In the early days of that frigid winter, Whitt spent half his time staring out the kitchen window. His beloved guitar leaned unplucked and gathering dust against a wall. It was the winter his manager dumped him after a recording deal had fallen through. His musician friends, as only starving artists can, sensed the contagiousness of a man down on his luck and they too deserted him. Worse, the lease on his apartment—a downtown dive, but at least it had a roof—was almost up.
He lit a cigarette and listened to the rain falling like static. A call came through on his cell. He didn’t recognize the number, but, figuring things couldn’t get much worse, he picked up.
“Whitt,” he said.
“Mister Whitt, my name is Koury.” Low baritone, American Midwest. “I work for a third party. We would like to know if you’re interested in a job.”
Whitt sat up in his chair. “What kind of job?”
“It’s not your usual line of work,” said Koury. When Whitt had no deal of his own, which was most of the time, he moonlighted as a session guitarist.
“I’m listening.”
Koury went on, “The third party would like you to find some information. Your expenses will be paid in full, plus a stipend, and a bonus if you complete the task within six months.”
“What kind of information? I’m a guitar player.”
“My employer would like you to find the oldest song.”
“What?”
“My employer would like you to find the oldest song.”
“The oldest song? What do you mean? Like the oldest song in a musician’s catalog?”
“No,” replied Koury. “The oldest song in the world. The first song.”
Whitt watched a crow alight on the fire escape outside his window through the smear of rain that washed over the grey city. “Who gave you my number?”
“We found you through a contact.”
“Yeah? Who?”
Koury said, “Are you interested in the commission, Mr. Whitt?”
“The first song? Why doesn’t your boss look it up?”
“My employer wishes for evidence, not guesswork. We imagine that to find such information will require considerable time and perhaps travel expenses. We are willing to pay these expenses plus a stipend and bonus.”
“Yeah, you said.” Whitt rolled his eyes. He’d had some absurd offers over the years: compose a funerary song for a dead cat, play happy birthday on a ukelele while sitting in a tree, do a Michael Jackson impersonation stark naked. This wasn’t the weirdest, but it was disconcerting how Koury knew his number and seemed to be serious.
“When can I start?” said Whitt, playing along.
“My employer wants you to start today,” said Koury. “Your lease will be paid for another six months so that you can …”
“Wait. My lease? How do you know about my lease?” Whitt thought it might be his landlord on the line, a man he’d never met or spoken to.
Koury said, “If you accept the task, we will send you an email with a link listing all the details you need to provide. This will give you access to the funds needed for the research, as well as information about the stipend and the bonus. The contract is for six months. It’s not renewable.”
“Look,” said Whitt, “I don’t know how you got my number or how you know about my lease. Actually, I don’t know anything, but I do know this sounds like a hoax. What kind of job is this? Why would anyone want me to find the first song? You can just look it up on the internet.”
At this point, Whitt knew he should hang up. That’s what the protagonist in a movie would do. But he wasn’t the protagonist in a movie. And he was broke. And something in him—maybe loneliness or a taste for the absurd—wished for the conversation to continue, for Koury to disclose where Whitt had grown up and what he had eaten for breakfast that morning and what brand of cigarette he had just stubbed out in the ashtray.
Koury said, “My employer likes to see things done properly. He likes evidence. That means he wants more than a search on the internet.”
It dawned on Whitt that Koury’s employer was probably listening in on the conversation or that he didn’t exist and Koury was acting alone.
“I understand,” said Whitt. “But look at it from my point of view …”
“Check your email. I’ve sent you a contract and the link that I mentioned. If you’re interested, respond within the hour. If you aren’t, you won’t hear from me again.” Koury hung up.
Twenty-four hours later, after answering the email and checking his bank account, Whitt discovered that his rent had been paid and his lease extended for another six months. He also discovered, in the small print of the contract, that the bonus consisted of one million dollars.
