Fans pick 100 books like Flowers in the Dustbin

The story of American music is laid out in a fascinating series of stories by musicologist and former New York Times music critic Robert Palmer. Palmer used interviews with Muddy Waters and many other bluesmen to explain how this music traveled from Africa to the American South and then up to Chicago, Detroit, and other northern cities.

It is an in-depth look at the stories and myths of the South and the people who made their escape from the brutal cotton fields and racial segregation of the times. This book is a must for anyone wanting to know the beginnings and significance of American music.

I dearly love this book by the daughter of Duane and Donna Allman, my favorite on the Allman Brothers Band. Part biography and part memoir, it’s heartfelt story of Galadrielle Allman’s quest to get to know her famous father as a human being and artist.

Through the lives of Donna and Linda Oakley, the two young widows at the center of the story, it is also one of the very few music history books that addresses rock & roll’s impact on families. Throughout the book, Allman connects with a father she never knew through her relationships with those who did—an extended family network that carried and shared Duane’s memory.

Her conclusion that Duane’s story was a love affair with the guitar helped me frame my own understanding of Duane’s artistry as I began writing my book.

Crossroads: Postwar American South, American youth culture, counterculture

I’ve spent a lot of time with this remarkable book over the years.

I suppose my greatest takeaway is the way Ward explores music’s meaning from a variety of angles and intersections: musical, economic, legal, racial, gender, class, and generational.

The airwaves could not be segregated; music gave insight into the Black freedom struggle and a shared sense of humanity that helped topple Jim Crow barriers nationwide. I particularly appreciate how Ward unpacks the ways Black audiences shaped the sounds of the era. Black music reflected an optimism and an assertion of racial pride, and you’ll find the modern Civil Rights Movement at the heart of his book.

Crossroads: African American freedom struggle, Postwar America, the South

Since their 1965 founding, the Grateful Dead have been one of the counterculture’s most enduring institutions.

No Simple Highway answers why, placing the band in the context of its times through three utopian ideals central to the band and its fans: Ecstasy (not just drugs, but an “urge to transcend”), Mobility, and Community. The band, Richardson argues, is “the American experiment in action.”

You’ll learn how the band wove multiple strands of American music with literature, folklore, the counterculture, and the visual arts into a truly unique musical tapestry whose express purpose was as part of a live music experience.

This music-as-participation dynamic meant the audience was as important to the Dead as the music they played. This book had a major impact on how I approached the band/audience story for my own Allman Brothers research. 

Crossroads: Postwar America, youth counterculture, audience, San Francisco

Speaking of Elvis, this biography, the second of two parts, is among the greatest of the late 20th century. We begin with Elvis entering the U.S. Army in 1958 and follow this increasingly lost soul through the years, his fame metastasizing into something unrivaled, incredible, enviable and wholly malignant. Guralnick captures the singular loneliness Elvis came to suffer, the slow suicide that was his Las Vegas residency, the exploitations of his manager, Col. Tom Parker, and a death so humiliating it finally made Elvis what he had longed to be for decades: Profoundly, squalidly human. None other than Bob Dylan called this Presley biography the one that “cancels out all others.”

Levon Helm’s unflappable integrity makes him such a likable protagonist you’ll root for him as he rises up from small-town Arkansas boy to A list musician. You’ll see the salt  of the Earth underdog that he was as he recounts what happened behind the scenes at  “The Last Waltz.” This Wheel’s on Fire reads like a director’s cut commentary you can’t believe you’re privy to hearing.  

A greatly entertaining book about the myriad scandals of Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, crimes and murder among Norway’s black metal bands, how Sam Cooke wound up shot to death in a low-budget motel, and Gram Parsons’ death at 26, among others, written by the guy with a podcast of the same name. I’ve played and listened to music my entire life but have never really studied the topic or its practitioners, so much of this came as a fascinating surprise. Brennan does veer into fiction—at one point he relates a conversation between two dead people after they’re dead—but still a very interesting compilation. 

When my wife and I moved to Nashville, I was stunned to realize that most forms of American popular music had been born within 500 miles of our new home, in an arc from New Orleans (jazz) to the Mississippi Delta (blues) to Memphis (rock ’n’ roll) to Nashville (bluegrass) to Bristol (country). 

I began reading eagerly about American popular music, and my reading led to writing—most recently my novel about the birth of country music, Lord of the Mountain. This list gives you some of my favorite books.

The best of these is also one of my favorite biographies of any kind, Peter Guralnick’s magnificent Last Train to Memphis, the first volume of his essential two-volume story of Elvis Presley and the birth of rock ’n’ roll.

The book begins with short chapters on a couple of blues players—Harmonica Frank and the mysterious Robert Johnson, who allegedly sold his soul to the devil so he could play guitar—before moving to extended chapters on Elvis, and others.

Marcus’s project is to cross-reference American history with American music and to try and make sense of them both. It sounds like something an academic would get up to, and plenty of research went into the making of Mystery Train (at 224 pages, the Notes and Discographies section of the 2015 edition is considerably longer than the original book).

However, Marcus is one of the great rock writers, and he’s as keen on crafting unforgettable sentences as he is in explaining the meaning of rock and roll.

I always knew there was something special, even mystical, about Led Zeppelin’s lead guitarist Jimmy Page. As a high school student, there was something about the band that drew me in, as if I didn’t have a choice.

I now know that I love their music, and Page’s playing in particular, because of the vision Page had for the band’s music, lyrics, and iconography on their album covers and artwork. Light and shade, light and heavy, clear and murky, simple and epic—how better to sum up Led Zeppelin?