Bibliography
Here is a listing by author
or editor of many of the best books I have been using for some years,
preparing to write this one. I have not named editions, since they vary
from one country to another, many of my copies are old and some of the
books are out of print. There are also entries under the headings Biography,
Discography and Reference.
ALLEN, Walter C.
Hendersonia (1973; self-published)
Allen, who died in 1974, was a doyen
of the small army of researchers into early jazz. His book about Fletcher
Henderson is a history of the band, almost day by day, and includes
a complete discography. Hard going for the uninitiated but indispensable
for the dedicated fan, it is the fruit of the sort of meticulous scholarship
that only a fan could produce.
BALLIETT, Whitney
American Musicians: 56 Portraits
in Jazz (1986)
American Singers: 27 Portraits
in Song (1988)
Barney, Bradley and Max: 16 Portraits
in Jazz (1989)
Balliett is jazz correspondent of
the New Yorker, and these are the latest collections of his journalism.
Barney, Bradley and Max ran the most famous clubs in New York;
the book includes a portrait of the wonderful NYC radio personality
Jean Bach. Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000 is a
definitive collection of New Yorker pieces.
BIOGRAPHY
Biographies of individual
musicians and pop stars are uncountable, but here are some of my favourites.
(See also ALLEN,
CHILTON,
GURALNICK,
LEES, MURRAY,
SHAW and
WRIGHT.)
Bix: Man and Legend,
by Richard M. Sudhalter and Philip R. Evans (1974), was the first great
jazz biography, and new ones can still be measured against it: Hoagy
Carmichael, Paul Whiteman, Bill Challis and the whole cast are discussed
in great detail. (See also SUDHALTER
below.) Also recommendable are Mingus by Brian Priestley (1982),
Miles Davis by Ian Carr (1982), Forces in Motion by Graham
Lock (1988; interviews and notes on Anthony Braxton’s 1985 tour of England),
Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times of Benny Goodman by Ross
Firestone (1993) and Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie
Holiday by Donald Clarke (1994). There is no definitive book on
Duke Ellington, and perhaps cannot be, but a recent one that bodes well
for the future is Ellington: The Early Years by Mark Tucker;
Tucker’s Duke Ellington Reader and A Lester Young Reader,
edited by Lewis Porter (1991), are excellent compilations. Porter's
John Coltrane: His Life and Music (1998) will not soon be superceded;
Rob van de Bliek's Thelonius Monk Reader (2001) is also very
valuable.
Autobiographies are usually ‘as told to’ books.
Some of the best of these are mentioned in the text. Biographies of
pop people tend to be disappointing, such as the several fat books about
Bob Dylan, perhaps because the whole point of his work is that we are
supposed to be living our own lives, not reading about him; but Clinton
Heylin's body of Dylanology is admirably clear-headed, and Peter Guralnick's
two-volume biography of Elvis Presley is surely definitive. (See GURALNICK
below, and MURRAY
for Jimi Hendrix.) The best books about pop and rock tell us as much
about the times as the lives, for example, Jon Savage’s England’s
Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock and Chris Heath’s Pet Shop
Boys, Literally. Significantly, both these are too long, telling
us more than we need to know. In country music, Nolan Porterheld’s Jimmie
Rodgers (1979) and Charles R. Townsend’s San Antonio Rose: The
Life and Music of Bob Wills (1976) and Colin Escott's Hank Williams:
The Biography (1994) are all excellent; all have discographies.
BORDMAN, Gerald
American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle
(1978; rev. 1986)
This describes year by year all the
musical shows that opened on the New York stage from 1866 (The Black
Crook) to 1985, with enough style to make the book a time-eater:
once you open it, a couple of hours will go by.
Bordman’s other books include
a biography of Kern (1980); in this connection Andrew Lamb’s Jerome
Kern in Edwardian London also must be mentioned (ISAM monograph
no. 22). The Institute for Study in American Music, Conservatory of
Music, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, published
about thirty monographs, all worthwhile (see SANJEK).