Whitt started by researching the earliest known forms of music. He didn’t own a computer and he soon tired of looking things up on his cell phone, so barely hours into his commission, he began what would become a regular routine of walking to the municipal library every morning and commandeering the same cranky desktop at the same carrel by a north-facing window. He bought a five-by-seven notebook with a spiral spine for two dollars in the Chinese bodega on the corner of Reagan Place and wrote down everything he learned. When it was full, he bought another.
In the weeks that followed, the rain turned to snow. The walk to the library became treacherous, but he remained undeterred. After all, the money was coming in from Koury.
He haunted the music section and found a couple of fat hardbacks written in the nineteen-sixties by eminent musicologists, as well as books on instrument-making, language, creativity, and sound. These he skim-read, darting from chapter to chapter according to relevance, stopping only to scribble in pencil in the black notebook.
He would take a break for lunch at Rumba, a bar-restaurant run by a Cuban couple, skirting the ice that had begun to accumulate on the sidewalks, and ordering the cheapest sandwich on the menu, a piece of cheese on a bed of salad in between two hunks of white bread, the whole thing nearly as thick and dry as the books he was reading. He would finish by ordering a black coffee and then walk back to the library for his afternoon session. Every time he left the carrel, he was afraid some clerk would scoop up the books and leave them neglected on a cart for days on end, where he’d be unable to find them. So he discreetly, and against the rules, returned them to their resting places on the shelves.
He supplemented his reading with internet searches. There were sites where musicophiles and obsessives lurked, chatting conspiratorially about annotated scores, lost recordings, and ancient instruments found in excavated tombs. At some point he realized he was sinking down a rabbit hole packed with arcana and obscure references that would lead him into other rabbit holes. He promptly returned to the books.
Three weeks into his commission, he panicked. He didn’t know what Koury’s employer wanted. What form should his findings take? Was Whitt to deliver the name of the first song? A recording of it? A score? A historiography? He emailed Koury, who replied immediately, telling him to provide the score of the first song, where and when it had been sung, and by whom. The ridiculousness of Koury’s answer didn’t evade Whitt, but as long as Koury continued to pay what was promised, Whitt didn’t care.
After a month, Whitt had skim-read twenty-eight books, but now found nothing else of use in the library. The music section principally contained biographies and memoirs of rock stars and jazz singers, divas and composers. He had read everything available on the history of music and so he decided to try a specialized store on the outskirts of the city that he’d found on the internet. It was called Bassoon.
Whitt took two buses, a subway, and a ten-minute walk in zero degrees. He moved like a fugitive under a graffiti-covered overpass, along cratered streets, past the wreck of Toni’s Haberdashers on Roosevelt, past empty garages with the roofs caved in and a group of indigents huddled around a fire in a trashcan on the corner of Cleveland and Madison. When he arrived, the store was closed. On the door was a handwritten list of opening times – eight hours per week. Whitt peered through the dusty storefront window and managed to make out, in the dark interior, a mad jumble of objects. He tried knocking on the door just in case. There was no answer.
The following day, he tried again at the allotted time. As he approached the store, he noticed movement inside, pushed his way through the door, which jingled a middle C, and saw behind the counter a tall Black girl in denim overalls, her locks neatly tied. She looked up, surprised.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hello.”
“Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for books on music history.”
“Right there,” said the girl and pointed.
The store was crammed with musical instruments, scores, books, records, CDs, bootlegged tapes, and tour memorabilia. Posters of touring bands covered the windows so there was barely any natural light, and the air was thick with dust. A menagerie of accordions, snare drums, and twelve-string guitars leaned or hung or sat randomly in almost every space.
Whitt picked a path through it all and spent the next hour rummaging. The book section wasn’t extensive but it contained a few histories and philosophies of music, some translated from German and French, and all published in the twentieth century. He turned one of them over and then looked inside the flap. No price.
“Excuse me,” he said. The girl raised her face. “How much is this?”
“Let me see.” She held out a hand.
Whitt walked over and passed her the book and she did a mental accounting: size of the work, age, condition, scrawled annotations in the margins.
“Five dollars,” she said.
“Will you take four?”
“Four dollars,” she said and smiled. “But don’t tell anyone.”
Whitt appraised her. She was probably early twenties, not much going on in her life.
