84 books like Sun Records

This is a story of Jazz by the musicians who made it. Hear Me Talkin' to Ya is a wide study of the Jazz at its source (New Orleans) through the era of Big Bands and into Modern Jazz, from Kid Ory to Dave Brubeck. This book doesn’t have a narrative or authors’ opinions. This book features passages quoted by Billie Holiday, Mary Lou Williams, Lil Harden Armstrong, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Othello Tinsley, Dizzy Gillespie, and a hundred other musicians.

We’ve entered a second era of inclusion. Women now play an essential role in creating music. Add Lizzie Miles, Anita O’Day, Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Mary Ann McCall, Alberta Hunter, and Leora Henderson and we get a different perspective of the evolution of music culture.  

My interest in music takes its roots deep into Louisiana because the first music was vocal.

Not only music but all literature had its beginnings in the words of history and folk songs. This book brought light into my young life. It was the beginning to understand American culture through its clearly defined early music. I carried various printings of Gumbo Ya-Ya with me through my early travels through Memphis, Louisiana, Como, Mississippi, etc. The book opened my mind to the history, and because of the book, the traveling opened my mind to the music.

Yes, the title is spelled correctly. I’ve known Stanley Booth from our days in Memphis. He has written about The Rolling Stones, B. B. King, Al Green, and Keith Richards. Keith wrote that “The interesting thing about music to me is that music has always seemed streaks ahead of any other Art form or any other form of social expression.” It has never been said any better.

Stanley Booth’s Rythm Oil contains studies of numerous, forgotten musicians and singers. It is a study of remote history. Stanley Booth doesn’t write with ink. He writes with grit.

Tight, vivid writing about the poorest people in America in the richest country in the world. There is dignity and warmth of two sons caring for their blind father, and there is God in also every life, for better or worse. I have to read this book at least once a year to remember what hard times and resolutions are. Every word seems to matter.

You can’t tell the story of rock ’n’ roll without diving into the life of the crazed, flamboyant musical entrepreneur Sam Phillips and his Memphis recording studio, Sun Records. There he discovered rock ’n’ roll pioneers Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison, and recorded blues artists such as Howlin’ Wolf, James Cotton, Rufus Thomas, and Rosco Gordon. 

When you finish the book, though, I think you’ll agree that his greatest creation was Sam Phillips. 

A provocative pre-history of rock music, written to provoke. (Don’t hold your breath waiting for John, Paul, George, and Ringo to show up.)

Wald crafts a fascinating alternative history of commercial popular music in the first half of the twentieth century, asking readers to focus not on big names or influential records but on the everyday practices, technologies, and contexts through which musicians and listeners actually experienced the music. Avoid if you don’t want to see a few sacred cows slaughtered.

When Wald published her thoroughly researched and sensitively written biography of Tharpe, few people outside the world of gospel were familiar with the guitarist and singer or her significant contribution to twentieth-century music. Wald traces Tharpe’s years as an acoustic guitar-playing traveling teenage gospel evangelist, her role as one of the first stars of the fledgling genre of gospel in the 1930s and 1940s, her controversial decision to play gospel music in nightclubs, and her influence as a flashy virtuoso whose intricate licks on the electric guitar inspired musicians in country, rock and roll, and beyond. A well-told story of a fascinating woman, Shout, Sister, Shout! establishes Tharpe as a key figure in the evolution of twentieth-century popular music.   

I stumbled across the first great Rolling Stone record guide around the time I first encountered used record stores: Second Hand Tunes, Dr. Wax and the legendary Wax Trax, all within walking distance of my Chicago high school. I never had sufficient funds to actually purchase the guide, so I snuck it from the shelf at Kroch’s and Brentano’s downtown and memorized as much data as my brain would hold: The best B.B. King albums are the ones on the Crown and Kent labels. Grab any early Kinks LPs you can find. I still quote from Dave Marsh & co. whenever I write about music.

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.

We’ve all read and seen stories where the old hero comes out of retirement to save the day one last time. 

But what if the “hero” really wasn’t a hero, but rather the product of somebody’s marketing department?  That’s the premise of this book.

Captain Dash Drake is famous, but fame has not brought fortune. When the evil invaders he “defeated” the last time come back, he’s ready to give up. His latest trainee, girl genius Kenzie Washington, thinks her hero will save the day. Watching the two of them misunderstand each other was amusing. Also standalone. 

(You should detect a pattern on my list – I’m not fond of never-ending series.)