BROVEN, John
Rhythm and Blues in New Orleans
(1977)
South to Louisiana: The Music
of the Cajun Bayous (1987)
The first of these was originally
called Walking to New Orleans. The books combine passionate advocacy
with good writing and an almost off-hand ability to set everything in
its time and place.
CHAPPLE, Steve, and Reebee
GAROFALO
Rock’n’roll is Here to Pay
(1977)
A useful book about the development
of the modern music business, though the last chapter predicts some
sort of flower-power utopia.
CHILTON, John
Who’s Who of Jazz (1985)
Sidney Bechet: The Wizard of Jazz
(1987)
The Song of the Hawk: Life and
Recordings of Coleman Hawkins (1990)
English trumpeter and bandleader
Chilton is a very good researcher. Who’s Who of Jazz, first published
in 1972, is subtitled ‘Storyville to Swing Street’. An A-Z of jazz people
born before 1920 who did most of their work in the USA, it is a specialists’
lodestar of accuracy. Biographies of Louis Armstrong (1971, with Max
Jones) and Billie Holiday (Billie’s Blues, 1975, surveying only
her musical career from 1933) were trail-blazers; monographs on McKinney’s
Cotton Pickers (1978) and the Jenkins’ Orphanage (A Jazz Nursery,
1980) are each one of a kind; Stomp Off, Let’s Go (1983), about
the Bob Crosby band, is fun (though it apparently had no editor and
looks like an explosion in a print shop). With his biographies of Bechet,
Hawkins and more recently Louis Jordan, Chilton reached a new height:
the combination of the cantankerous and the lyrical that was Bechet
and the very private Hawkins will probably never be better captured,
and all the recordings are expertly dealt with.
COOK, Richard, and Brian
MORTON
The Penguin Guide to Jazz
(1992)
The first print-run of this book
was too short, because bookshops refused to order enough copies; sales
are brisk, and no wonder. Virtually every jazz artist is found here
in A-Z format and nearly all their currently available releases are
intelligently commented upon, so that if you are interested in an artist,
you can decide which records to take a chance on. The coverage is international,
and sensibly ignores the fact that many discs nowadays are imports in
various countries. There are almost 1,200 pages and an index for finding
side men and women. This book is indispensable.
Note: By 2000 the 5th edition
of Cook & Morton was in print, and material had to be cut from each
edition for space reasons. This book should be on the Internet, but
Penguin remains mired in the last century.
DANCE, Stanley
The World of Duke Ellington
(1970)
The World of Swing (1974)
The World of Earl Hines (1977)
The World of Count Basie (1980)
‘As told to . . .’
Night People by Dicky Wells
(1971)
Duke Ellington in Person by
Mercer Ellington (1978)
Those Swinging Years by Charlie
Barnet (1984)
The British-born Stanley Dance, long
resident in California, once had a letter printed in a British jazz
journal in which he angrily refused to understand why so many jazz records
have been bootlegged over the years, despite the way the owners of the
masters sat on them. He was an opinionated man and no doubt a ‘mouldy
fig’, but a valuable journalist. Most of the books are oral histories,
revealed by Dance’s power of observation and editorial skill to be perhaps
the most important genre of all. The World of Swing, for example,
covers over forty musicians and singers, mostly interviewed, from the
world-famous to the more obscure but still influential. It is a myth
that jazz musicians are inarticulate. Dance lets the feeling of what
the music is all about come through the personalities.
DANNEN, Frederick
Hit Men (1990)
The damning book we were all recommending
to one another, and well written too. The subtitle, ‘Power Brokers and
Fast Money inside the Music Business’, says it all. The paperback edition
is updated.
DEFAA, Chip
Voices of the Jazz Age (1990)
Swing, Legacy (1991)
Eight vintage profiles and twenty
somewhat later ones. The first contains a good article about Bix, and
the interview with Sam Wooding not long before he died is good stuff
taken down in the nick of time.