“You want to go for dinner later?” said Whitt.
“With a man who can’t pay five dollars for a book? Where are you taking me—the homeless shelter?”
“The Ritz. I have friends in high places.”
“Nah, I’m good,” she said. “I’m busy.”
“Doing what? Working in your closed shop?”
She smirked in silence.
Whitt said, “You a musician?”
“Nope. You?”
“Can’t you tell?”
She looked him up and down. He was twice her age.
“Yeah,” she said. “You look broke. So yeah.”
With that he laughed and jingled through the door, the book under his arm.
According to Ernst G. Strauss, Ph.D a long-dead musicologist from Vienna whose book Whitt was now reading, musical instruments dated back at least 43,000 years. There was a Neanderthal-era flute carved from the bone of a bear and discovered in a cave under melting permafrost. It had tiny finger holes for changes of pitch. Carbon-dating placed it at 40,000 years, but, Strauss wrote, it’s likely that drums came even earlier, made much as they are today: animal skins bound tight across hollow logs.
From Strauss, whose austere black and white photo adorned the back cover of the book, Whitt also learned of Egyptian papyrus with musical annotations and lyrics. He learned that cave paintings showed human figures blowing or beating instruments. What he didn’t learn was the name of the earliest song, or who had sung it.
The morning after buying the book, Whitt rubbed his hands together to shake off the cold, and headed for the library. This time it wasn’t for books. Instead, he sat at his usual computer and drafted a long-planned email. It read Dear Professor Savinovic, I’m a musician, I’m trying to find out about early music, actually the earliest song ever sung and I’m hoping you’re available for a chat. I can come to your office if you like. Yours sincerely, Whitt.
He re-read it, puffed out his cheeks, and tried again.
Dear Professor Savinovic, my name is Whitt, I’m a researcher. I’m interested in finding some information about early oral music and was wondering if you’d be able to meet me for a short interview in your office. Regards, Whitt.
“Better. But still shit.”
His cell phone started vibrating in his pocket. He didn’t recognize the number but he picked up anyway. Session musicians always did.
“Whitt,” he said, and hustled to the library’s atrium.
“This is Koury.”
“Hello.”
“My employer would be interested in an update.”
“An update?”
“He also wishes to know if you need further resources.”
“I’m working on it.”
There was a pause.
“Working on what?” said Koury. “The update or further resources?”
“Ha,” said Whitt mirthlessly. One of the library clerks, a woman in her fifties who didn’t like musicians, glanced at him from the front desk. “I meant the task. I started by reading a number of books and I’m onto Strauss’s The History of Music.”
“I see. My employer wants to know if you discovered a geographical location for where the first song originated—a country or a town.”
“Maybe Egypt. Some Ancient Egyptian papyrus has music written on it. And parts of Africa and Europe. There are cave paintings with people playing instruments. One in Senegal, one in France. Turkey, too. Maybe Syria.”
Koury didn’t respond.
“Are you still there?” said Whitt.
“That’s five countries,” said Koury. ”Egypt, Senegal, France, Turkey, and Syria.”
“That’s where my research is pointing. Cave paintings.” There was another long pause. “I’m looking into contacting some music historians,” Whitt mumbled. “I’m just drafting a message.” Silence. “A message for a professor of music history … I guess he … well … I mean, I don’t know …” Whitt’s words faded away, turned to white noise like the aftermath of some cosmic explosion. Koury hung up.
Five months passed. The weather turned warmer. Whitt quit smoking and then took it up again. He didn’t hear back from Professor Savinovic. Or Dr. Wimbush-Lichter. Or Professor Tchouameni. Or Dr. Odetoyinbo. Or Professor Kihlexhin. Or even Kihlexhin’s Ph.D student, M. Buffenheimer. In fact, he didn’t hear from anyone except Koury, who called him like clockwork on the first day of every month demanding an update which Whitt always provided in the form of thirty seconds of mumbling, always using a combination of the same words: research … experts … instruments … cave paintings … song … unknown.
