Fans pick 79 books like Our Noise

In its ambition and sweep across time and political upheavals as well as musical styles, this book may have been the closest thing I had to a model for my book.

Part musical memoir and part capsule history of the American South’s era of integration, Dixie Lullaby was written by longtime music journalist Mark Kemp – a man who grew up in Asheboro, North Carolina in the 1960s and ’70s and has the Lynyrd Skynyrd and Allman Brothers records to prove it.

Winston-Salem native Folds is the focus of one of my chapters, as a truly unlikely success story.

At the height of the grunge era of 1990s alternative rock, he led Ben Folds Five, a piano trio that played catchy pop dubbed “punk rock for sissies.” Somehow, they had a hit single with a downcast ballad about teenage abortion.

Folds is an unexpected character himself, a musical prodigy who became a quirky multi-media star after his hitmaking days ran out. His 2019 memoir is a fantastic window into his artistic process, as well as his just-do-it worldview.

He’s been one of my favorite interview subjects over the years.

While I got to watch a lot of North Carolina music history unfold in real time, a great deal of it happened before I was born.

Fortunately, when it came to Piedmont blues, I had the work of English folklorist Bruce Bastin to draw on. With Cryin’ for the Carolinas and its 1986 companion volume Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast, Bastin gives an essential portrait of the 1930s vintage scene in Durham, North Carolina.

A large cast of iconic blues musicians, many of them disabled, got by busking in and around the city’s tobacco warehouses back then, legends like Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Rev. Gary Davis, and Blind Boy Fuller – who wrote the song that became my book title.

Meticulously researched with extensive visuals.

Like me, John Darnielle of the band Mountain Goats (a Merge Records act, as it happens) was not born in North Carolina, but fully embraced it upon moving here.

After much acclaim for the twisted freak-folk of his band, Darnielle launched a parallel career as a fiction writer with this novella in Continuum Books’ 33-1/3 series.

Nominally about the 1971 Black Sabbath album of the title, Master of Reality is actually a personality sketch of obsessed and troubled super-fans of the sort Darnielle has in abundance in his hometown of Durham and elsewhere.

He has followed it up with more literary greatness, especially his revelatory 2014 novel Wolf in White Van.

No list of books on the indie music scenes of the 1980s is complete without this classic tale of the rise of commercial tensions regarding indie rock bands.

Music offered a form of rebellion against conformity – and punk challenged the corporate music industry of the 1970s with its DIY code and aesthetics. But in its wake, new forms of rebellion and alternative pathways to success emerged – at least for a time.

These bands that Azerrad chronicles became the giants of this alternative scene, and they were the sound of college radio. As Azerrad writes, corporate labels co-opted new wave in the early 1980s, “but they couldn’t co-opt punk’s infrastructure—the local underground scenes, labels, radio stations, fanzines, and stores. They, perhaps more so than any particular musical style, are punk’s most enduring legacy.” 

Unlike the previous two titles, Pure doesn’t have an author built-in soundtrack. However, this story, written in 2000 by a sixteen-year-old (!!!), is as paradoxically blunt and elusive as so many alternative music albums of the 1990s were. A mixtape for Pure would definitely include Hole, Radiohead, Tori Amos, an Explicit Content label, and just about all the trigger warnings you can think of. As difficult as some of the scenes of this book were to read, I found it deeply impactful and empathy-inducing. I’ve yet to meet another person who connected with this book that I don’t feel a certain kinship to. They are few and far between, like people who still own a Temple of the Dog CD.  

A beautifully written debut novel. When I read the first paragraph, I knew I was in capable hands. "The day Donald Ray Spencer was killed, he caught four catfish. I found them, right there beside him on the floorboard, wrapped in yesterday's paper. They looked as surprised to be dead as the boy did." 

I love a book of secrets, bad choices, and, like all good stories, loss and love. The writing was so lyrical I didn't care that it teased me along and made me wait before I was invited to discover the secrets. I also appreciated that not all the characters are likable because, in the end, I understood why.

What does this book have to do with sports? Nothing.

What does it have to do with identity and community, and how the one pushes and pulls, rips and welds the other into form? With how histories can turn into hauntings and our fondest hopes into demons? Everything.

Randall Kenan died while I was finishing my book and I still haven’t really gotten over it. I’m always going to miss the words he never got to write, even as I cherish those he did.

The vintage fashion descriptions are killer diller with little mini-stories about each dress featured that evoke nostalgia and often melancholy. The mini-stories were sweet, delightful vignettes that reminded me of the way I think of my vintage clothing. They were beautifully written and I loved them all but most noticeably, I loved the story about the wartime mother splashing in puddles with her children. Dora’s character was likable and believable and I rooted for her. The supporting characters were perfectly quirky and delightfully despicable. Plus there is a nice romantic element with a fun love-triangle with wonderful supporting characters.

“Nine robed figures dressed all in white,” begins this haunting story of the Ku Klux Klan arriving in the small town of Bumblebee, North Carolina. The year is 1932 and the town is, of course, segregated. Black and White. A line in the soil―just like the neighborhood street of my childhood in Springfield, Virginia that divided my Korean family from the white family who fought and failed to keep us from moving into our home. The reader will step into eleven-year-old Stella Mills' shoes and feel all her fear and anger over the injustices of her world that highlights voting rights. But young Stella harnesses her anger through words (much the way I did as a child) by creating a fantasy newspaper column called Stella Star’s Sentinel. Why didn’t I think of that? I only had my blue diary with a gold clasp. In Stella’s ‘newspaper’ she expresses how… show more.