DISCOGRAPHY
A thriving industry. (See also ALLEN,
COOK and
MORTON,
HARRISON,
KINKLE and
WHITBURN.)
RUST, Brian. Jazz Records 1897-1942
(n.d.).
Now published by Storyville Publications
(see WRIGHT),
these two fat volumes are the basis of jazz discography, and have been
used for many years by fans, collectors, researchers and authors of
sleeve-notes, who sometimes even acknowledge it. Rust’s The Victor
Master Book, vol. 2 (self-published) was a fascinating one-off,
listing Victor records made from 1925 to 1936 by master number (with
indexes for artists and song titles). There never was a volume 1. A
new edition of Rust’s two volumes on American dance bands was being
prepared, as well as a complete list of the classic Columbias.
DIXON, Robert M. W., and John GODRICH.
Blues and Gospel Records 1902-1943 (1982). Another classic from
Storyville.
LEADBITTER, Mike, and Neil SLAVEN.
Blues Records 1943 to 1970 is
a two-volume update of the earlier classic including R&B, the first
volume (A-K) published by Paul Pelletier’s Record Information Services
in 1987. Leadbitter had died in 1974. Volume 2 (L-Z), credited to Leadbitter,
Fancourt and Pelletier, finally came out in 1994 and was worth the wait.
BRUYNINCKX, W.
A complete jazz discography printed
in Belgium, divided into categories of traditional, swing, modern, progressive,
modern big band and vocalists. It comprises a total of thirty-five paperback
volumes.
HOUNSOME, Terry. Rock Record
(1991). Began as the limited edition Rockmaster in 1978. This edition
(which could be the sixth, depending on how you count them) lists all
the albums by 10,000 rock bands and artists, with personnel, labels
and numbers of editions in various countries. A new edition came out
in 1994; Hounsome's Record Researcher Publications also issued Single
File, which listed over 100,000 British singles. Hounsome is now
on the Net; go to www.recordresearcher.com.
FLANAGAN, Bill
Written in my Soul (1987)
Interviews with ‘rock’ songwriters
(including Carl Perkins and Willie Dixon). Elvis Costello: ‘I can’t
actually play any musical instrument properly. I can’t read music. And
here’s the New York Times calling me the new George Gershwin ... It
was embarrassing to watch these people fall into the trap of their own
critical conceits.’
FOX, Ted
Showtime at the Apollo (1985)
In the Groove (1986)
The first covers fifty years of the
great Harlem venue, while the second contains interviews with a dozen
record producers, from John Hammond and Milt Gabler to Nile Rodgers.
GARFIELD, Simon
Expensive Habits (1986)
Subtitled ‘The Dark Side of the Music
Business’, stories from the British pop industry about how easy it is
to get cheated. Of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s hit albums in the early 1970s,
Back to Front was number one and grossed £1,700,000, of which
he received only £60,000. He had to go to court to get more royalties
and control of his own copyrights.
GELATT, Roland
The Fabulous Phonograph 1877-1977
(rev. 1977)
Still a good survey, updated from
the 1955 edition.
GEORGE, Nelson
Where Did Our Love Go? (1985)
The Death of Rhythm and Blues
(1988)
The first tells the history of the
Motown label. The second study asks how black music can retain its identity
in a white-dominated music industry, inevitably touching on the perilous
position of black culture in a society whose engine is white-bread economics.
GILBERT, Douglas
Lost Chords (1942; repr. 1970)
‘The Diverting Story of American
Popular Music’, a period survey of songs and business up to the 1930s.
The last chapter is titled ‘Juke Box, Jazz, Swing, and Boogie-woogie’
to make the book look up to date, but says little about any of these,
sticking to Tin Pan Alley.
GILLETT, Charlie
The Sound of the City (1970;
rev. 1983)
Somewhat breathless ‘Rise of Rock
and Roll’ story by a British DJ and label boss who knows his stuff,
written around the records themselves and not neglecting byways such
as swamp rock.