Ever since he’d first accepted Koury’s proposal, he’d begun to hear music everywhere. He would ask himself “Is this the first song?” or “Did the first song sound like this?” He found himself fixating on the sirens of passing ambulances, chord progressions from songs blaring out of car radios, elevator muzak, the squawk of bickering birds from the library roof, the sound of cutlery in the kitchen at Rumba.
But whenever he tried to noodle around on his guitar, he couldn’t find a tune or even a sequence to satisfy him. What came out was blank and characterless as if someone had wrapped a rag around his fingers. When he wasn’t smoking, he hummed non-stop—the habit had lost him two girlfriends—but even his humming now came out wrong. He would slip into the wrong key or lose the rhythm.
As for his task, the internet gave dozens of different answers. Some said the earliest was one of the Hurrian songs, the lyrics and notes inscribed in cuneiform on ancient clay tablets. Others said it was a third-century hymn written on papyrus and discovered in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, in 1918.
With one month to go, Whitt figured he would invent the song. He would base it on some ancient tune from Macedonia or Eritrea or something he could dig up on the internet. Even though his musical gift had gone, disappeared like midnight smoke from a street grill, he reckoned he could write a tune with three notes, add some generic lyrics about love or death or the weather, and claim they were his own translations. No one said the song had to be good; it just had to be the first.
Or maybe he’d crank out a nursery rhyme. Mothers had been singing to their babies forever. If Koury questioned him, he’d say this was the best he could do, this was where his research had taken him, period, full-stop, dead end, and who was to argue? If that wasn’t enough for the million dollar bonus, then so be it. Who really knew what the first song was? Nobody. The music historians with their titles and endowments and publications, they didn’t know any better than he did, a washed-up session musician. Otherwise Koury would have asked them, right? The hell with it.
What more could Whitt do? He figured he could bum around the world on Koury’s dime and listen to Bedouins or Kalahari Bushmen or Australian Aboriginals singing, visit The Museum of Music and Sound in Paris, interview a bunch of old-time banjo players from the back end of wherever, but the truth was he didn’t want to. Home—even in the clogged-up city with its permanently screaming sirens and rain-soaked fire escapes—was home. The rest of the world was for the rest of the world. Whitt took pleasure now from nothing more than a good lick of bourbon and a stack of old records. He would find the oldest song right here in his head.
On a whim, he took two buses, a subway ride, and a walk through the warzone over by Roosevelt. To his faint surprise, Bassoon was open and the same Black girl he’d seen months earlier was behind the counter, locks tied neatly, no makeup.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hi there. Can I help you?”
Whitt realized she didn’t recognize him.
“I’m looking for books on the history of music.”
“Over there,” she said and pointed. He wandered over, sidestepping the familiar piles of scores and musical instruments, which hadn’t been moved since the last time. There he lingered while she sorted old music mags.
He flipped through a few books, feigning interest. There was nothing he hadn’t already seen. After a few minutes, he gave up and approached the desk.
“May I ask you something?”
“Sure,” she replied.
“I’m doing a little research. I’m trying to find out what the first song was, you know, the earliest ever song.”
The girl put down the magazines.
“That’s easy,” she said.
“It is?”
“Whale song. I think it came way before humans. But just google it.”
“I’ll do that,” said Whitt. “Thank you.”
The door jingled behind him. Middle C.
The snow and ice that had choked up the city in the early months of the year were gradually melting, giving way to streams of water that dripped like rope from every balustrade and roof, portico and gutter.
Whitt dodged the beggars on the damp corner of Cleveland and Madison, a cigarette plugged into his trap. He was still pretty nimble, pretty wiry for his age. He had a thousand jazz tunes in his head, which came out one by one when he got to humming, but he wasn’t humming now. He was thinking. There are no lyrics to whale songs. Is a song without lyrics really a song? And what is that noise that whales make? Is it a song? Does it count?
When he got home, he checked his funds on his phone and emailed Koury. Whitt would need a top-up, a travel stipend. He was near the end of his research and Koury’s employer would finally have what he wanted.
A day later, Whitt was back at Bassoon and relieved to find it open.
