Assigned Readings

This page is under construction (and even after construction, it will be under continuous remodeling). It contains a list of books you ought to read if you want to be informed, entertained--and further enlightened on the stuff I write about on this blog. I know I should put links to Amazon or Barnes and Noble on this page for each book, and someday I might. Fact is, if you care enough, you can find these books, either on those sites or at your library. And you should.

A note about libraries: If your library has an electronic online catalog you can access from home, use it. You may be able to search and reserve books (and CDs, too) and have them sent to the library branch in your neighborhood. The books below, however, are ones any serious music fan should buy and keep. Every one of them is worth reading more than once.

The Peter Guralnick Shelf

You gotta read this guy, starting with Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley. Whether you like his music or not, Elvis is the premiere cultural icon of the postwar era, and cultural literacy demands you know his story. How he got to the top and how he fell from that perch is exhilarating and tragic, and fascinating on every page. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom charts the rise of soul from the R&B years of the 1950s to its demise in the early 1970s and its relevance to the Civil Rights Movement. Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians is a collection of Guralnick's magazine pieces focusing on early figures in R&B, blues, and country.

The Joel Whitburn Shelf

Whitburn has compiled and edited dozens of books mining the Billboard magazine charts for data. Four of his books in my library are falling apart from repeated use:

Most essential is Top Pop Singles: 1955-1986, which shows artists alphabetically and lists every record by each artist that made the Hot 100, with chart entry date, peak chart position, record serial number, and other trivia.
Next is Top Pop Annual: 1955-1986, which shows each year as a chapter and lists records by chart peak. In other words, all the records peaking at Number One in a given year, followed by all those peaking at Number Two. At each number, records are shown by chart date--so when I tell you that "Dream On" by Aerosmith peaked at Number Six on April 10, 1976, that's how I know.
Third on the list of indispensables is Billboard Hot 100 Charts: The Seventies, which shows each week's Top 100 chart as it appeared in Billboard for the whole decade. This is the book I'd take with me to a desert island if I could only take one.
And last of all is one I don't refer to all that much, but one that astounds me every time I do: Pop Memories: 1890-1954. Its format is similar to Top Pop Singles, but Whitburn has researched available record charts back to 1890. That's only a handful of years after Edison invented the phonograph.

The Dave Marsh Shelf

Marsh is one of the founders of rock journalism and a writer of great style. His must-read books include The Heart of Rock and Roll: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, perhaps the greatest musical argument starter ever written, and Louie Louie: The History and Mythology of the World's Greatest Rock and Roll Song. He's also edited various editions of The Rolling Stone Record Guide and The Book of Rock Lists, written biographies of Bruce Springsteen and the Who, and enough other books to fill a whole library shelf.

The Craig Werner Shelf

Werner is an African-American Studies professor at the University of Wisconsin, and his field of expertise is black music. His two books on the subject should be read together: A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America explores the cultural roots of blues, jazz, gospel, R&B, soul, and follows black music into the eras of disco, hip-hop, and rap. Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul (apart from having a subtitle reminiscent of a 19th-century science book) is a unique triple biography of three critical figures and the years in which they rose to prominence and back again--a period roughly paralleling the rise and fall of the Civil Rights Movement. Werner spends a great deal of time discussing the "blues I" and the "gospel we," the twin spirits of Saturday night and Sunday morning, two different attitudes whose contrasts and contradictions run through the best black music of the last 100 years. That all sounds pretty academic--but Werner's prose never is.

The John A. Jackson Shelf

Like the two Werner books mentioned above, Jackson's first two books should also be read together: Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock and Roll and American Bandstand: Dick Clark and the Making of a Rock and Roll Empire. Both Freed and Clark were pivotal figures in the history of rock on records, and on radio and TV. Both also were touched by the payola scandal of the late 50s--Freed failed to cooperate fully with the feds and lost his career because of it; Clark went along and thrived for over 40 years thereafter. Both books are indispensable for understanding the role the media played in helping rock conquer the world. Jackson's most recent book is A House on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul, about the producers Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, and Thom Bell, and the records they made with such groups as the O'Jays and the Stylistics. Jackson is occasionally a tin-eared writer--for example, in A House on Fire, he keeps referring to "the English Invasion" of the early 1960s--but he's such a thorough historian that the lapses don't matter too much.

The Other Shelf (continually under construction)

The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll by Charlie Gillett: An early history of rock, first published in 1970 and revised in 1983. Gillett finds the roots of rock in urban R&B and rockabilly, and his book is scholarly without being stuffy.

Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax Records by Rob Bowman: Everybody knows about Motown; everybody's heard music from Stax, but not nearly so many people know how its rise paralleled Motown's, how it dominated the R&B world for a brief time in the early 1970s, and how it ultimately crashed only a few years later.