GITLER, Ira
Jazz Masters of the ’40s (1966)
Swing to Bop (1985)
The first is one of a series, of
which the others (Jazz Masters of the ’20s by Richard Hadlock,
’30s by Rex Stewart, etc.) are also worthwhile. The more recent
book is ‘an oral history of the transition in jazz in the 1940s’ in
the musicians’ own words, and priceless.
GOLDBERG, Isaac
Tin Pan Alley (1930)
A period piece on the heyday, with
an introduction by Gershwin.
GOODMAN, Fred
The Mansion On The Hill (1996)
"Dylan, [Neil] Young, [David] Geffen,
[Bruce] Springsteen and the Head-on collision of rock and commerce".
The heartbreaking and fascinating story of how an idealistic generation
sold out, or was sold out.
GORDON, Robert
Jazz West Coast: The Los Angeles
Jazz Scene of the 1950s (1986)
The largely white cool jazz scene
was commercially successful (as post-war jazz went), but suffered from
critical snobbery in a sort of reverse racism. This survey is full of
good sense and especially useful now that many of the records are being
reissued on CD. West Coast Jazz by Ted Gioia (1992) looks pretty
good too.
GURALNICK, Peter
Feel Like Going Home: Portraits
in Blues and Rock’n’roll (1971)
Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals
of American Musicians (1979)
Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues
and the Southern Dream of Freedom (1986)
Two volumes of affectionate, well-written
portraits, and a definitive history of soul music. His two-volume biography
of Elvis Presley, Last Train To Memphis and Careless Love,
will not be bettered. Another book was about Robert Johnson, but will
be superseded when controversial research may be published. .
HAASE, John Edward (ed.)
Ragtime (1985)
A marvellous survey of every aspect
- waltzes, the banjo, women in ragtime, everything you can think of
- in nineteen chapters. Contributors include Max Morath and Edward A.
Berlin (whose own 1980 book is very good), and there are interviews
with Gunther Schuller and Rudi Blesh.
HAMM, Charles
Yesterdays: Popular Song in America
(1979)
The best survey I know, it begins
in England and sticks to songs, and is well illustrated. Weakest in
the last couple of chapters, because the rock era’s songs lend themselves
less well to this kind of treatment.
HANNUSCH, Jeff
I Hear You Knockin’ (1985)
‘The Sound of New Orleans Rhythm
and Blues’, in the form of profiles of over thirty musicians and producers.
The best sort of fan’s book, to put alongside Broven.
HARRISON, Max
A Jazz Retrospect (1976; 1991)
A collection of first-class jazz
journalism, the kind that never goes out of date. Harrison was one of
the first to describe Ellington accurately as a miniaturist. He also
wrote the jazz entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
and he writes about classical music too; a collection of that would
also be worth having.
HARRISON, Max with Charles
Fox and Eric Thacker
The Essential Jazz Records, Volume
1: Ragtime to Swing (1984);
Volume 2: Modernism to Postmodernism
(2000) (with Thacker and Stuart Nicholson).
Thematically arranged by decades
and styles, it provides commentary on a great many of the most valuable
recordings. LP issues are listed, but that does not matter; original
recording dates and complete personnel are given, so you can know what
you are getting in today’s CD editions. The point is that the commentary
is illuminating, and so stylish that it can be enjoyed for its own sake;
it is even fun to read about music you have already been listening to
for years. The second volume was a long time coming, but the integral
two-volume edition by Mansell is a delight, and contains some of Nicholson's
best work.
HIRSHEY, Gerry
Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul
Music (1984)
Well written, full of interviews
and love of the subject, to go on the shelf next to Guralnick.
HOSKYNS, Barney
Say It One Time for the Brokenhearted
(1987)
Subtitled ‘The Country Side of Southern
Soul’, this is an eye-opener of a book about the influence of country
and soul on each other. His list of forty masterpieces of country soul
ought to be bootlegged if necessary on CD.