“Do you want to go to the Sea of Cortez?” he said. “All expenses paid.”
The girl was cleaning an accordion at the counter, wiping its surfaces with a microfiber cloth dipped in alcohol. She moved slowly, carefully, and didn’t take her eyes off the instrument even as he approached.
“You don’t even know my name,” she said, without looking up.
“What’s your name?”
“Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth, do you want to go to the Sea of Cortez?”
“I don’t know your name either.”
“Whitt. With an h.”
“Whitt, I’ve never been out of this city,” she said, and finally raised her eyes. “I was born here. I’ll probably die here.”
“Is that an answer?”
She put the cloth at the lip of the bottle of cleaning alcohol. Then she tilted the bottle with her other hand. A few drops soaked the cloth. She cleaned again, drawing the material along the wooden body and then the folds of the bellows, one by one.
She said, “I guess it is. I have a three-year-old at daycare. What’s she going to do if her mama is in the Sea of Cortez when she gets home?”
Whitt thought for a moment. No mention of the kid’s father. “What if the little girl came along, to hear the whales singing?”
“I need to finish up with this instrument and close the shop. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Yeah. That accordion is made of maple wood. Use water, not alcohol.”
With three weeks to go before Koury’s deadline, Whitt rolled up his jeans and dipped a toe in the translucent water. All around him the wind whistled. He pitched it at a high E, but with all that glissando it was hard to tell. In front of him the Sea of Cortez swelled. He was where he needed to be. He could see the jetty a short walk away. All he needed now was to find the right man in the right boat: Juan Cordero in a fifty-foot whaler.
Whitt approached a woman in rubber boots. “Excuse me, I’m looking for Juan Cordero. He has a boat. Do you know where I can find him?”
“Go that way. You’ll see a bunch of guys in overalls with clipboards. Ask them. They’ll know.”
Minutes later, Whitt was aboard Cordero’s whaler, his hand in the sailor’s grip. Cordero was rangy and craggy, skin roughened by sun, wind, and waves, and with a thicket of grey hair poking out of his grey beanie hat. He was tall but a little stooped from his days spent crawling through the holes and tiny doorframes of his boat.
Once he’d released Whitt’s hand, he said, “I was a naval officer. I spent two decades tracking submarines. In all that time, I heard hundreds of whales singing. They always fascinated me. The naval technicians classified those songs as “biologicals,” which just means they weren’t submarines or torpedoes. When I retired, I bought this boat, the scuba gear, and a hydrophone to record underwater—that thing there.” He pointed to a coiled black wire with a cylinder on one end.
He continued, “This is the last month we might see whales until December, so you contacted me at just the right time. If we don’t see any, no matter. I have recordings for you, amigo, dozens of them. Get comfortable. We’ll leave in a moment. And let me guess, you’re a musician.”
“Correct.”
Cordero finished prepping his boat.
As they sailed into deeper waters, Whitt sat quietly on the bench, puffing on a cigarette. He stared at the placid sea the color of iron, and found himself strangely immersed in the lapping of the waves, his problems washing away in the white foam kicked up by the whaler. He no longer heard musical notes, just water on wood. As the engine pulsed, he looked up at the clear sky. No birds now. The boat was too far out.
“Look!” said Cordero.
A pod of dolphins, twenty strong, raced through and above the water, arching their backs, swallowing the distances.
An hour passed, and then two.
Finally, with night beginning to descend, Cordero ushered Whitt to the front of the boat.
“There,” he said.
Whitt looked, but saw nothing. And then he saw everything.
Not fifty yards away, a blue whale broke the surface, its mass dwarfing the boat. It undulated in the glassy water—a great curve like a wheel turning—until its flippers slid under with barely a splash. It resurfaced and swam with them a while, Cordero holding a straight line. It went under again and resurfaced parallel to the boat. It continued that way for fifteen minutes, dipping down and coming up. Then it barreled forward, ahead of the boat, as if leading them somewhere.
Cordero cranked the engine and followed the whale as the dark came down. And then he lost sight of it. He switched off the engine. All was still. Whitt leaned forward and peered over the side. Nothing.
