Rating: 
Summary: The Whole Shebang and MORE
Review: Nick Toches has written a loving, rigorous and MAJOR history of music in America. One other reviewer in these pages writes that he feels the author was bored by the time he wrote this information down. For this reader at least, NOTHING could be further than the truth. Toches shows us that his compendious heart and brain are not satisfied by anything less than EVERYTHING.It's a book about human memory and the hunger to set the facts and liner-notes straight by reaching out to touch the men and women who once lived by their music. Toches' hunger is ravenous and overwhelming. As the poet Jonathan Williams has written: GET HOT OR GET OUT! To read this book you need patience, the patience to love the richness of all the twistings and turnings, the hidden connections, the links of these songs and their singers with our own times. If you want to know about histories of the Blues links to Minstrel singers and Country and Rock and the age of Crooners...and...
You'd like to walk with the Devil but God Bless You Mr Toches for bringing back a world.
A Stunning Achievement.
Rating: 
Summary: Emmett Miller Lives!
Review: Nick Tosches brought Emmett Miller onto the stage of writing about American popular music about 20 years ago in his magic-realistist imagined chapters on Emmett Miller in his original edition of Country Music about 20 years ago. At the time, his comments were imaginary because we knew so little about Miller. As Tosches wrote, for all we knew then he could be running a candy store in Jersy City. Over those twenty years Tosches found out about Miller and records a lot of that information in this book. This is great selfless work by Tosches and by other scholars who were inspired by his work and by Miller's music.
Well, this is not fiction, this is what we know about him, about minstrelry, about his life. You can't blame Nick for the fact that the truth is a bit less colorful and still less filled in than fiction. Also, Tosches is no academic and does not pretend to be. He's music's best and most literary representative of the new journalism. Miller is important. He was good. His music sounds great today. If you don't think so, you need your ears adjusted, your sense of life, love, and joy revived. He may not have been a financial success, but critical trend setters, particularly in Country Music, have styled themselves after him to this day. Bob Wills--another former blackface perform-- combined Emmett Miller, the blues of the MIssissippi Sheiks, La Musica Ranchera, and ranch dance music into Western Swing. Wills auditioned his singers throughout his career by asking them to sing Miller's hits and comparing them to Miller. Wills recorded songs identified with Miller throughout his career.
Hank William's biggest success was essentially an imitation of an imitation of Miller. Merle Haggard has acknowledged his heritage by recording a Miller tribute album and usually does a Miller-Wills number during every concert. Leon Redbone gets a very large amount of his singing style and personna from Miller.
The problem of minstrelry can't be discussed without discussing race and culture in America in a way most people can't discuss it, like it is a real problem that is really there and part of the discoursde, win or lose. I don't exactly agree with Tosches' take on the problem, but, at least, he approaches the issue honestly and put it in the center of the discourse where it
belongs. Perhaps, unlike Tosches' Country Music and Hellfire, this is not a book that belongs in every home, every school, every library, every bookstore, but it belongs on every bookshelf of anyone interest in American popular music, especially country music and Western Swing.
Rating: 
Summary: A self-indulgent mess
Review: One comes to this one expecting a savory exploration of what can be known about a fascinating figure who lives in shadowy legend, filled out by scene-setting context -- rather like Barry Singer's book on Andy Razaf some years back. And Tosches has done great work in unearthing some facts about Emmett Miller. But in the end, there is only so much we can know -- time has passed, Miller didn't leave much of a paper trail, and few people who knew him survive. So Tosches pads it out with endless, rambling digressions into every topic that happens to come up -- the origins of the term WOP, how ragtime originated, musings on how classical authors presaged the meaning of the blues, capsule biographies of every session musician who participated in a recording, cross-referencing recordings of the same number and drifting into doing the same for some other number that the first one evokes, giving every review of Miller's performances on the touring circuit from town to town even when the reviews all largely say the same things over and over, and on and on, all without chapter breaks. Tosches self-consciously wields this "excursus" fixation as a kind of tic that he challenges the reader to either get used to or put the book down. Okay -- I "get it". He wants to paint a picture and share his love of the lore in the meantime. But the occasional breathless parenthesis is one thing; 300 pages of almost unadulterated aimless, self-indulgent cross-referencing is another. Buffs of early country music and the blues might cotton to all of this signposting and obsessive chatter about obscure recordings. But beyond that, this book is virtually unreadable past the first 50 pages or so, and I highly suspect that the editorial reviewers falling all over it did not actually read the book. This is a smug, solipsistic party trick, not a book written for anyone outside of the author's own head.
