Fans pick 100 books like Please Be with Me

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’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

Flowers in the Dustbin uses an approach I dearly love: the vignette. Miller deftly selects stories that tie together a larger narrative of “where rock & roll came from—and what it came to do.” 

The book begins with the birth of rhythm & blues through one of its earliest stars, Wynonie Harris. Subsequent stories in chapter one weave together the impacts of technology, the Great Migration, racial dynamics, a booming economy, and an emerging youth culture. It culminates in Elvis’s earliest recordings, the so-called birth of rock & roll. All in the first chapter!

In the story that follows, Miller demonstrates why rock & roll emerged and how it reflected and shaped the social, cultural, and political landscape.

Crossroads: Race, Postwar America, Youth culture

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

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.

This book gave me a drive. Goodman’s account of the Strokes’ debaucherous rise in 9/11-era New York City ignited my passion for oral history and to tell the story of the music that made me. Downtown cool kid garage rock shaped popular culture immensely, but so did My Chemical Romance and their cohort (even more so, I’d argue). Up to this point (MMITB was published in 2017), 2000s emo was frequently misconstrued by those too old to have understood its impact or left out of the conversation entirely.

As I conducted interviews for my book, I challenged my own hypotheses (and personal biases) about these two scenes. I learned they intermingled more than I thought. I talked to Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz about DJing the ultra-hip downtown party Misshapes and My Chemical Romance’s Mikey Way about trying to catch a glimpse of Madonna at the same place.

In my opinion, the Grateful Dead's music forms an important part of the soundtrack of the psychedelic sixties–and into the seventies and beyond.

They first performed under this name at Ken Kesey's acid tests in San Francisco and gained an exponentially-growing reputation as cutting-edge performers of acid rock–so much so that loyal "Dead Heads" would follow them around from concert to concert. McNally was the band's official historian, and his inside track gave him access to fascinating details about the individual band members, their music, their drug trips, their metaphysical meanderings, and much more.

This book brings me back to the days of my youth when I lived for a time in the San Francisco Bay Area and saw the Dead perform at Fillmore West.

You thought you knew everything there was to know about The Beatles. I thought I did. I was wrong.

Craig Brown somehow manages to tell a very familiar story with details that either you never knew or had forgotten. He isn’t scraping the barrel: the book is full of excellent stories about the Fab Four, and sheds new light on where the band came from and where they ended up. It’s more than 600 pages long, and beautifully written, but a very easy read.

The first time I heard Two Hearts Beat As One by U2 was glorious! I was entranced by the driving drums and the bass line and inspired by Bono’s lyrics, which spoke to my burgeoning interest in how to be cool. And U2 was cool in the 80s. And Bono was one of the coolest musicians I looked up to back then.

His memoir goes deep into explaining where his bravado and “cool” come from. It was a darker and more complicated place than I expected.  Having recently endured the death of my own mother, shortly before I read this book, I was moved to read about how the death of his mother impacted him and motivated him. 

I came away with even more respect for Bono’s life philosophy and his commitment to his family, his bandmates, and his ongoing craft as a musician. 

Mo Foster was one of rock’s great sidemen, performing with artists such as Jeff Beck, Phil Collins, Eric Clapton, Gerry Rafferty, Van Morrison, and George Martin.

Mo tells the stories of the greatest players who developed what is arguably the most important instrument of the 20th century, the guitar, talking to some of its greatest players including Hank Marvi, Eric Clapton, and Brian May. Mo was one of the funniest men I have ever known, and I can guarantee that if you read this book, you will be learning and laughing on every page!