It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music [Paperback]

I'm not into dissing things for the sake of it but this one asks for it. I read a lot of music criticism, biogaphies, reviews etc. and I can't think of a shallower, less illuminating and more self absorbed work than this. Worse still its cover blatantly misrepresents its content. On the back there (in bold lurid lettering) is a list; Featuring Johny Cash, Wilco, Iron and Wine, Steve Earle, Leadbelly, Elvis Presley, Bill Monroe, Willie Nelson, Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, The Carter Family(& others). Not bad eh? Unfortunately only Cash, Elvis, Leadbelly,Johnson and the Carters are covered in anything but the most cursory fashion. Earle for instance gets about five lines (on four separate pages)and we just about learn what her favourite Wilco album is.

In fact we learn a fair bit about the author. She has an unsettling habit of telling us what she is eating as she arrives in various places;turkey sandwich in Louisville, root beer in Memphis, fried chicken in Clarksville (yum yum)-you think I'm kidding? This might be ok on twitter but I paid for this turkey. The epilogue is especially revealing it goes; "..if there is one thing I've learned from writing this book, its that americana is more complicated than any lone platitude-however pithy or appealing or clever-could ever manage to describe." She seems to think she is the missing link between Raymond Chandler and Jack Keroac.

She does manage to interview Ramblin Jack Elliot but apparently doesn't bother to listen to the gig he did on the same night. However there is a whole chapter on some roadside diner chain. The only significant content which approaches originality is the chapter on "free folk". The rest is cribbed from other more worthwhile books which she at least has the grace to credit. The overall is reminiscent of an undergraduate project-"wouldn't it be cool to visit all these places and hey I could fund the trip with a blog." A kind of Blair witch Project with an equally scary result.

I was going to give it to Oxfam but I'm going to keep it on the shelf just incase I come across anything else by the same writer-unlikely I think but I wouldn't want to take a chance.

There is a good idea for a book here (somewhere). Unfortunately the writer gets bogged down by means of that tired "gonzo" journalist strategy of including herself in the narrative whenever possible. her writing on the music is fine but the endlessly repetitive hotel room/travel/road material just drrrrrrrrrraaaaaggsss. She is just not on top of her writing enough to get away with turning a music book into a pitch for some kind of indie-road-movie. She's no willy vlautin that's for sure. As music criticism/study its okay, as a travelogue it barely moves...

Every now and then I allow myself the luxury of reading something about all the music I listen to, sometimes as biographies (Ben Ratliff's Coltrane, Ben Fong-Torres's Gram Parsons biog, Hickory Wind), sometimes as histories (Gerri Hershey's Nowhere To Run or Chris Willman's Rednecks And Bluenecks). All of the above are good books, but I especially like it when there's a different kind of angle, as with Willman, who tackles Country's political side.

Amanda Petrusich, in It Still Moves, approaches her history of popular Americana as a road trip, appropriate given that so much Americana is about transience: it's shiftless, full of wanderlust, forever on the move. There is very little parallel in British Music (Ticket To Ride? I don't think so), and probably the best British-based road song I can think of is Glasgow Girl by Houston Kid Rodney Crowell. But let's face it, there are no roadhouses to speak of in the UK, and the Little Chef is a poor substitute for the kind of roadside diners you'll find along the highways of the USA, or even for the Cracker Barrel chain, to which she dedicates an entire chapter. (I have my friend Louanne Langdale to thank for my own familiarity with the chain as back in '07 she took me to one in Pennsylvania, en route to a Hawk Observatory in the Apallachians. Like Petrusich, I saw through the façade but still enjoyed the food and overall experience.)

Petrusich's wanderlust raises its head in her adopted NYC home, with the author feeling the urge to move, which she promptly does, beginning her peregrinations in Memphis, recounting the story of Beale Street through to the birth of Sun Records, Rock and Roll, and the King. Moving on to Clarksdale, Mississippi, she finds the supposed site of Robert Johnson's Faustian deal converted into a neon-lit fast food magnet surrounded by all manner of tack: the impression is more PJ O'Rourke's Holidays In Hell than Lonely Planet Promised Land.