JONES, Max
Talking Jazz (1987)
A useful collection by one of the
best-known British music journalists, introduced by Jones and intelligently
edited, often from interviews over a period of years. His piece on Billie
Holiday alone is worth the price.
KINKLE, Roger D.
The Complete Encyclopedia of Popular
Music and Jazz 1900-1950 (1974)
Compiled by a dealer and auctioneer
in old records, these four fat hardback volumes have now been out of
print for a while. Two volumes are an A-Z of recording artists (many
mainstream people with no entries in other books) and two are lists
and indexes: one lists musical shows and films, representative hit songs
and records year by year; also listed (by catalogue number, which sounds
boring until you learn how to wallow in it) are all releases on several
important labels from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s. Incredibly accurate,
Kinkle’s work was computer typeset in the USA twenty years ago, and
after many years of using it I finally found one mistake: he got Judy
Garland’s death date wrong by six months.
LAX, Roger, and Frederick
SMITH
The Great Song Thesaurus (1984)
Lists songs with dates and information
about each, and is divided into several sections (British, American,
Indexes, etc.). Goes back much further than SHAPIRO
below, but accepts stories as fact, such as that Mother Goose was an
American.
LEES, Gene
Singers and the Song (1987)
Meet Me at Jim and Andy’s: Jazz Musicians and Their World (1988)
Cats Of Any Color: Jazz, Black and White (1994)
Inventing Champagne: The Worlds
of Lerner and Loewe (1990)
Journalist, editor, lyricist and
sometime vocalist, Gene Lees always writes well, but when he writes
about something he loves, magic happens. These books collect pieces
from his unique monthly Jazzletter, launched in 1981. He has
also written biographies of Oscar Peterson and Lerner & Loewe, and
an ‘as told to’ book, Henry Mancini’s Did They Mention the Music?
(1989).
LITWEILER, John
The Freedom Principle: Jazz after
1958 (1985)
Ornette Coleman: The Harmelodic
Life (1992)
The first is a first-class book on
the subject by an important Chicago journalist; you know it is good
because it sends you straight to the record shelf. His treatment of
Coleman is important, treating the life and the music as one, befitting
a great artist.
LYTTELTON, Humphrey
Best of Jazz: Basin Street to
Harlem (1978)
Enter the Giants (1981)
Trumpeter, bandleader and a famous
voice on British radio through his jazz record programme, Lyttelton
is also a good writer. His article on Basie trombonist Dicky Wells,
for example, should send you to the records to hear what he is talking
about.
MALONE, Bill C.
Country Music USA (1968; rev.
1985)
Impossible to imagine a better survey
of the subject: fat, authoritative, a good read, a good index.
MARSH, Dave
The Heart of Rock and Soul: The
1,001 Greatest Singles Ever Made (1989)
You can argue with Marsh, founder
of Detroit’s Creem magazine in 1969, about his choices, but not
about his love of the music. Relive the days when it was fun to buy
singles, and be reminded why.
MATTFELD, Julius
Variety Music Cavalcade (1959;
rev. 1962)
Subtitled ‘Musical-historical Review
1620-1961’, this was a terrific idea spoiled by its lack of proper indexes.
A list of hit songs for each year is accompanied by contemporary news:
with ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ in 1954 came the US Senate’s censure of
Joe McCarthy, the first news of a link between cigarettes and lung cancer
and the coining by McCall's, a women’s magazine (recently renamed Rosie
after a TV celebrity), of the word ‘togetherness’; the fiction best-seller,
Lloyd Douglas’s The Robe, was held over from the year before.
But the index lists only the songs.
MURRAY, Charles Shaar
Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix
and Post-War Pop (1989)
Shots from the Hip (1991)
Murray is the brightest and most
amusing of rock critics. The American Lester Bangs had an enchantingly
surreal style, but was a believer in rock myths and did not convince
me. You have to love the music to be a critic, and I know some who have
gone off it, but Murray (who is British) will never have to give up
on it, because he has no illusions about it, or about anything else:
he has the sense to find most things funny. His biography of Hendrix
is a model of its kind, ranging more widely and intelligently than most
rock biographies; his collection of journalism from 1972 to the present
will remain valuable.