Rating:
Summary: The completion of a 25-year quest
Review: We all have our obsessions that can lead to our downfalls. Our Moby Dicks. Our black pearls. For Nick Tosches, that obsession over the past quarter-century has been Emmett Miller, a now-obscure minstrel singer from Georgia who recorded for OkeH and Victor in the '20s and '30s. When Tosches first wrote about Miller in the mid-'70s (in his book "Country"), little was known of Miller. No photographs of the man were known to have survived, little biographical information existed, and his music was difficult to find in print. Over the course of the next 26 years, Tosches and a few associates tracked down leads and rumors about Miller's origins, until a somewhat better picture of the man started to emerge during the '90s. A few photographs turned up eventually. His grave was found in a bad section of Macon, Georgia. And one by one a scant few people who had known Miller or had worked with him turned up with hazy, somewhat unreliable tales of his career. Which raises the question of why Tosches would spend so much time and energy chasing after the ghost of an obscure singer who had died - alcoholic and penniless - in 1962? Part of the answer is that Miller was a truly gifted vocalist whose unique style influenced the likes of Bob Wills, Tommy Duncan, Leon Redbone, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, and others. Part of the answer is also that Miller's music is nearly uncategorizable; his unusual vocal style made a strong impression on country singers in years to come, but his music wasn't country by any stretch. In fact, with backing on his records by the likes of Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, guitarist Eddie Lang, and drummer Gene Krupa, Miller was rubbing shoulders with some of the best jazz musicians of the era. Finally, Miller's career took place during the final years of minstrelsy (the history of which Tosches devotes musch space here), and Miller represented a last flickering spark in the embers of blackface musical comedy before dying completely during the Great Depression. Ultimately, Tosches' quest was only partially successful at best. We get a picture of the major events of Miller's life; his birth, the essentials of his career, his marriage (late in life), and his death. But of the man himself only dim hints; brief glances at the contents of a room in the split second after a light bulb flashes, then burns out. Gaps of knowledge still exist, as Tosches freely admits, but he's followed the trail as far as he thinks he can and leaves it now to younger scholars. A consistently fine work, in the now-well-established Tosches style. If one complaint can be made, it's that photographs of Miller and the book's other subjects might have been included. But perhaps it's for the best that none are present. Pictures of Miller aren't all that hard to find at this point - they're out there if you know where to look - and if anything the lack of photographs lends to the ghost-like portait of Miller that Tosches paints.
Rating: 
Summary: Even Master Artists Occasionally Write Uninspiring Books
Review: Whenever I get my sweaty hands on non-fiction by Nick Tosches, I find myself reading every sentence, slowly, with joy, with total absorption, with glee. This book, however, left me dozing. I found myself skimming pages, speed reading long passages until I'd come across something like Tosches' description of visiting E.M.'s grave in a ratty part of town, or Tosches' passages about procrastination, the hotel pool, his girlfriends... Much of this book reads like a dry science dissertation. It's lacking the poetic magic--the intensity--the weird fire in Tosche's bones and loins and toes and tongue that some of his other writing literally glows with. The book made me think of John Lennon's "Mind Games" album. Some of the songs are OK to listen to. You know the voice, you recognize the sound, the melodies are OK, but ultimately listening is a chore. I think that by the time Tosches actually sat down to write up everything he knew about E.M. he was bored with his subject. He should have written the book a decade earlier than he did. It would have had more passion. It would have been sublime. Given his fascination with E.M., and his talents, it might have been one of the best biographies ever written.
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