With a subtitle like "The Twisted Roots of Rock 'n' Roll", I was expecting a somewhat different book; perhaps a Country music version of Hollywood Babylon. Instead I got a sometimes hard to follow, potted history of Country music, with surprisingly meagre references to some big names of Country music (and in Johnny Cash's case, that reference isn't positive).

The characters that gain the most coverage in Country are Emmett Miller, who Tosches considers the true father of Country music, and Jerry Lee Lewis, who obviously caught Tosches attention enough that he would subsequently write a whole book about the Killer.

If nothing else, Country made me search out Emmett Miller on You Tube. ( )

A wealth of information about country and early rock music, but also bluegrass, soul, r&b, blues, rockabilly and any number of genres and styles that brushed up against each other and country.

Nick Tosches in the preface says, as far as country, he likes "the old stuff. At once so real and so fraudulent, so repressed and so uncontrollable." He lauds Emmett Miller, virtually unknown now, as "one of the most intriguing and profoundly important men in the history of country music." This edition has an appendix with more information about Miller that Tosches and others dug up since previous editions. That's the kind of book this is. Well-researched and in-depth. ( )

Tosches effectively describes a musical (d)evolution, as country music's affinity for violence and raunch gives way to God, Mother, Sin, Guilt, and Sorrow. These then are the dying metaphors of Country's subtitle.

I never much cared for country music, my understanding of it defined by radio play while living in Texas and Tennessee. It was only after college that I could appreciate some country, though never the Nashville Pop stuff. The music that resonates with me I tend to tag as "roots", everything else from the genre I relegate to the "country & western" label.

Tosches' ruminations appeal precisely because they're interesting cultural commentary. I took his country music examples as illustrations of general musical trends, for the most part uninterested in the particular artists or subgenres. Tosches on the other hand is keen on the specifics, lamenting a lost rebel side of country, which I admire mostly as a matter of principle, and from afar. The rebel myth is hard enough to swallow in rock n roll, put a rhinestone cowboy hat on it and I'm most apt to snigger.

What's clear is that the commercial juggernaut warps and pressures all music. Following along in an unfamiliar musical tradition --one in which I have little interest-- helped me see the generic forces at work. They're targeting music I like, too, of course (and a lot more besides music), so while it's always been fairly easy to see, Tosches helps identify some less-evident trends at play. The biggest was obvious but not always clear: transform the unorthodox into something more easily commodifiable, the trappings of rebellion without the threat. ( )

This is a great book, like Tosches's biographies of Emmett Miller and Jerry Lee Lewis (those biographies seem to be an outgrowth of this work). Tosches, with his ear for arcane similarities and his attention for minutiae, makes connections, draws analogies, underscores influences, et cetera, all geared to describing how country music (whatever that is) gave rise to rock 'n' roll (whatever that is). The point? Genres were fluid and flux, and nothing as real as the music of the American South never has a clear-cut beginning. The greatest things to come out of this book:

(1) It highlights the fact that country music was never the genteel, safe alternative to "black music" (whatever that is) or rock (or, today, rap, for that matter). The music was full of course metaphors, sex, death, etc., just like the black, English, and Scots-Irish music it descended from.

(2) It demolishes the well-worn LIE that whites just stole black music. (Where Dead Voices Gather does this too.) The color line was there, but it was always blurred, often times ignored. Blacks stole from whites, whites stole from blacks, blacks copied, whites copied, and so on and so forth.

Luckily, many of the arcane tunes found here can be searched for on YouTube, which means you can, without spending a fortune, listen to many of the tunes Tosches mentions. Tosches, in this originally 1977 work (it has been updated), is not as unnecessarily erudite as he is in some of his more recent works. He does harbor a hatred for Johnny Cash, who I guess he thinks is a sellout, and Roy Acuff. (I for one never much liked Roy Acuff.)

I can't get his read on Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, who, I would argue, are more influential than his pet Emmett Miller. There are a few remarks here that can be taken as snide towards the Playboys, but perhaps his views have softened, as they don't appear in Where Dead Voices Gather. I still say that Tosches should turn his prodigious energy to such a book on Bob Wills (and one on Gary Stewart to boot.) As such, he makes a mistake referencing Wills. He states that Wills and the Playboys finally got around to recording "Milk Cow Blues" in 1969, when, in fact, they recorded two versions (one with a searing guitar solo by Junior Barnard, the other with a brilliant twin (or triple?) "guitar"-solo) for the Tiffany Company in 1947, one which was actually pressed (and released?) on a 78 (according to Townsend's discography). Certainly they played "Milk Cow Blues" live well before then. (I wonder what Tosches's opinion is, as I respect it, of Wills, the amazing Tiffany Transcriptions, and Junior Barnard.) Tragic indeed that Tosches does not mention, in a book about country rock roots, the rocking 1946 single by the Texas Playboys, "Bob Wills Boogie," which has boogie piano by Millard Kelso, a rock-like solo by electric MANDOLINIST Tiny Moore, under-girded throughout by the manic playing and soloing of Junior Barnard. This rocks better than many of the tunes Tosches mentions for the surrounding era. (Or, for that matter, what is his opinion of "Fat Boy Rag" from the Tiffany Sessions, the solos in it would make T-Bone Walker, hell, Chuck Berry, ashamed to be on the stage.) As an aside, this is the problem with Charles Townsend's great but tame biography of Wills, San Antonio Rose. It explores the fiddlin' roots of Wills and compares Will's music to the jazz of the 1920s and 1930s, but only pays lip-service to any blues influence on Wills and his cohorts. (To me, it appears Wills absolutely idolizes the Mississippi Sheiks; and in the Tiffany Transcription of "I'm a Ding Dong Daddy," Tommy Duncan adds a line to the song that does not exist in other versions, echoing a dirty blues of Charlie Patton, singing "you can shake you can break it you can hang it on the wall, throw it out the window I'll catch it 'fore it falls." There are a many such signposts to the blues. Perhaps I'll write the damn thing.)

All in all, bravo to Tosches again. If you like his other works, you'll like this'n. ( )