Where Dead Voices Gather [Paperback]

Nick Tosches (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2002

A forgotten singer from the early days of jazz is at the center of this riveting book--a narrative that is part mystery, part biography, part meditation on the meaning and power of music.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Nick Tosches's new book is aptly titled. On the surface a biography of obscure Southern minstrel singer and blackface comedian Emmett Miller (1900-62), his passionate text at its core is another installment in Tosches's lifelong inquiry into the nature of American popular music. It's a place, in his view, "where dead voices gather" as artists chaotically and indiscriminately pluck tunes out of sources ranging from English ballads to slave spirituals and fashion lyrics from half-remembered commercial releases heard once on the radio or archetypal stories told so often that no one knows who first gave them voice. Miller was a "yodeling blues singer" who performed in blackface, adhering to the minstrelsy tradition that was in its death throes by the time he had his brief moment of fame in the 1920s. Tosches, who first heard a Miller recording in 1974, characterizes him as "one of the strangest and most stunning stylists ever to record ... the last mutant mongrel emanation of old and dead and dying styles, the first mutant mongrel emanation of a style far more reckless and free than the cool of scat." As this sentence suggests, Tosches's prose has calmed down hardly at all since his first book, Country, was published in 1977; you either love his freeform approach or it drives you nuts. Admirers will relish his marvelously dense and detailed portrait of pop music's crazy-quilt complexity, enriched by Tosches's encyclopedic knowledge of American culture. And he boldly stares the race question in the face, though not everyone will be convinced by his assertion that "it is the shared umbilicus of fantasy that sustains and unites ... the polar temperaments of minstrelsy and rap." This is another genre-smashing work from a writer as eccentric, provoking, and wholly original as the music he loves. --Wendy Smith --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Beyond a handful of recordings revealing early jazz-era blackface minstrel Emmett Miller as "one of the strangest and most stunning stylists," some good press in the late 1920s and a few scattered recollections of a pleasant fellow who liked his whiskey, Miller has virtually escaped memory. But Tosches (Dino), a bestselling author and contributing editor at Vanity Fair, unearths this forgotten yodeling gem and excavates further still the creation, impact and demise of minstrel music. Neither tsk-tsking nor snickering at minstrelsy's racial humor, Tosches uses Miller to examine this period of "musical miscegenation and cultural pollinations" and the folks who provided its soundtrack. In his race to get down the facts play dates, names, etc. some of the author's characteristic fearlessness and quick humor is lost. But he was clearly wrong to call his obsessive venture a "mad labor for which no audience exists... grown now into... a book so bereft of commercial potential that not even I, who can skin a snake without its knowing it, can hope to con the most benighted and gullible of publishers into paying a decent dollar for it." On the contrary, Tosches's quest is irresistible, and many will, like the author, fall under the elusive yodeler's spell. (Aug. 21)Forecast: Despite its obscure subject, the book to be advertised in Time, the New York Times Book Review and the Village Voice will be widely reviewed and will reach an audience far beyond jazz aficionados. Tosches's wide-ranging pop-cultural subjects (e.g., country music, rock 'n' roll, Dean Martin, Sonny Liston) have made him popular, as evidenced by The Nick Tosches Reader (Da Capo), culled from his 30-year career.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books (September 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316895377
• ISBN-13: 978-0316895378
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #894,571 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The completion of a 25-year quest, August 16, 2001

By 

Jon E Johnson (Boston, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Where Dead Voices Gather (Hardcover)

We all have our obsessions that can lead to our downfalls. Our Moby Dicks. Our black pearls. For Nick Tosches, that obsession over the past quarter-century has been Emmett Miller, a now-obscure minstrel singer from Georgia who recorded for OkeH and Victor in the '20s and '30s. When Tosches first wrote about Miller in the mid-'70s (in his book "Country"), little was known of Miller. No photographs of the man were known to have survived, little biographical information existed, and his music was difficult to find in print. Over the course of the next 26 years, Tosches and a few associates tracked down leads and rumors about Miller's origins, until a somewhat better picture of the man started to emerge during the '90s. A few photographs turned up eventually. His grave was found in a bad section of Macon, Georgia. And one by one a scant few people who had known Miller or had worked with him turned up with hazy, somewhat unreliable tales of his career. Which raises the question of why Tosches would spend so much time and energy chasing after the ghost of an obscure singer who had died - alcoholic and penniless - in 1962? Part of the answer is that Miller was a truly gifted vocalist whose unique style influenced the likes of Bob Wills, Tommy Duncan, Leon Redbone, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, and others. Part of the answer is also that Miller's music is nearly uncategorizable; his unusual vocal style made a strong impression on country singers in years to come, but his music wasn't country by any stretch. In fact, with backing on his records by the likes of Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, guitarist Eddie Lang, and drummer Gene Krupa, Miller was rubbing shoulders with some of the best jazz musicians of the era. Finally, Miller's career took place during the final years of minstrelsy (the history of which Tosches devotes musch space here), and Miller represented a last flickering spark in the embers of blackface musical comedy before dying completely during the Great Depression. Ultimately, Tosches' quest was only partially successful at best. We get a picture of the major events of Miller's life; his birth, the essentials of his career, his marriage (late in life), and his death. But of the man himself only dim hints; brief glances at the contents of a room in the split second after a light bulb flashes, then burns out. Gaps of knowledge still exist, as Tosches freely admits, but he's followed the trail as far as he thinks he can and leaves it now to younger scholars. A consistently fine work, in the now-well-established Tosches style. If one complaint can be made, it's that photographs of Miller and the book's other subjects might have been included. But perhaps it's for the best that none are present. Pictures of Miller aren't all that hard to find at this point - they're out there if you know where to look - and if anything the lack of photographs lends to the ghost-like portait of Miller that Tosches paints.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Almost Perfect...., September 26, 2002

