Hidden country: the secret family tree of country music.

• Author: Root, Damon W.
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Book Review

Where Dead Voices Gather, by Nick Tosches, New York: Little, Brown, 330 pages, $24.95

Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture, by Barbara Ching New York: Oxford University Press, 186 pages, $22

THE INDIGENOUS AMERICAN art form of country music is frequently slandered, shunned, and mocked. It's routinely dismissed as either tacky nostalgia or the soundtrack for menacing rednecks. Often condemned by tastemakers and the tragically hip as one of the most conservative and stifling arenas of popular culture, country is bigger than its detractors imagine. More U.S. radio stations program country music than any other format, while country album sales netted a cool $1.5 billion in 2000. And in spite of the fact that most big city critics probably can't name one of his songs, Garth Brooks is the biggest selling solo act in history.

Two recent books, Nick Tosches' Where Dead Voices Gather and Barbara Ching's Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture, help tell country's long, complex, and fascinating story. In the process, the authors map a busy intersection between culture and commerce that has produced not just a sound but a whole set of meanings that has helped delight--and define--millions of American lives.

Nick Tosches has written critically acclaimed biographies of Jerry Lee Lewis and Dean Martin and the indispensable histories Country (1977) and Unsung Heroes of Rock & Roll (1984). In Where Dead Voices Gather, he turns to the forgotten roots of country music. On the surface an account of the life and times of Emmett Miller, a largely unknown blackface minstrel singer, the book is in fact a treatise on the meaning and making of culture itself, laying bare the hidden origins and strange currents of popular entertainment. Tosches gladly tips over more than a few sacred cows, most notably the notion that pop music was stolen from black culture.

Born in Macon, Georgia, sometime around the turn of the 20th century (birth certificates weren't required there until 1919), Emmett Miller was, in Tosches' words, "the most singular emanation of that bizarre twilight fusion of blackface minstrelsy, Tin Pan Alley, and jazz--an emanation through which the forces of country music and the blues swirled as well." At his brief peak in the mid-to-late 19205, this "yodeling blues singer" emerged as "one of the strangest and most stunning of stylists ever to record."

He transformed yodeling from a novelty into something "plaintive and disarming," a technique appropriated with great success by singers as different as Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bob Dylan. Merle Haggard, one of country music's greatest figures, declared his debt to this mysterious minstrel on his album I Love Dixie Blues, while Western swing legend (and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer) Bob Wills auditioned vocalist Tommy Duncan with Miller's "I Ain't Got Nobody." Tosches convincingly argues that Emmett Miller is "a Rosetta Stone to the understanding of the mixed and mongrel bloodlines of country and blues, of jazz and pop, of all that we know as American music."

Tosches illuminates the myriad ways country inspired contemporary pop culture. In one memorable passage he unearths the origins of black blues shouter BigJoe Turner's "I Got a Gal for Every Day in the Week" in "a ragtime coon song composed in 1900." In another he traces Bob Dylan's "Blind Willie McTell" back through Jimmie Rodgers' "Gambling Bar-Room Blues," Blind Willie McTell's "Dying Gambler," and Louis Armstrong's "St. James Infirmary" to an Irish ballad called "The Unfortunate Rake." And in a story central to the heart of the book, he reveals how Emmett Miller's 1928 version of "Lovesick Blues" became "the direct inspiration for the 1948 performance that 25-year-old Hank Williams rode to fame." These events and countless others like them are, Tosches writes, "the story of American music itself: the story of the black stealing from the black, the white from the white, and the one from the other."

Tosches presents Emmett Miller as a deep source for pop music, one whose influence rippled outward throughout the last century. Consider The Georgia Crackers, Miller's backing band from his 1928 sessions for New York's Okeh label, There is Eddie Lang, "the first great jazz guitarist," who performed with luminaries such as Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. Drummers Gene Krupa and Stan King both played in Benny Goodman's celebrated orchestra. The most notable Crackers were Jimmy...