Reading to the Roots: Books on Americana

Book Buzz is a blog produced in collaboration with neighborhood librarians from Houston Public Library, Harris County Public Library and the Bellaire Library.

A couple years back, I came to the conclusion that most of the music coming out of the radio these days amounts to the sonic equivalent of a kale and açai berry diet: trendy, lab-tested safe, and guaranteed to leave you craving something that will stick to your ribs (and/or arteries). I mean, I want songs that sound like the singer has more at stake than market share and merchandizing, so I started digging into our musical roots: Pre-WWII Delta and Piedmont Blues, Jug Bands, Appalachian Death Ballads and the like.

Beyond the primordial world of early Americana I never knew was there, I discovered that an awful lot of the roughest, rawest, realest music ever recorded came from Texas; another thing I discovered is that you can’t listen to the music without wanting to know more about the people who made it, and yet another thing: their stories are as compelling as their music.

If you’re looking for an overview of Texas’ musical roots, you cannot do any better than Michael Corcoran’s All Over the Map: True Heroes of Texas Music.  

Caroline Gnagy’s Texas Jailhouse Music: A Prison Band History tells the true story of the Goree State Farm All-Girl String Band and other inmates who found some spiritual freedom in music despite being locked up. It you like it, try I Say Me for a Parable, sharecropper-turned-1960s-folk-music revival darling, Mance Lipscomb’s oral autobiography.

Strictly speaking, Huddie Leadbetter isn’t a Texan, but he spent a lot of time here - most of it hard - and he wrote perhaps his most famous song, “The Midnight Special” while sitting in a cell at the Imperial State Prison Farm in Sugar Land. The Life and Legend of Leadbelly by Charles Wolfe is not a bad biography.

It is a good bet that more than a few prison sentences started out as a night on the town in Dallas’ Deep Ellum, a red light district famed for its blues. Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas by Alan B Govenar and Jay F. Brakefield is a jaunty little read about a bygone era.

For those of you who prefer mystery to history: Jesse Sublett of The Skunks and The Violators, not only solved the murder of a girlfriend, and wrote a memoir about it, Never the Same Again, he went on to write several fictional detective novels set in the Austin demimonde.