By 

Steven Thornton (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Where Dead Voices Gather (Hardcover)

.... But not. When he's writing about Emmett Miller and the history of minstrelsy, he's brilliant. Not only did he do a ton of original research on Miller and minstrelsy and early American music (blues, jazz and country, before any of those three were genres; even the categories are foreign to us today), but he can tie it into modern musical ideas like no one else. He makes these shadows come alive for a minute, which is amazing; you can almost smell Miller in the room. And his exploration of these roots pulls together many previously ungathered threads.

However, he goes off the deep end, as usual for Tosches. Too many Ezra Pound discursions, for starters. If you're trying to impress us with your deep knowledge of foreign languages, you'd best not quote extensively from that old fraud, who "translated" buttloads of poetry from languages he couldn't read (with "help"); this taints Tosches with the suspicion of similar overreaching. It's great that he has read up on Greek word roots, but these links are too tenuous; it's a little bit of showing off and doesn't really illuminate anything. If he wants to write another book carrying his musical history ideas back from English ballads to ancient Greece, go for it, but here it just looks like dressing-up time. Stick to the blues.

And though Tosches is a great critic of the pop music of his time, like all of his contemporaries in that game (Meltzer, Marcus, ad infinitum) he's every bit as stuck in a particular rut as those he would criticize. He's quoting Iggy Pop and Patti Smith again, folks.

But while those complaints are serious, they don't detract from the fundamental brilliance of the story. It's a terrific, if languid, detective story, as well as an opening into a new world of understanding popular music. Tosches is the only "rock" critic ever who could have written it, which is a pity. I don't see how you can understand where our music came from without this book. Read it.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Emmett Miller Lives!, May 12, 2002

By 

Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Where Dead Voices Gather (Hardcover)

Nick Tosches brought Emmett Miller onto the stage of writing about American popular music about 20 years ago in his magic-realistist imagined chapters on Emmett Miller in his original edition of Country Music about 20 years ago. At the time, his comments were imaginary because we knew so little about Miller. As Tosches wrote, for all we knew then he could be running a candy store in Jersy City.

Over those twenty years Tosches found out about Miller and records a lot of that information in this book. This is great selfless work by Tosches and by other scholars who were inspired by his work and by Miller's music.

Well, this is not fiction, this is what we know about him, about minstrelry, about his life. You can't blame Nick for the fact that the truth is a bit less colorful and still less filled in than fiction.

Also, Tosches is no academic and does not pretend to be. He's music's best and most literary representative of the new journalism.

Miller is important. He was good. His music sounds great today. If you don't think so, you need your ears adjusted, your sense of life, love, and joy revived. He may not have been a financial success, but critical trend setters, particularly in Country Music, have styled themselves after him to this day.

Bob Wills--another former blackface perform-- combined Emmett Miller, the blues of the MIssissippi Sheiks, La Musica Ranchera, and ranch dance music into Western Swing. Wills auditioned his singers throughout his career by asking them to sing Miller's hits and comparing them to Miller. Wills recorded songs identified with Miller throughout his career.

Hank William's biggest success was essentially an imitation of an imitation of Miller. Merle Haggard has acknowledged his heritage by recording a Miller tribute album and usually does a Miller-Wills number during every concert. Leon Redbone gets a very large amount of his singing style and personna from Miller.

The problem of minstrelry can't be discussed without discussing race and culture in America in a way most people can't discuss it, like it is a real problem that is really there and part of the discoursde, win or lose. I don't exactly agree with Tosches' take on the problem, but, at least, he approaches the issue honestly and put it in the center of the discourse where it
belongs.

Perhaps, unlike Tosches' Country Music and Hellfire, this is not a book that belongs in every home, every school, every library, every bookstore, but it belongs on every bookshelf of anyone interest in American popular music, especially country music and Western Swing.