RAMSEY, Frederick, Jr,
and Charles Edward SMITH (eds)
Jazzmen (1939; repr. 1985
with introduction by Nat Hentoff)
A collection of fifteen pieces by
such authors as Wilder Hobson and Otis Ferguson, two of the earliest
American jazz journalists. Hentoff’s generation was inspired by it,
and it is still recommendable.
READ, Oliver, and Walter
L. WELCH
From Tinfoil to Stereo (1959;
rev. 1976)
Written by enthusiasts, wordy and
even repetitious but ‘unputdownable’, this classic came from an obscure
publisher in Indianapolis. Still the best account of the evolution of
sound recording, by the time it was updated and republished copies of
the original edition were changing hands for several hundred dollars.
Interesting illustrations too, as well as several indexes.
REFERENCE
A-Z books of rock, pop, country music
and so on have too many words and not enough entries, rarely an index
and usually an unacceptable number of factual errors. The Penguin
Encyclopedia of Popular Music, edited by Donald Clarke (1989), was
the first single-volume reference book to cover all the genres; I name
my own work because it remained the best value, with more than three
thousand entries (including entries for genres, and listing albums for
most artists) and a very good index. Its nearest competition was compiled
by rockers who had Buck Clayton playing saxophone instead of trumpet,
and had no index at all. By the time the updated edition came out in
1998 the bookstores were full of imitators. The work is now available
at www.musicweb.uk.net (click on "Popular A-Z").
In jazz, however, there are irreplaceable
books for specialists. John Chilton’s Who’s Who of Jazz is mentioned
above, Leonard Feather’s venerable three volumes of The Encyclopedia
of Jazz (1960, 1966 and 1976) were valuable for the large number of
more obscure entries, and a new edition was completed by Ira Gitler
after Feather's death. Jazz: The Essential Companion, by Ian
Carr, Digby Fairweather and Brian Priestley, is a well-written and useful
A-Z, as is The All Music Guide To Jazz. Blues Who’s Who
by Sheldon Harris (1979) is also indispensable. (See also KINKLE;
for A-Z books of songs, see LAX
and SMITH,
and SHAPIRO.)
REID, Jan
The Improbable Rise of Redneck
Rock (1974)
The story of how country music was
reborn in Texas when Nashville got too slick while remaining intolerant.
Incredible that this book does not have an index.
RUSSELL, Ross
Jazz Style in Kansas City and
the Southwest (1971)
A good survey. Russell was the founder
of Dial Records, recorded Charlie Parker and was Parker’s manager for
two years; he also wrote Bird Lives! (1973), the first and still
the fullest Parker biography, but all the books about Parker seem to
be flawed by bad memories and wishful thinking on the part of the witnesses,
as though Parker were a mirror in which people saw what they wanted
to see.
SANJEK, Russell
American Popular Music and Its
Business (1988)
Sanjek was a BMI executive who spent
his retirement completing this massive three-volume work, which began
as an ISAM monograph. The volumes are titled ‘The Beginning to 1790’,
‘1790 to 1909’ and ‘1900 to 1984’, and have nearly 1,500 pages as well
as indexes and bibliographies. When I obtained my copies, I stopped
everything and wallowed in them for weeks, and still consult them as
often as any books on my shelves. Statistics, squabbles, technology
and takeovers are all here; since Sanjek’s death his son has done an
abridged single-volume edition.
SCHULLER, Gunther
Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical
Development (1968)
The Swing Era (1989)
There is not really a recommendable
single-volume history of jazz; you need to read several books, of which
these should be the first. Recognised as a gem of good sense and scholarship
on publication, Early Jazz is also immensely readable, and the
next volume is just as good.
