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Where Dead Voices Gather Hardcover – August 21, 2001

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Nick Tosches (Author)
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4 out of 5 stars 21 customer reviews
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (August 21, 2001)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0316895075
  • ISBN-13: 978-0316895071
  • Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,148,518 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsThe completion of a 25-year quest
By Jon E Johnson on August 16, 2001
Format: 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.Read more ›
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4.0 out of 5 starsAlmost Perfect....
By Amazon Customer on September 26, 2002
Format: 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.
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4.0 out of 5 starsEmmett Miller Lives!
By Tony Thomas on May 12, 2002
Format: 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.Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 starsDead Voice

Where Dead Voices Gather by Nick Tosches, a book about the minstrel shows of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is easily one of the worst book I have had the... Read more

Published 5 months ago by Black Buffalo
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Excellent research, names, dates, recordings - and interspersed with the inimitable and inspired banter of Nick Toches

Published 10 months ago by Guy de Paris
4.0 out of 5 starsA not too serious wiev on American musical roots

I bought the book partly because of my interest in Eddie Lang's guitar playing. The book is much more of course, and gives an interesting view of some of the roots of American... Read more

Published 14 months ago by Tapani Taka
4.0 out of 5 starsChallenging, thought-provoking

This is a book about following trails long forgotten to understand how we claim ownership of ideas. Tosches traces the history of performers, minstrel troupes (white and black),... Read more

Published 22 months ago by Trampus
4.0 out of 5 starsHow jazz and blues and country, et cetera, intersect, intersected, and...

Tosches is a collector and docketer of facts, snippets, similarities, opinions. His masterful biography of Jerry Lee Lewis is quite a read (and in dire need of an update). Read more

Published on January 8, 2014 by Gene Rhea Tucker
5.0 out of 5 starsgreat book for Musicologist

met all my expectations. amazing research... learned where American music really came from... the minstriels shows. And no surprise the music biz is run by morons

Published on March 3, 2013 by Randal Patrick
5.0 out of 5 starsPoetically written melding of disciplines

The legacy of American minstrelsy is, complex, mysterious, and a sort of genome of the American musical spirit. Read more

Published on December 31, 2012 by P. H. Bloom
5.0 out of 5 starsWho is Eddie Lang?

There are books that I really like, and then there are books that affect me. This is one of those rare books that hit me where I live. Read more

Published on February 12, 2011 by Harry
3.0 out of 5 starsErm...Nick, ya might want to take a research methods course

Fact-wise, terrific: Tosches piles 'em on, as usual. He's a unique, gifted writer, even if one doubts certain of his conclusions, as one does in this book. Read more

Published on July 17, 2006 by wfgodot
5.0 out of 5 starsthank you

finding stuff on emmett miller is very hard

i bought The Minstrel Man from Georgia and fell in love with his voice right away and emotion behind it thank you for... Read more

Published on December 21, 2004 by Paul Quesnell

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