Thursday, May 10, 2012

Currently Reading.





Where Dead Voices Gather
by Nick Tosches

"[This] startling and mesmerising music," he enthuses in the opening paragraph of Dead Voices, "seemed to be a Rosetta Stone to the understanding of the mixed and mongrel blood-lines of country and blues, of jazz and pop, of all that we know as American music." In Country, the writer pinpointed [Emmett] Miller's potential influence on the likes of Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills, Hank Williams and even Bo Diddley (whose seminal voodoo rocker "Who Do You Love" steals some of its lyrical content from an old Miller black-face comedy routine). But when it came to describing Miller's life and times, he found himself engulfed in mystery: no photographs, an incomplete discography, the few still alive who knew him giving vague, conflicting accounts."

- The Guardian

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