SHAPIRO, Harry
Waiting for the Man (1988)
‘The Story of Drugs and Popular Music’
is more than that, going back to the medicine shows seen in so many
old Westerns, which were peddling nothing but dope; it comes up through
the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 and the problems of Keith Richards
and the Allman Brothers Band to the substitute addiction to scientology,
giving a list of victims.
SHAPIRO, Nat, and Nat HENTOFF
Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya (1955)
One of the first oral histories of
jazz, compiled from interviews, letters, magazine articles and so on.
A classic and still fascinating.
SHAPIRO, Nat, and Bruce
POLLOCK
Popular Music, 1920-1979 (1985)
Three hefty books cumulating and
updating eight earlier volumes indexing over 18,000 songs, including
introductory essays, indexes and much info on each song. Pollock also
published Volume 9, 1980-1984.
SHAW, Arnold
52nd St: The Street of Jazz
(1971)
Honkers and Shouters: The Golden
Years of Rhythm and Blues (c. 1974) The Rockin’ 50s (c. 1974)
Black Popular Music in America
(1986)
The Jazz Age: Popular Music in
the 1920s (1987)
Shaw joined Leeds Music (which later
became MCA) in 1945; a songwriter, publicist, record producer and college
professor, he won ASCAP’s Deems Taylor Award a couple of times. He also
wrote biographies of Frank Sinatra (1968) and Harry Belafonte, among
other things. The first three listed here are the best. 52nd St was
originally called The Street That Never Slept, and is good on
the clubs and their influence on music. The next two are insider’s books,
full of vitality, detail (for example, on the origins of the classic
R&B labels) and, especially Honkers, valuable interviews
with such people as Ralph Bass and Art Rupe. Shaw’s later books are
surveys and appear hurried; they are cramped and hard to read and have
the occasional minor error.
SMITH, Joe
Off the Record (1988)
In this book, record-company executive
Joe Smith combines arrogance and ignorance. His book is a disgrace (and
from a Warner Communications Company). Not only is there no index, you
have to make your own table of contents: over two hundred short interviews
are put together in no particular order. The interviews themselves do
not look like interviews at all and many of them are worthless. (Paul
Weston told me that the interview with him and Jo Stafford as printed
was nothing of the kind.) There are so many that there are nuggets to
be found, however, and the book goes on the shelf next to Fox and Flanagan.
Smith is like a cook in a bad restaurant, not knowing that the job could
just as easily be done well.
SOUTHERN, Eileen
The Music of Black Americans (1971; rev. 1983)
A masterpiece of scholarship by a
Harvard professor of music and Afro-American studies, it covers every
aspect of black musical achievement in the USA beginning in the early
seventeenth century, and provides plenty of social context as well.
Indispensable.
SPELLMAN, A. B.
Black Music: Four Lives (1966)
Originally called Four Lives in
the Bebop Business, a classic on the music of its period in the
form of profiles of Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Herbie Nichols and
Jackie McLean. It also paints a depressing picture of what it is like
to be a black artist trying to make a living as an original, competing
with your own dead predecessors, who themselves struggled all their
lives.
SUDHALTER, Richard M.
Lost Chords: White Musicians and
Their Contribution to Jazz 1915-1945 (1999)
A tour de force by the Bix-inspired
cornetist and biographer of Bix, who has also had a parallel career
as a first-rate journalist. An exhaustive and fascinating portrait not
only of scores of musicians who might never receive their due because
of today's political correctness, but of the times and the business
in which they worked.
TOSCHES, Nick
Country: Living Legends and Dying
Metaphors in America’s Biggest Music (1977)
Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis
Story (1982)
Unsung Heroes of Rock’n’roll
(1984)
Where Dead Voices Gather (2001)
Country gives the lie to the
Nashville image of country music as upright and puritanical: not just
gossip, but songs, personalities, forgotten roots and the darker side
of the history. The third book is useful fun on the most influential
popular music of the late 1940s and early 1950s; not all the heroes
are entirely unsung, but most people have never heard of Hardrock Gunter
or Jesse Stone. The last book is a search for an obscure but influential
recording artist, Emmett Miller, perhaps the last white American minstrel,
but it is more than that: a trawl through an American culture that most
of us know nothing about. A biography of Dean Martin had bad reviews
which it probably did not deserve: Tosches' somewhat surrealistic style
serves the subject matter.
