'Matters of Vital Interest'

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Bill Monroe: The Life and Music of the Blue Grass Man (University of Illinois Press), by Tom Ewing

In 1938, Bill Monroe changed the name of his string band to the Kentucky Blue Grass Boys. Before long, his particular rapid-time take on Appalachian folk traditions became a genre unto itself. Tom Ewing played guitar in latter-day incarnations of the Blue Grass Boys and was inspired by the gentlemanly mandolinist to write an extensive chronicle of his life. For research, Ewing moved to Monroe’s homeland, Ohio Country, KN, where he scoured newspapers and archives to assemble a family history. Bill Monroe provides more information than a casual fan will require and provides fascinating descriptions of life on the road in the pre-Interstate age. His biography will be valuable for anyone researching the roots of American music.

Broadway to Main Street: How Show Tunes Enchanted America (Oxford University Press), by Laurence Maslon

The American musical theater has been cheered and jeered for well over a century; chronicles and memoirs fill library shelves and yet, Laurence Maslon has found a new or at least different angle on its history. In Broadway to Main Street, he traces the path by which the Great White Way, once a rumor for anyone outside New York, became a national (no, global) phenomenon. Word slipped out via sheet music and 78 RPMs, but this was largely piecemeal. The advent of the LP finally made it possible to own and enjoy an entire original cast performance at home, but radio opened the way, exposing audiences around the country to the stars and the shows. A witty and informed writer, Maslon casts light on the less explored byways of the early through mid-20th century entertainment industry.

Dixie Dewdrop: The Uncle Dave Macon Story (University of Illinois Press), by Michael D. Doubler

Although Uncle Dave Macon’s music was already being marketed as “old time” in the 1920s, he immediately intuited the importance of a new technology: radio. Macon became the Grand Ole Opry’s first star and continued on the show until his death in 1952. Written by Macon’s great-grandson, Dixie Dewdrop is the first full biography of the banjo player whose recording career began before Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. He was an exuberant performer, “constantly in motion as he played,” Doubler writes, an all-around entertainer as quick with a joke as he was with a song. Macon left an immediate mark on country music and later on influenced the folk-blues revival where his repertoire was embraced by Pete and Mike Seeger.

Matters of Vital Interest (Da Capo), by Eric Lerner

One morning in 1977, while engaged in meditation at the Rinzai Zen Center in Los Angeles, Eric Lerner looked up at his session mentor and recognized Leonard Cohen. He knew the face from album covers and before long the two very different men—sharing little beyond their Jewish heritage, a love of sex and an interest in Zen—became lifelong friends. Lerner, a novelist, writes an amusing yet endearing account of the songwriter whose hopeful melancholy and resigned determination touched many souls over 45 years in music. Matters of Vital Interest lifts the veil on an intensely personal artist whose life was refracted—not necessarily mirrored—in his work. With insight nurtured by his novelist’s sensibility as well as his long association with his subject, Lerner identifies Cohen not as a teacher imparting the truth but a poet who created a persona “whose utterances deflect any further inquiry into his own heart and mind.”

Joni on Joni: Interviews and Encounters with Joni Mitchell (Chicago Review Press), edited by Susan Whitall

Always an articulate artist, Joni Mitchell left behind many points of interest in the interviews she gave over the years—along with some surprises. “I learned some things” from listening to Journey, she said in a 1983 Musician magazine article. Like her music, her musical interests have been eclectic. In 1979 she told Rolling Stone’s Cameron Crowe that she appreciated the Dada in Devo. “Everything that they express is a complete reaction against everything that we stood for. But they do it well, theatrically speaking.” One imagines from reading Joni on Joni that Mitchell derived great satisfaction from her creative life. “It’s a funny thing about happiness,” he concluded in her Rolling Stone interview. “You can strive and strive to be happy, but happiness will sneak up on you in the most peculiar ways.”

Swans: Sacrifice and Transcendence, The Oral History (Jawbone Press), by Nick Soulsby

“How could there be nostalgia for a band that never repeated itself?” writes Nick Soulsby. He’s asking about Swans, and raises a good point—and yet, people can be nostalgic for the era of Swans’ emergence in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s alt world. But even then, Swans were a taste not easily acquired and represented an evolving cacophony beyond the edge. Soulsby is a sophisticated biographer who outlines the facts of Swan maestro Michael Gira’s childhood and early years without drawing conclusions about how they shaped his life. “His achievements, and his flaws, deserve to be appreciated without being reduced to an acting out of trauma,” Soulsby maintains. Most of Sacrifice and Transcendence is devoted to the memories of Gira’s associates (and the man himself). The early pages draw a vivid panorama of ‘70s New York in all its florescent decay.

That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound: Dylan, Nashville and the Making of Blonde on Blonde (Chicago Review Press), by Daryl Sanders

As Daryl Sanders reports in That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound, Bob Dylan spent many nights while in high school glued to the clear channel stations booming blues and country out of Nashville. That experience, coupled with the high reputation enjoyed by that city’s studio musicians, explains Dylan’s determination to record in Nashville. And that music studio proficiency contributed to the album many hear as Dylan’s greatest, Blonde on Blonde. Reconstructing events by pouring over decades of interviews, Sanders gives deep background for the Blonde on Blonde sessions, going in detail track by track. Dylanologists will be fascinated by the many pieces Sanders assembles.