In Nashville there is a reflection on the making of modern country music and the Outlaw divergence, leading light Waylon Jennings. Outlaw and any number of other styles, trends and genres come under scrutiny here and elsewhere in the book, taking a heavy ribbing along the way. She has a pop at Garth Brooks, the Grand Ole Opry and even TGI Friday's, but ultimately accepts that manufactured authenticity is, in the USA, what authenticity is (see Cracker Barrel above). This theme is continued in the book's deconstruction of alt-country, which leaves the impression both that it doesn't exist and that maybe it's everything, though I suspect it's not Petrusich's fault. What is good is the way she circles round and through the subject, drawing in many of the different names associated with the non-genre before dismissing them as practitioners, or allowing them to dismiss themselves.

She also analyses the way the counter-culture becomes mainstream becomes establishment - we see it in the way former punk nasties become reality show stars and advertise butter, or dope fiends receive knighthoods. I saw some of the absurdity of the "counter culture" on my TV whilst reading the book in Whistler during a skiing holiday, as a TV Rastaman in Whistler town centre intoned songs about Revolution and Ras Tafari as part of the celebrations of the countdown to the Vancouver Winter Olympics, surrounded by affluent skiers. It brought to mind The Clash's White Man In Hammersmith Palais: "You think it's funny/ Turning rebellion into money." But it's too easy to knock folks just trying to make a living, as Petrusich points out when she arrives in Kentucky to recount the story of the Carter Family and AP Carter's chronicling of American folk, and subsequently discussing John Lomax's supposed exploitation of Lead Belly. There are no guarantees in the music business, and Carter, Lomax and, for that matter, Sam Phillips at Sun Records, subject of similar accusations, were people who took big risks and left a valuable legacy behind them. Besides, I have even seen suggestions (Shock! Horror!) that The Clash themselves might have been interested in money, too.

In amongst the music history Petrusich lists the bric-a-brac littered around the various places she visits, sometimes to amusing effect, sometimes not, but always helping to bring them alive for the reader. There's a particularly evocative description of the author's own hometown, and it is the detail she adds throughout that makes the story human. This is possibly at its best when she explores the socio-economic background to the Carter Family story, not just the hardships of the Appalachian mining communities of the time but also the more immediate problems of the region, which boasts well-below national levels of mean incomes and drug dependencies born of the necessity to self-medicate as a result of working down the pits. Out of such hardships were born the songs of struggle as the miners fought company goons employed to intimidate them into submission to the dangers of their jobs. These, Petrusich contends, are the true subversive songs of Americana.

In the final chapter there is discussion of some of the newer American "folk" artistes, in which Petrusich seems to be trying to put her finger on the next big thing in Americana. It's a worthwhile read in many respects, but the endeavour seems futile nevertheless. I found myself reflecting on how many times I'd been told about the new Hendrix, the new Marley, the new Dylan and on how, worthy as they were in their own right, the likes of Robin Trower, Ini Kamoze and Steve Forbert never lived up to the (no doubt unlooked for) hype.

Whilst some of Petrusich's story is familiar, it is told in a fresh way and is interspersed with the unfamiliar, surprising, and, sometimes, downright dumbfounding. And as with Rednecks And Bluenecks, which first alerted me to Drive By Truckers, there is the possibility of a new musical "discovery" - I've already ordered a CD by Th' Shack Shakers - coming from Petrusich's extensive knowledge.

Back in 2005 I was forced to abandon a long-planned "Deep South Musical Odyssey", which was rudely sabotaged by Hurricane Katrina, and I have yet to revive the plan. Not only has It Still Moves given me some ideas for other places to go when I do, for the time being it's going to have to do as a substitute. As such it does as good a job as you could ask.