TRAVIS, Dempsey J.
An Autobiography of Black Jazz
(1983)
An affectionate memoir of Chicago’s
musical history, using a great many interviews and illustrations. Travis
became a pianist like his father, and at the age of sixteen in the mid-1930s
was the youngest bandleader registered with the musicians’ union. A
good read.
VAN DER MERWE, Peter
Origins of the Popular Style:
The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music (1989)
A scholarly book and a delight, tracing
influences around the world and down through a thousand years. European
folk music, for example - hence much American country music - probably
comes originally from the Middle East, not medieval or Renaissance Europe.
WARD, Ed, Geoffrey STOKES
and Ken TUCKER
Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone
History of Rock and Roll (1986)
A readable history by three journalists,
one each for the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Like most rock books, it assumes
that nothing much happened before 1956, it is not true, for instance,
that Stephen Foster never received any royalties. But when it gets to
the meat, there are insights, such as Stokes on why Bob Dylan did not
sell records to blacks: ‘Though Dick Gregory might joke about finally
getting served at a Woolworth’s lunch counter only to find out that
the food was lousy, the subversive sentiment underlying the joke would
remain buried.’
WHITBURN, Joel
Top Pop Singles 1955-1966
Top Pop Albums 1955-1985
Top R&B Singles 1942-1988
Top Country Singles 1944 1988
Pop Memories 1890-1954
Whitburn’s Record Research, Inc.,
began reprinting the Billboard charts in the early 1970s, producing
expensive books for DJs and cultists which turned out to have a wider
appeal. The latest editions do much more than this, providing blurbs
on the artists and much else; they are still expensive but unusually
well made for a good deal of use. Most of these books have been updated,
and there is an annual yearbook update; the spiral-bound Daily No.
1 Hits tells you what was number one in the USA each day from 1
January 1940. The most remarkable is Pop Memories, which goes
far beyond Billboard, researching hobbyist columns, sheet music
sales, record company lists, radio plays and so on to create charts
going right back to the beginning, the only source for the hits of the
acoustic era (though I would like to know more about just how the calculations
were made). The earliest Billboard charts had only fifteen or
twenty places, but Pop Memories effectively creates a longer
list, giving a better view of many artists. By including jukebox sales
the book makes it clear that somebody made money from Billie Holiday’s
recordings of 1935 to 1942, for example, even if she did not.
WILDER, Alec
American Popular Song: The Great
Innovators 1900-1950 (1972)
A gentle, loving, intelligent masterpiece:
an appreciation of the best songs and composers of our century by a
man who was one of them, but too modest to include any of his own. Of
perhaps 300,000 songs, Wilder examined about 17,000 and mentions or
quotes the music of around 800 of the best. More valuable for those
who read music, but there are insights for everybody who loves songs.
WILMER, Val
As Serious as Your Life: The Story
of the New Jazz (1977)
A detailed survey, full of interviews,
about how hard it is to make a living at it, it also affirms that the
music is an important part of the community; by a British woman who
earned the trust of that community.
WRIGHT, Laurie
Mr Jelly Lord (1980)
‘King’ Oliver (1987)
‘Fats’ in Fact (1992)
Like Walter Allen’s Hendersonia,
these are documentary histories of the artists’ activities with discographies
and illustrations. ‘King’ Oliver is an update of an earlier book by
Allen and Brian Rust. Wright is publisher and editor of Storyville magazine,
and also publishes Tom Lord’s Clarence Williams (which documents
the activities of one of the busiest people who ever worked in black
music), Rust and Dixon and Godrich (see DISCOGRAPHY).
