Book description
Winner of Ishmael Reed's Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award
This masterful explorationof American roots music--country, rockabilly, and the blues--spotlights the artists who created a distinctly American sound, including Ernest Tubb, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Elvis Presley, Merle Haggard, and Sleepy LaBeef. In incisive portraits based on searching interviews with these…
- Coming soon!
Why read it?
1 author picked Lost Highway as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
As a kid, I thought, because that is what I was taught by simplified historic revisionism, that Rock n Roll was invented one day when Bill Haley perfected his spit curl, or when Elvis went on the Ed Sullivan Show to shake his hips.
Lost Highway fundamentally reshaped my understanding of the dynamics that shaped this music, and thus, ultimately, everything that followed.
By delving into headwaters that crossed race and genre, I learned of the elemental—and mythical—forces that had been percolating for decades (centuries?) beneath our feet, and unleashed an enormous cultural shift.
If you love Lost Highway...
Ghosts
Known more for his books on Mayas, Aztecs, and Spanish conquistadors, historian Matthew Restall's latest book takes his deepest dive yet into the history of pop music.
In the late-1970s, three music-obsessed, suburban London teenagers set out to make their own kind of pop music: after years of struggle, success…
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