Groove, Bang, and Jive Around

“…an underground classic of such legendary stature that New York’s black cognoscenti have transformed the work into an urban myth.” —Darius James

Annette, the heroine of Steve Cannon’s underground classic Groove, Bang, and Jive Around, is a Black New Orleans teenager with serious family troubles and a recently acquired appetite for sex.

In Cannon’s hands her story becomes a satire on every aspect of American culture: race politics, religion, and sexual freedom. In its opening chapters Groove is almost a conventional erotic novel, with the more frenzied sexual activity set against a backdrop of jazz and voodoo; but halfway through, Cannon takes his heroine to the Oz-like Oo-bla-dee, an idyllic country – supposedly founded by Dizzy Gillespie – where “people ran their own lives.” There, after witnessing much revelry and payback, Annette meets her real mother, who reveals to her the true circumstances of her birth.

Although Groove, Bang, and Jive Around sold more than 150,000 copies when it first appeared, it was not available for twenty years, and copies of the 1997 printing have rarely stayed in one place long. —Lending Library