Cordero said, “Now she’ll sing.”
He picked up the hydrophone, tied the cable to a guyline, and let it drop into the sea. Then he plugged the other end into a small battery-powered boombox.
Finally, they heard the whale’s song. At first, it came to Whitt as squeaks and hoots, a violinist warming up. Then it morphed: a burst of woodwind, a clarinet screech. It wasn’t clean or pure: besides the whale’s song, there was the wash of the water and the strange snapping sound of shrimp, and for a few seconds a deep rumbling from the core of the earth. But the rest was the whale singing.
By the light of a bare bulb in Cordero’s tiny cabin, Whitt scribbled the whale’s music in his black notebook. The score he wrote made no sense. It had no rhythm or theme, for Whitt heard everything all at once: the whale’s joy moving through timeless oceans, kinship with all the creatures of the sea, lamentations which Whitt took for loneliness, a call to ancestors whose bones lay on the seabed.
As he finished writing his score, Whitt saw that his paper was speckled with drops though the cabin was dry, and realized he was weeping. He turned and saw Cordero at the open door.
“Whale song,” said Cordero. “It’s from another world, amigo. We don’t know much about these creatures. They’re more advanced than us, like octopi and dolphins. They live by a code we don’t understand. I cried too when I first heard a whale singing.”
Two days later, Whitt sat in his familiar spot in the library. He’d typed up his musical score on the desktop and sent it to Koury with a note. The earliest song came from a whale. We have no reason to believe the song is any different from what we hear whales singing today. This score is the song of a blue whale in the Sea of Cortez. He re-read the message and pressed send. Koury called him an hour later.
“This song has no meaning,” said Koury.
Whitt moved the phone to his other ear. Beyond the fire escape outside his window, he could see shadows and light, which meant the sun was shining.
Koury went on, “My employer says it’s no more meaningful than the score of a man humming to himself. It has no rhythm or logic. There’s no composition here, no intention that makes a song a song.”
“This is what the whale sang,” said Whitt, “whether your employer likes it or not.”
“But it isn’t a song,” said Koury. “My employer asked for …”
Whitt hung up. He put on his one good pair of shoes and walked into the empty street and lit a cigarette. Then he took two buses and a subway.
In the subway car, a blind woman tapped out a rhythm with a spoon on a tin cup which she then passed around her fellow travelers. Whitt heard the clink of a coin, and knew instinctively it was a D, but he was preoccupied planning what he would tell Elizabeth, the girl at Bassoon. He would tell her he’d seen dolphins passing, and a whale swimming shotgun that dwarfed the boat. He would tell her he’d heard the world’s earliest song and written down every note, and that a song sung by a humpback in Puerto Rico could be heard by another humpback in Newfoundland sixteen-hundred miles away. He would ask if she wanted to close the shop ten minutes early and get coffee, if they could find coffee in that godforsaken bombed-out neighborhood, because he had stories to tell about whale songs. And he wanted her stories, too, about how she’d ended up in a store full of music in a part of the city—her city—where there was none, and how that store had been named Bassoon when there was no bassoon to be seen. And when he got home, he planned to pick up that guitar of his and put his fingers to use finally and reclaim his gift, which maybe, just maybe, the whale had restored. Yes, he would get a tune out of it somehow.
JJ Amaworo Wilson is a German-born Anglo-Nigerian-American writer. His work has been published in The Penguin Book of New Black Writing, African American Review, Justice Journal, The New York Journal of Books, and A Public Space, among many others. His 2016 novel, Damnificados, won four awards and was an Oprah Top Pick. Another novel, Nazaré, came out in 2021 and won the Foreword INDIES Book Award and the Independent Publisher Book Award. Amaworo Wilson has also written several books about language, two of which won prizes that saw him honored at Buckingham Palace in 2008 and 2011. He is the writer-in-residence at Western New Mexico University and teaches in the faculty of Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing. He has a new story collection forthcoming, including a story first published in Solstice: ‘Bare Knuckle.’
