Why read Where The Dead Voices Gather?

Book cover of Where The Dead Voices Gather

Book description

For twenty years, Nick Tosches searched for facts about the life of Emmett Miller, a yodelling blackface performer whose songs prefigured jazz, country, blues and much of the popular music of the twentieth century.

Beginning with a handful of 78 rpm records and ending at a tombstone in a Macon,…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Where The Dead Voices Gather as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Rob Miller

Author

Like most people, I thought songs were songs. They were just there, as they always had been. I didn’t think much of their provenance or their context.

This book popped my brain wide open and hipped me that all those benign, been-there-forever items in the Great American Songbook were haunted by the ghosts of a country founded under some troubling circumstances. It is an endlessly fascinating and eerie dig through the graveyards of our shared musical heritage.

I will never hear the songs he shines a lantern light on in the same way again.

From Rob's list on why the weird underbelly of American music is more interesting and important than pop music.