88 books like Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family & Their Legacy in American Music

A century ago, the record industry sent representatives all over the country to do field recordings of vernacular artists playing folk, blues, and early country for “hillbilly” and “race” records (the sort that Rounder would start putting out in the 1970s).

One of these scouts was Ralph Peer from the Victor Talking Machine Company, for which he oversaw 1927’s legendary “Bristol Sessions.” It was the first time that Hall of Fame titans the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers recorded, generally cited as the beginning of the country music industry.

As explained in Barry Mazor’s excellent biography, Peer went on to become one of the giants of the recording and publishing industry, laying the groundwork that pretty much every record label including Rounder has followed since.

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.

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. 

In Memphis during the 1950s, there was Black and there was White, but the two rarely met. One of the few places where they did was in clubs and recording studios, and the sparks they struck started a fire that came to be called rock ’n’ roll. 

In this wonderfully rich stew of a book, author and filmmaker Robert Gordon walks the streets of Memphis, exploring the sights and sounds and smells of a unique, endlessly fascinating world. 

As Gordon’s publisher says, “This is a book about the weirdos, winos, and midget wrestlers who forged the rock ’n’ roll spirit.” As Rolling Stone says, “If you haven’t read this book, do it now.”

This jive-tongued jazz cat really knows how to use language! His use of slang is evidenced by the ten-page glossary at the end of the book. Raw and gritty, Mezzrow’s memoir describes how he learned to play jazz and blues in a juvenile reformatory, where he developed his love for the Black “race” and its culture. He often riffs on race. In 1920s Chicago he rubbed elbows with Black and White jazz luminaries, plus gangsters, prostitutes, and drug dealers. During a side trip to Paris, France, he spread the gospel of jazz to Europe. In the 30s he lived in New York City’s Harlem, inhabiting a milieu similar to that in Chicago, peddling marijuana to jazz greats and others. His extraordinary writing inspired Jack Kerouac and the Beat writers.

Engineer Ken Caillat’s richly detailed account of the arduous and complicated creation of the classic Fleetwood Mac album reads like a novel. He winds together the personal and creative narratives that were tangled up in the months-long creation of this epic work, while the two couples in the band came apart and personal relations suffused the process. Calliat himself was conducting an affair with the studio manager. It was all sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

The epic life of French jazz guitarist Django Reinhart deserves a Spielbergian biopic treatment. After the cart fire where he damaged his hand and the personal epiphany of hearing a Louis Armstrong record, the Gypsy guitarist would bring jazz to Europe with his near magical musical improvisations. He lived a wild, carefree life, full of big cars, large dreams, and sensual pleasures. When the Nazis took over Paris, he returned to his homeland, opened one of the city’s most dazzling nightclubs, and made hit records that flooded the French airwaves during the Occupation. When the war was over, his career went out like a light switch and Django repaired to a quiet life in a remote riverfront village, spending his time fishing and painting nudes. 

We need a documentary made from this exquisite history of how rock and roll came to Great Britain by the redoubtable Pete Frame, best known for his intricately calligraphed and intensely researched Rock Family Trees. He walks readers through the rise of Tommy Steele and the 2I’s club in Soho, where Cliff Richards, England’s Elvis, and other nascent stars of the new sound were discovered. He skillfully entwines the strains of skiffle, trad jazz, and early British r&b into his narrative and brings to life early British rock and rollers such as Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Vince Taylor, and others who never made their way across the Atlantic, setting the stage for the emergence of the Beatles and nothing less than an explosion of British culture on a global scale after the many long, dark years following World War II. This brilliant book is stuffed full of original research and… show more.

There are incredible and powerful queer musicians making country music, but you wouldn’t know it given the ways a lot of journalism works.

This book is absolutely essential reading if you’re interested in untold stories of country music, and queer artists working against the grain and despite rampant discrimination.

Also, the University of Illinois Press is doing amazing things for bringing smart books to public readers—don’t assume this book isn’t for you because it was published by an academic press! The opposite is true. This book is brilliant and accessible. 

It rings with awe-struck musings on Bartram’s explorations, begun just before the American revolution, of the lush and bountiful landscapes of the southern British colonies. Bartram’s effusive descriptions of the astonishingly profuse flora and fauna, replete with taxonomic names, provide a baseline for gauging the steep ecological declines that followed. The Penguin edition includes an appreciative introduction by American writer James Dickey, best known for his novel Deliverance.