Hear All Three of Jack Kerouac’s Spoken-World Albums: A Sublime Union of Beat Literature and 1950s Jazz

Image by Tom Palum­bo, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

At the epi­cen­ter of three explo­sive forces in 1950s America—the birth of Bebop, the spread of Bud­dhism through the coun­ter­cul­ture, and Beat rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing of poet­ry and prose—sat Jack Ker­ouac, though I don’t pic­ture him ever sit­ting for very long. The rhythms that moved through him, through his verse and prose, are too flu­id to come to rest. At the end of his life he sat… and drank, a most­ly spent force.

But in his prime, Ker­ouac was always on the move, over high­ways on those leg­endary road trips, or his fin­gers fly­ing over the typewriter’s keys as he banged out the scroll man­u­script of On the Road in three fever­ish weeks (so he said). After the pub­li­ca­tion of On the Road, Ker­ouac “became a celebri­ty,” says Steve Allen in intro­duc­tion to the Beat writer on a 1959 appear­ance, “part­ly because he’d writ­ten a pow­er­ful and suc­cess­ful book, but part­ly because he seemed to be the embod­i­ment of this new gen­er­a­tion.”

After a lit­tle back-and-forth, Allen lets Ker­ouac do what he always did so well, whether on tele­vi­sion or on record—embody the rhythms of his writ­ing in his voice, his phras­ing always musi­cal, whether he read over jazz hot or cool or over med­i­ta­tive silence. He did a lot of both, record­ing with Allen and many oth­er jazzmen, and “exper­i­ment­ing with a home reel-to-reel sys­tem, tap­ing him­self to see whether his spon­ta­neous prose out­bursts had the musi­cal rhythms F. Scott Fitzger­ald con­sid­ered the hall­mark of all great writ­ing.” So writes his­to­ri­an David Brink­ley in the lin­er notes (remem­ber those?) to the com­pi­la­tion album Jack Ker­ouac Reads On the Road, a rare col­lec­tion of haunt­ing poet­ry read­ings, play­ful croon­ing, and exper­i­ments with voice and music. Brink­ley describes how Ker­ouac, the French Cana­di­an from Low­ell, Mass­a­chu­setts, devel­oped his “bop ear” by hang­ing out at Minton’s Play­house in Harlem in the 40s, watch­ing Thelo­nious Monk, Char­lie Park­er, and Dizzy Gille­spie invent what he called a “goofy new sound.”

The sound stayed with him, as he turned his immer­sion into Amer­i­can lit­er­ary and musi­cal coun­ter­cul­ture into On the Road, The Sub­ter­raneans, The Dhar­ma Bums, etc, and through­out all the writ­ing, there was the music of his read­ing, cap­tured on the albums Poet­ry for the Beat Gen­er­a­tion with Steve Allen, Blues and Haikus with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims—both in 1959—and, the fol­low­ing year, Read­ings by Jack Ker­ouac on the Beat Gen­er­a­tion. Kerouac’s read­ing style did not come only from his inter­nal­iza­tion of bebop rhythms, how­ev­er, but also from “the dis­cov­ery of the extra­or­di­nary spo­ken-word albums of poets Langston Hugh­es, Carl Sand­berg, and Dylan Thomas,” Brink­ley tells us. The writer became “con­vinced that prose should be read aloud in pub­lic, as it had been in Homer’s Greece and Shakespeare’s Eng­land.” The albums he record­ed and released in his life­time bear out this con­vic­tion and explore “the pos­si­bil­i­ties of com­bin­ing jazz and spon­ta­neous verse.”

These records became very dif­fi­cult to find for many years, but you can now pur­chase an omnibus CD at a rea­son­able price (vinyl will set you back a cou­ple hun­dred bucks). Alter­nate­ly, you can stream all three Ker­ouac albums free on Spo­ti­fy, above in chrono­log­i­cal order of release. If you don’t have Spo­ti­fy, you can eas­i­ly down­load the soft­ware here. And if you’d rather hear Ker­ouac’s read­ings on CD or on the orig­i­nal vinyl medi­um, that’s cool too. How­ev­er you expe­ri­ence these read­ings, you should, at some point, expe­ri­ence them. Like all the very best poet­ry, Ker­ouac’s work is most alive when read aloud, and most espe­cial­ly when read aloud by Ker­ouac him­self.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 55 Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es: From Dante and Mil­ton to Ker­ouac and Tolkien

Jack Kerouac’s 30 Beliefs and Tech­niques For Writ­ing Mod­ern Prose

Jack Ker­ouac Lists 9 Essen­tials for Writ­ing Spon­ta­neous Prose

The First Record­ing of Allen Gins­berg Read­ing “Howl” (1956)

Watch Langston Hugh­es Read Poet­ry from His First Col­lec­tion, The Weary Blues (1958)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness