Here are 100 books that Rock, Rosetta, Rock! Roll, Rosetta, Roll! fans have personally recommended if you like
Rock, Rosetta, Rock! Roll, Rosetta, Roll!.
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Ever since childhood, I’ve wondered about people who led inventive, innovative lives. How did they get their inspiration? Where did their ideas come from? How did they take that inspiration and change the world? I found information, but not the answers I was looking for, at the library. When I became an elementary library teacher, new forms of biographies – beautiful picture book biographies about people of all kinds – became available. My students loved them and so did I, and I became inspired to write for children. I’m excited that my first two picture book biographies, which received starred reviews, are out in the world – with more coming your way!
I’m always fascinated by the transformative moment – how and when people decide to use their voices for change.
Nina Simone’s musical talent was recognized early, and she faced discrimination early, too. As the Civil Rights Movement grew, Simone at first focused on building her career. Her transformative moment was born of rage at the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and the Birmingham, Alabama, 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four young girls and severely injured another.
Protest songs poured out of her, and she became the fearless voice of the Civil Rights Movement. Powerful and inspirational!
2
authors picked
Nina
as one of their favorite books, and they share
why you should read it.
This book is for kids age
4,
5,
6, and
7.
What is this book about?
A BIG ISSUE BOOK OF THE YEAR
Longlisted for the UKLA Book Awards
This illuminating and defining biography from bestselling author Traci N. Todd, with illustrations from award-winner Christian Robinson, tells the story of Eunice Waymon, who grew up to become Nina Simone - and shares her bold, defiant, and exultant legacy with a new generation.
With passion and unparalleled skill, Traci N. Todd and Christian Robinson bring this iconic singer's story to young readers and their families. Meet young Eunice, who sang before she could talk, and journey with her from the piano stool she shared with her father…
Ever since childhood, I’ve wondered about people who led inventive, innovative lives. How did they get their inspiration? Where did their ideas come from? How did they take that inspiration and change the world? I found information, but not the answers I was looking for, at the library. When I became an elementary library teacher, new forms of biographies – beautiful picture book biographies about people of all kinds – became available. My students loved them and so did I, and I became inspired to write for children. I’m excited that my first two picture book biographies, which received starred reviews, are out in the world – with more coming your way!
I love this book because it shows how a musical icon discovered and developed his own personal style.
Juan García Esquivel had a passion for music but no formal training. Without knowing the typical ways of arranging notes, Esquivel was free to experiment–and that made his work so unique that anyone hearing his music knew right away that he was the composer.
I think this book is great for showing the value of thinking differently. I also love the joyful illustrations inspired by ancient Mexican art.
Juan Garcia Esquivel was born in Mexico and grew up to the sounds of mariachi bands. He loved music and became a musical explorer. Defying convention, he created music that made people laugh and planted images in their minds. Juan's space-age lounge music--popular in the fifties and sixties--has found a new generation of listeners. And Duncan Tonatiuh's fresh and quirky illustrations bring Esquivel's spirit to life.
Ever since childhood, I’ve wondered about people who led inventive, innovative lives. How did they get their inspiration? Where did their ideas come from? How did they take that inspiration and change the world? I found information, but not the answers I was looking for, at the library. When I became an elementary library teacher, new forms of biographies – beautiful picture book biographies about people of all kinds – became available. My students loved them and so did I, and I became inspired to write for children. I’m excited that my first two picture book biographies, which received starred reviews, are out in the world – with more coming your way!
This uplifting picture book biography inspired me!
Young Evelyn loved playing music, but at age 10, she suffered dramatic hearing loss. With encouragement from a music teacher, she learned to feel musical vibrations and embraced percussion. Facing discrimination because of her disability, she persisted–and won entrance to a top music school and eventually, worldwide recognition.
A feel-good, inspiring biography of courage and dedication that left me cheering for Evelyn and wanting to learn more about her music!
1
author picked
Listen
as one of their favorite books, and they share
why you should read it.
This book is for kids age
4,
5,
6, and
7.
What is this book about?
* Schneider Family Book Award Winner *
A gorgeous and empowering picture book biography about Evelyn Glennie, a deaf woman, who became the first full-time solo percussionist in the world. (Cover may vary)
"No. You can't," people said. But Evelyn knew she could. She had found her own way to listen.
From the moment Evelyn Glennie heard her first note, music held her heart. She played the piano by ear at age eight, and the clarinet by age ten. But soon, the nerves in her ears began to deteriorate, and Evelyn was told that, as a deaf girl, she could…
Ever since childhood, I’ve wondered about people who led inventive, innovative lives. How did they get their inspiration? Where did their ideas come from? How did they take that inspiration and change the world? I found information, but not the answers I was looking for, at the library. When I became an elementary library teacher, new forms of biographies – beautiful picture book biographies about people of all kinds – became available. My students loved them and so did I, and I became inspired to write for children. I’m excited that my first two picture book biographies, which received starred reviews, are out in the world – with more coming your way!
I love this energetic book about experimental composer Charles Ives for its liveliness, beautiful language, and glorious sounds! It’s also an important example of staying true to yourself and following your own path.
Before he became a composer, young Charles Ives’s life was full of noise–glorious noise! Influenced by his father, a music educator and bandleader, Ives experimented with sound. Like John Cage, he faced ridicule and criticism, and faced roadblocks to having his music performed.
The extraordinary story of the composer Charles Ives.
"Sometimes little Charlie lay in his crib just listening. He heard his mother’s long dress as she moved around his room. He heard big clocks and little clocks. He heard wagons and horse hooves. He heard dogs and crickets and the church bell next door."
Charlie listened all through his boyhood, and as he grew into a man, he found he wanted to re-create in music the sounds that he heard every day. But others couldn’t hear what Charlie heard. They didn’t hear it as music – only as noise. In this…
I’ve been a music fan–especially pop and rock and roll–since I was a toddler, thanks to my dysfunctional family upbringing that led me to spend the bulk of my time attached to my transistor radio! Not only did I listen to rock radio stations, but I also learned about musicians, including the Beatles, thanks to magazine articles and books once I started to read at an early age–I went to my local library daily and continued to do so all the way through my school years!
I’ve been a tremendous fan of Lucinda Williams since seeing her perform on nearly a weekly basis back at the Barndance at the Palomino in the late 80’s and early 90’s–she’s an incredibly talented singer and musician, and it turned out she’s a great memoir writer too, able to describe how she came up from traumatic childhood in the Deep South, to her years of being overlooked in the music industry, to her eventual successful country and pop music career which includes being a three-time Grammy winner!
'Williams's memoir is as flinty, earthy and plain-spoken as her songs' New York Times 'The often hilarious, occasionally harrowing Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You is a bracingly candid chronicle of a sui generis character plotting a ramshackle but ultimately triumphant trajectory' Wall Street Journal 'An engaging read and beautifully written' MOJO
The beloved and iconic singer-songwriter and three-time Grammy winner opens up about her traumatic childhood in the Deep South, her years of being overlooked in the music industry, and the stories that inspired her enduring songs.
Lucinda Williams's rise to fame was anything but easy. Raised…
As a life coach and author of two dozen self-help books, I’ve spent the past twenty years helping people to be more creative. I love reading about the early lives of artists because it is an engaging way to learn about the creative process. Even rock stars have doubts, insecurities, regrets, and setbacks. Yet, fueled by their passions, they persist. They overcome their obstacles and pursue unique paths to success. These books are inspirational and informative for anyone with a creative dream.
This is a candid autobiography of an unlikely rock star. Relying on her early journals, Carly Simon conveys the details of her privileged childhood and storybook career as a singer/songwriter. Woven through her musical accomplishments are her relationships – primarily her marriage to James Taylor – but also with Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger, Jack Nicholson, Cat Stephens, and Kris Kristofferson.
#1 New York Times Bestseller A People Magazine Top Ten Book of the Year 'A sensational memoir ...brilliantly well written. Carly Simon is incapable of writing a boring sentence ...you can forgive anything for the unparalleled brilliance of her writing' - Lynn Barber, Sunday Times 'Hugely affecting memoir ...heartfelt and remarkable' - Fiona Sturges, Independent Carly Simon is a household name. She was the staple of the '70s and '80s Billboard charts and was famously married to James Taylor with whom she has two children. She has had a career that has spanned four decades, resulting in thirteen top 40…
Over many years of being an African American fan of rock music, I’ve learned that the combination of my gender, race, and musical taste can be disconcerting to people who expect Black women to adhere to a limited set of cultural interests. My frustration with these kinds of assumptions, my awareness that rock has deep roots in African American musical culture, my curiosity about the experiences of African American women who participated in rock and roll, and my desire to make sure that they are part of the stories we tell about the music’s history led me to write Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll.
One of my favorite memoirs, Rage to Survive is a no-holds-barred dive into the life and times of a powerful singer who traversed the genres of rock and roll, blues, and R&B during her decades-long career. James tells compelling stories about her tough upbringing on the west coast and her teenage immersion into sex, drugs, and early rock and roll (check out her 1955 hit “The Wallflower”); shares her experiences touring in the segregated south during the 1950s; offers gossip about well-known musical figures; and reflects on her development as an artist navigating the recording industry in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. Throughout she offers insights about love, loss, motherhood, hard knocks, bad choices, addiction, and personal and professional triumphs. James speaks with passion, humor, and honesty.
One of the great women of American music, equally at home singing blues and jazz, Etta regales us with tales of her chaotic childhood, the stars she has known, and her troubled trip to stardom in this mesmerizing autobiography.
