Tuneful travelogue
NONFICTION
"It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music" by Amanda Petrusich. Faber and Faber. 290 pages. $25.
Bottom line: Musical history sings well enough.
Amanda Petrusich has her work cut out for her, sallying forth from her New York home in search of the heart of American music.
Petrusich, a New York Times columnist and editor at Paste Magazine, loads up a battered coupe to follow the path of what is arguably our most resonant resource and best-loved export. It's a vision quest that has been undertaken by others who found, as Petrusich does, that the getting there is more revealing than the arrival.
In fact, none of the travelers to America's musical heartlands has quite unlocked their secrets. Petrusich makes no promises and fares no better. At the same time, there's always room for another witty and wise first-person foray into the wilderness, and she delivers.
American music is at its roots Southern-bred, and in order to reach sacred ground, Petrusich crosses the Mason-Dixon Line and navigates a slough of 21st century progress, meaning mile-wide highways of an endless sameness surrounded by countless square miles of cheesy marketing.
She arrives first on the Mississippi Delta, that swath of black dirt where blues, and therefore rock 'n' roll, took form. From there, she visits Memphis, crosses the state to Nashville, then triangulates her way in a series of quick stops in Charlottesville, Lexington and Charleston, W.Va. After which she heads into Appalachia and the headwaters of country music. She rounds out her journey with a reflection on those oddball legends who recorded and collected the priceless music that emanated from all these places.
For those acquainted with the landscape, it's something of a familiar path. How many times can the story of Robert Johnson at the crossroads or Sam Phillips discovering Elvis be retold?
That said, Petrusich is an earnest explorer with a sunny devotion to her mission, a fine eye for detail, and a strong sense of history lurking in shadows. Having done her homework, she ably relates narratives about how the music rose from the dirt to be molded and performed by such wicked talents as bluesman Charley Patton and "hillbilly" singer A.P. Carter and then laid to vinyl by the likes of H.C. Speir and Ralph Peer, characters all who had not the first clue that their echoes would resonate through one century and into the next.
However, what Petrusich finds as she wends her way along the crooked byways of American music are connections frayed and broken by the same commercial tides that brought it into the limelight. The Mississippi Delta is now a locus of "music tourism" that includes among its must-sees a cheerful signpost marking the place where Johnson supposedly sold his soul to Satan. Memphis' Beale Street is a dim knockoff of its former self, the famed studio at Sun Records is quaint and lifeless, and at least some visitors to Graceland, that monument to Southern kitsch, must wonder what it has to do with the young man who was the voice and the face of a world-shaking cultural tsunami.
Likewise, the gleaming corporate mass of Nashville's Music Row seems an unintended mockery of the sounds that once cascaded down mountainsides in joyous streams.
Petrusich skips Atlanta, which was musically a beehive in the 1920s. Though all she would have found here is a once-wicked Decatur Street and the last bleat of red-hot blues long entombed in concrete. She commits the more glaring omission of bypassing New Orleans, the repository of as much American musical treasure as all the other locales put together. Of course, that's a book in itself. A less grievous sin is a throwaway chapter about Cracker Barrel, as in the restaurants.
Other than that, Petrusich succeeds in relating the tale of a worthwhile journey. Following in the footsteps of Peter Guralnick and Nick Tosches, she's an able historian, a solid journalist, and a talented raconteur. And even as the corporate apparatus goes on gobbling up anything that even faintly hints at true Americana, she finds reason for hope.
Outlaws, former and current, will always buck the machine, even from the grave. Petrusich's heartfelt reverence for these mysterious and mythic men and women at the heart of America's music is the key to this mostly fine and funky travelogue.
David Fulmer of Atlanta is the author of five music-based historical novels published by Harcourt Books.