature that New York's black cognoscenti have transmogrified the work into urban myth," with a foreword from Darius James and an afterword by poet Tracie Morris.
Despite decades of notoriety as one of the "filthiest books in the world," Steve Cannon's first and only novel, Groove, Bang and Jive Around, has hardly been read since first being published by the Paris- based Ophelia Press in 1969. Due to its scarcity, the New York Press deemed it "an underground classic of such legendary stature that New York's black cognoscenti have transmogrified the work into urban myth." This debut, revised for release by Olympia Press in 1971, cemented Cannon's place as a stalwart of the East Village and key figure in New York's black avant-garde—inspiring a generation to break with staid literary modernism, according to Cannon's friend and collaborator Ishmael Reed, for whom its release "signaled a resurfacing of the irreverent, underground trickster tradition of black orature." Seeped psychedelia and hoodoo, this erotic farce follows Anette, a fourteenyear- old runaway, from the outhouse of a New Orleans juke joint to the land of Oo-bla-dee, a realm of bacchanalian self-determination founded by Dizzy Gillespie. Inspired equally by Chester Himes and Women's Liberation, the author claims—as Ophelia put it, Groove, Bang and Jive Around is an absolute necessity "for everyone who wants to know where and how the action takes place in Sex and Soul."
"If there's a dirty prayer, this is it. Groove, Bang and Jive Around will invariably piss people off, that's the plan and its delight. It's gorgeously uneven, like a country road, it's squawking & sonorous like great live music, indeed, it is that. Groove, Bang is poetry and a novel out loud, and Steve Cannon, who wrote it was a huge heckler and a funny man and
I wish I could thank him for this wonderful disturbing, deeply wrong (hot) and light-footed book that somehow fell
out of reading history he has given us and now it has fallen back in."
—Eileen Myles, author of a Working Life
"Groove, Bang and Jive Around is a real jewel—adolescent, informed, funky—both sex and writing."
—Screw magazine
"Groove, Bang and Jive Around is the outside, breakthrough novel that inspired a generation of avant-garde writers to
imitate the Cannon style. Representing a departure from old fogey African-American literary modernism, this funky,
pre-Rap novel signaled a resurfacing of the irreverent, underground trickster tradition of black orature."
—Ishmael Reed, author of The Slave Who Loved Caviar
"A filthy novel . . . full of enough sex, rhythm and New Orleans bite to turn even the most disenchanted reader into a
voluptuary."
—Melanie Maria Goodreaux, author of Black Jelly
"Steve Cannon dared to blaze his own path, taking a sledgehammer to whatever was expected of Black art from all
corners. This new edition of Groove, Bang, and Jive Around does not try to recover his voice for tasteful appropriation. Instead, it delights in the underground paperback world in which Cannon pursued his artistic freedom, giving us a feel for the book's insistence on not belonging. From cover to cover, Groove, Bang, and Jive Around will not be redeemed—but can be savored as a one-of-a-kind reading experience."
— Kinohi Nishikawa, author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground
"'Introduce yourself!' 'Read the goddam poem!' 'I love you madly!' With a solid faith in universal humanity, Steve Cannon's door was open to everyone. He was/is our mentor. Written in the manner & the language only he could maneuver in his youth, Groove, Bang and Jive Around, an adventure of Annette, the Juliette of de Sade of our time, is a rare treasure. Don't be bashful! Delve into it hard to groove together!"
—Yuko Otomo, author of STUDY and Anonymous Landscape
"No mere relic of a lost era, Groove, Bang and Jive Around is a living portal, a scrying mirror pouring out wisdom lurid as it is lucid in an uproarious stream which has no course but to overtake the reader in its vulgar transcendence. For
those holding this book, drink deep or not at all."
—Mitch Anzuoni, Inpatient Press
Darius James is the author of five books including Negrophobia (Citadel, 1992), reissued by NYRB
Classics. He has worked as a lecturer, a spoken-word performer, a freelance journalist, an internet radio host, theater
director and, creative writing coach. His documentary The United States of Hoodoo was released in 2012.
Tracie Morris is a poet and sound artist. She is the author and editor of several books, and a professor of poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Steve Cannon (1935-2019) was a writer who shaped the literary history of Manhattan's Lower East Side. He was the founder and executive director of A Gathering of the Tribes, an East Village nonprofit and exhibition space, and the publisher of a magazine of the same name. Tribes, which operated from Cannon's Alphabet City townhouse, functioned as a salon where artists and musicians such as David Hammons,
Sun Ra, and Butch Morris could reliably be found among a cohort of younger poets emerging from the Nuyorican Poets Café scene. Born to a preacher in New Orleans, Cannon relocated to New York from England in 1962, where, alongside such luminaries as Amiri Baraka and Calvin C. Hernton, Cannon joined the Umbra Workshop, a cornerstone of the 1960s African American avant-garde poetry and publishing. In 1973 he, Ishmael Reed, and Joe Johnson cofounded the influential literary and audio/visual imprint Reed, Cannon, and Johnson. As a poet, playwright, and professor, Cannon mentored a generation of writers including Eileen Myles and Paul Beatty, and taught across the City University of New York system for more than three decades.