“Big Butt.” That’s all you need to know about me. It was the first song I wrote and recorded on a dusty cassette tape in 1986. I was 10 years old and an obsessive Prince fan. On the back of his records, he wrote some variation of “written, recorded, produced and performed by Prince.” Those words empowered me to be an artist. More specifically, here’s what I wrote as a 10-year-old: “When I grow up, I want to be a rock star like Prince.” Five years later, I started writing poetry, and all of the poems I wrote felt like songs. Music is the fuel for all that I create.
The moment I realized I was getting older was the moment I put two little pieces of toilet paper in my ears in the middle of a Mogwai show in Asheville, NC.
It was the loudest show I’d ever attended. And it was phenomenal.
Mogwai has been making cinematic music for a long time, and I came into awareness of the band with 2008’s “The Hawk is Howling.” They are epic, funny, mysterious, meditative, and relentless.
It’s no surprise that Stuart Braithwaite’s book is perfect for the Mogwai fanbase in that it gives some insight into the band’s philosophy while maintaining a sense of mystery. I also like that Braithwaite doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously.
Born the son of Scotland's last telescope-maker, Stuart Braithwaite was perhaps always destined for a life of psychedelic adventuring on the furthest frontiers of noise in MOGWAI, one of the best loved and most ground-breaking post-rock bands of the past three decades.
Modestly delinquent at school, Stuart developed an early appetite for 'alternative' music in what might arguably be described as its halcyon days, the late '80s. Discovering bands like Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, and Jesus and Mary Chain, and attending seminal gigs (often incongruously incognito as a young girl with long hair to compensate for his babyface features)…
I love realm of the sensual. I sometimes call it The Magic Kingdom—the experience that sets us apart from our childhoods and teenage years. Intimacy—not just with people or lovers, but with the stuff we love as adults—is a compelling quest. For me, it lives in writing, cooking, singing, painting, befriending, loving—the things that lift my life out of the ordinary into time-stopping moments. Sharing it my writing, especially in my new fiction (Stay with Me, Wisconsinand my upcoming novelThe Seven Mile Bridge) has been an experience of helping us all get our hands and hearts and skin into the things we love and then abide there as long as life allows us.
Laurie Colwin is by far my favorite fiction writer. She died in 1992 at the age of 48, and Goodbye Without Leaving is one of my all-time favorite books of hers.
In it, Geraldine Coleshares—a privileged graduate student who is unmoved by her insulated and expectation-laden world—goes on the road as backup singer for Ruby Shakely and the Shakettes—an Ike and Tina Turner-type rock and roll band.
Her parents are horrified and will barely speak to her when she calls them from the road, but there’s nothing she loves more than to stand on stage in a day-glow fringed dress, singing her heart out.
When love finds her in the form of a straight-ahead lawyer who adores her and knows every rock n roll and rhythm and blues artist from the last century, she grudgingly lets him in, and though she knows she loves him, she resists marriage at every…
One of the most beloved novels from the critically acclaimed novelist Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving explores a woman’s attempts to reconcile her rock-and-roll past with her significantly more sedate family life as a wife and mother.
As a bored graduate student, Geraldine Colshares is plucked from her too-tame existence when she is invited to tour as the only White backup singer for Vernon and Ruby Shakely and the Shakettes. The exciting years she spends as a Shakette are a mixed blessing, however, because when she ultimately submits to a conventional life of marriage and children, she finds herself stuck…
I’ve always been fascinated by the stories of outsiders. I’m probably attracted to the topic because I come from a couple of misfits who reared me in a small town in the deeply conservative South. My mom is an irreverent, Socialist, Croatian immigrant with half a dozen kids, and my dad a curmudgeonly polyglot who loves books more than people. First as a journalist, then as a historian, I’ve long studied the economies and cultures created by those systematically marginalized or merely with a healthy disdain for the mainstream—enslaved people, queers, disenfranchised women, downtrodden artists, poor immigrants. The books here all capture things that make our society beautifully textured, diverse, and resilient.
Thanks to this book, I know that a great biography can also serve as a penetrating lens into an era. Yes, this is a book about Janis Joplin, but I do not value it because I care particularly much about the tragic specifics of her life, as much as I respect her music.
I love this book because it serves as a deep dive into the links between the often tritely-considered 1960s triumvirate: sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Echols does not lightly throw around the word “counterculture”—that’s a big pet peeve of mine—but takes the reader on a tour of the making of a clear and specific cultural divide that’s still very much with us today.
No mistake, though; it is also an empathetic tale of a sensitive and era-defining musician.
The undisputed queen of sex, drugs and rock n' roll was also the voice of a generation who, when she overdosed on heroin at the age of twenty-seven in October 1970; became the posthumous icon of bad girl femininity for millions around the world. Drawing on hundreds of interviews Echols renders Joplin in all her complexity, revealing how this sweet-voiced girl from Texas recreated herself, first as a gravely-voiced bluesy folksinger, and then as rock n' roll's first female superstar. Echols examines the roots of her musicianship and her efforts to probe the outer limits of life; declaring herself the…
