Memphis, TN, is best known as the city of Elvis & rockabilly. But this book fills in what isn't so familiar: Memphis is our great cultural mixing board, where all the black & white folks have met & done musical bus. for two cent. or more, with blues, jazz, country, gospel, rock, soul, pop, & punk. The book reaches back into the 19th cent., when Memphis was a wild frontier town. Tells the history of the blues, hard country, & black & white gospel in Memphis & how they got remade into powerful rock & roll in Sam Phillips Sun Records studio. In the '60s the first integrated generations started waxing their own sounds. Follows the Memphis music scene even today.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Kirkus Reviews
Nager is a documentary filmmaker and former music editor of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the only daily paper in the Home of the Blues, a fair set of credentials for the author of a chronicle of the city's musical history. Memphis was unusually well positioned to become a musical crossroads for America. A large port city on the Mississippi River, just north of the Delta country that gave birth to the blues, only 210 miles from Nashville and every bit as much a part of the hill-country heritage that created country and bluegrass, its also a gateway to the north and the big industrial cities that disseminated America's music as a commercial product. As portrayed by Nager, Memphis was also a unique breeding ground for America's various musical forms, a place where black and white met surreptitiously. There is, Nager shows, considerably more to Memphis than Elvis, although he doesn't short-change the King. However, he is ostensibly more concerned with the key figures who came before and after, and who have received somewhat less attention. Given that, it seems odd that Nager spends so much ink on W.C. Handy, Jimmy Lunceford, and some figures with a relatively peripheral relation to the Bluff City, like Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith. All too often this book is a catalogue of musicians who passed through Memphis, or recorded in Memphis, or were born in Memphis. And too much of the musical history recounted in its pages has been told better elsewhere by Peter Guralnick, Francis Davis, and others. The book does come alive in its chapter on Stax/Volt records and the '60s soul music craze, and Nager does give ample space to many musicians who might otherwise be forgotten. But this is at heart an unsurprising work with no fresh insights. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A truly whole and telling history of Memphis music,
By A Customer
This review is from: Memphis Beat : The Lives and Times of America's Musical Crossroads (Hardcover)
This is one of the best books I have ever read about Memphis music. It focused on many of the things that other books overlook, while still retaining the heart of Memphis which is THE BLUES. Larry Nager has a very good understanding of the atmosphere and attitudes of the people in Memphis, since he lived there for several years. The book is thorough in its coverage of everyone from Elvis to Phineas Newborn Jr. to Otis Redding. I highly recommend this to the Memphis music novice or the avid Memphis history collector.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good Book,
By
This review is from: Memphis Beat: The Lives and Times of America's Musical Crossroads (Hardcover)
Finally a book that talks about all the music from Memphis, where most books just talk about a certain type. But Memphis is a special place, a real crossroads for many different styles of American music.
Few minor glitches - some factual mistakes - repetition (JL Lewis always had an ill-fated marriage, a few times in the book) - bad layout, a few white lines to seperate paragraphs would have been nicer. But, these are just minor things, overall it's a good book.
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