THE READING ROOM: Six New Music Books Bursting Forth This Spring

As the snow melts and temperatures begin to climb, the fresh tendrils of a new crop of music books break the sodden ground of winter’s desolation. Like those perennial flowers that bloom in April and May, this spring’s music books bring vibrant color to a dull landscape, invigorating the soil out of which music criticism and scholarship grows. Here’s a selection of some of the best of the new music books coming in the spring, two of which are available now.

Leah Payne, God Gave Rock & Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Music (Oxford, Feb. 1)

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, rock and roll went down to the crossroads and met Jesus, much to the chagrin of many mainline Christians accustomed to the sedate hymns of Sunday morning worship. Larry Norman, The Second Chapter of Acts, Mylon LeFevre and Broken Heart, and Andre Crouch and the Disciples plugged in, cranked up their amps, and sang joyously of love, trying to reach a younger generation turned off by traditional church services. In God Gave Rock & Roll to You, Payne provides a captivating look at the history of the music that grew into the genre that became known as contemporary Christian music.

Michael Broyles, Revolutions in American Music: Three Decades That Changed a Country and Its Sounds (Norton, Feb. 20)

In his rich historical study, musicologist Broyles (Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music) examines how three discrete periods — the 1840s, the 1920s, and the 1950s — shaped American music. He explores the intersections of race and technology in these decades, illustrating how these forces fostered changes in the music of the times. For example, the development of the phonograph and the subsequent rise in music recordings in the early 20th century helped popularize jazz. Broyles offers snapshots of the way that artists such as Bessie Smith, Tony Bennett, Johnnie Ray, and Elvis Presley embodied and transmitted these larger cultural changes in their music.

The Blind Boys of Alabama, with Preston Lauterbach, Spirit of the Century: Our Own Story (Hachette, March 19)

Ride along the gospel highway with the longest-running gospel group in this inspiring autobiography, written with Lauterbach (The Chitlin’ Circuit), one of our great chroniclers of soul and gospel music. Between 2002 and 2005, with the core members of the group in their 70s, they won four Grammy awards and kept up a rigorous touring schedule. The group has been performing since 1939, and while there have been various iterations of the group over time, they continue to perform in the service of the music that resides in their souls: the spirituals and gospel music of their upbringing. As Lauterbach writes, “The Blind Boys deliver unvarnished truth on record, on stage, and in conversation.” That same spirit pervades this long-overdue book.

Alice Randall My Black Country: A Journey through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future (Atria/Black Privilege Publishing, April 9)

When she was three, Randall wrote her first country song in the front seat of her father’s car: “Daddy don’t go into that B-A-R.” Since then, of course, Randall, one of Nashville’s few Black female songwriters, has written or co-written songs that have been recorded by artists including Glen Campbell, Holly Dunn, and Radney Foster. Trisha Yearwood had a No. 1 hit with Randall’s “XXX’s and OOO’s,” which she co-wrote with Matraca Berg. Yet, as Randall points out in her powerful blend of memoir and music criticism and history, “I had been so whitewashed out of them [my songs], the racial identity of my living-in-song heroes and sheroes so often erased.” In her book Randall recovers her own Black country roots as well as the lives and work of Black country musicians, especially Black women, who have shaped the music. An essential book. (The book will be published the same week as the release of the album My Black Country: The Songs of Alice Randall on Oh Boy Records, ND story.)

Ann Powers, Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell (Dey Street, June 11)

Not a standard account of Mitchell’s life and work, Powers’ vibrant book combines her deep passion for Mitchell and her music — a fan’s love — with her rich critical acumen and desire to honor Mitchell’s journey to becoming the discerning and popular artist into which she grew. In chapters that examine turning points in Michell’s career, Powers travels Mitchell’s path with her, from her childhood in Canada and her years on the folk scene to her turn toward and immersion in jazz and jazz fusion and her restless creative spirit. Powers’ brilliant work portrays Mitchell as an artist whose “journey would be, throughout her life, her destination.”

Elijah Wald, Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories(Hachette, April 2)

Jelly Roll Morton rose to fame in the 1920s as a bandleader, but, as music historian Wald (Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues) points out in this captivating book, Morton started out much earlier playing in smoky bordellos and honky-tonks around New Orleans. Many of the songs Morton wrote and sang in those years have been hidden, until now. In this masterful piece of sleuthing, Wald recovers these songs and re-creates the vibrant, and sometimes dark, world of the private clubs out of which early jazz and blues emerged.