what are good books about rock 'n' roll's prehistory?

i'm glad you're suspicious of just-so stories about how 20th cent music leads up to rock, as if it's the highest evolved form of folk expression. it is only the most lucrative.

as for critic's books, just make a list of your dozen or half dozen key pre rnr performers [mills bros or bessie smith? cubans in bebop or blacks doing hillbilly proto c&w? and look at a bunch of books' indices trying to find which has the most about them. you'll get the most out of a book that panders to your interests, because any grand unification theory about popular music is a con.

and make sure you read a decent broadway memoir, broadway was the sun which irradiated the primordial soup of the self-taught innovators of blues/folk/jazz/pop.

And a while back I picked up a similar book on reccommendation called "Origins of the Popular Style," but haven't read any of it yet. Also can't remember the author.

Deep Blues is good, obviously

The imaginary one without an "idelogical perspective" you conjured up earlier. And I never made an argument for musical natural selection.

But oh man, that extra "Chuck" must have sounded so condescending. Sorry. I guess I think that an excessive focus on certain forms of music *as* the predecessors to rock music is practicing a teleological approach to style.... A good book would simply explore and celebrate the music in question without being overly concerned with its influence on rock. Marcus doesn't really seem interested in exploring the pre-rock genres he touches on in his books; he just uses a select number of artists as touchstones and relates them to his generational heroes. I know that's a slight simplification but I believe it pretty much holds.

that sounds awful.

Wrong again. Have you ever read the appendices to *Stranded* or *Mystery Train*??? If not, you should; they're not only the best things he's ever written -- They're some of the best things almost ANYBODY has ever written about music, before OR after rock'n'roll.

There's something about the sheer ahistoricity of approach now that the heavenly jukebox is a practical reality, though, which I think will be a prominent new model if not the dominant new model. The ease of revamping and shuffling and mixing and matching and its influence on how one hears music, especially as the album model continues to unfurl, will have an impact.

Um I just mean that Marcus usually listens to the music and writes what amounts to a psuedohistorical (based in a small amount of research, mostly taken from midcentury canonical American Studies type books) argument with a lot of impressionistic language and extraordinarily amounts of hyberbole about a song SPLITTING THE WORLD OPEN and TEARING INTO THE SOUL OF AMERICA etc. etc. He seems hung up on defining some kind of essence of American culture, or essences, and doesn't tell us enough about how the music works, how it's arranged, who recorded it, what the industry was like, etc. etc.

Well he doesn't talk about himself as much as some other critics but whenever I've read a Marcus book by far the dominant personality in the book is Marcus. Even when he's writing about Sly Stone you scarcely get an impression of Stone himself or his milieu or his music.

So when Lester Bangs writes about the Count Five, do you get more an impression of Lester's life, or the Count Five's? And again, if you say the former, why is that BAD? Why should I care about the Count Five's lives, anyway?

Is Lester Bangs now an argument-cincher? I don't like his writing either.

It's because you hate fun, obv!

i enjoyed this book when i read it (about 10 years ago). as the title makes obvious, he's looking at earlier forms as they fed into rock. ennis is a top-down thinker; he has a scheme and a thesis and he organizes his material accordingly. its not a history of all american pop, but of how various forms (pop, black pop, county pop, jazz, folk and gospel) shaped rock as a music and as an industry. i find that makes for a more engaging read than a book that simply lays out a mass of facts. the industrial focus is a strong suit of the book, i think. this is an academic book, but not too stuffy - flipping through i see he's got photos of cynthia plaster caster.

"the origins of the popular style" is by peter van der merwe. never read this though i've been looking for a good cheap copy since reading christgau's review of it years ago.

some other books i've only skimmed but that seem to be considered standards on pre-rock pop:

the sanjek's massive "american popular music and its business", and the updated 3rd volume separately published as "pennies from heaven: american popular music business in the 20th century".

alec wilder - "american popular song 1900-50". personal critical analyses of the major songwriters. where sanjek is concerned with the business side, this deals in detail with the musical styles of the individual songwriters and uses lots of musical examples. i think wilder is pretty much anti-rock, and basically ignores it.

What Sam J. said in his last post, above, is correct--there are singular virtues and pitfalls to a teleological approach. One of the virtues is giving the work a focus, a purpose, an immediacy. All of which can be found to greater or lesser extents in Marcus's early books (and perhaps Chuck's book, although I haven't read it). I'd be silly not to admit as much because this is one reason I found Marcus et al so compelling when I first discovered him. And I shouldn't discount that my taking music personally and seriously ever since owes much to his inspiration.

I feel that, having been inspired and having sung the virtues of Marcus et al once upon a time, I'm now more than a little tired of him (=understatement), and particularly sensitive and touchy about the shortcomings of his approach, which I've touched on above albeit in a much too polemical fashion. I guess I feel like I've exhausted his books--both as a source of information and a source of pleasure, and I do believe that says something about the limits of his approach. But again, I shouldn't discount the power of the story he tells and the number of people (myself included) whose musical tastes have been expanded and enriched as a result of making contact with Mystery Train, etc.

What Burr says just above is true also, and was actually something I was going to write a few hours ago but instead I decided to skeedaddle out of work, which was driving me crazy today (another reason for the pissy posts above): I may just be looking for different things in my music writing now, different things from what Chuck and other people are looking for.

Hope that mends some fences (?) and makes up for my occasional ILM temper-tantrums, at least until the cycle begins again....

(Ah, life.)

Tattersall, Ian (1995) The Last Neanderthal: The Rise, Success, and Mysterious Extinction of
Our Closest Human Relatives (New York: Macmillan, pp. 208, ISBN 0-02-860813-5).

Trinkaus, E. & P. Shipman (1993) The Neandertals: Changing the Image of Mankind (New
York: Knopf, pp. 454, ISBN 0-394-58900- 9).

I'm not being facetious. I'm totally serious.

Lost Highway and Feel Like Going Home by Guralnick
King of the Delta Blues: The Life & Music of Charlie Patton by Calt & Wardlow

Also, never thought I'd actually put a plug in for the guy, but the great one-third of Joe Carducci's generally ridicilous *Rock and the Pop Narcotic* is the third in which he actually talks about music (it's called his "Rock Hagiography", or something -- sorry, haven't looked at the book for a while, and can't find it on my self right now.) Anyway, it actually starts with a good tracing of the evolution of the small-band format which would result in rock'n'roll, though country, jazz, blues, Western swing, and so on. Worth checking out.