Cool Books About Obscure Music

Reading About, Dancing About Architecture

Early in life I discovered that the way to approach anything was to be introduced by the right person.

-Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company

I recently came across the book, You’ve Never Heard Your Favorite Song. I love the title because it’s a hope that never goes away. Even in this Ai encroaching, music tsunami, post post post everything world, having every song ever made, right here in this silver mirror box, at my fingertips,  I still, always dream that there is one more song down the lit screen rabbit hole that will lead to a song I’ve never heard and some magic left to take my breath away. 

Every Friday morning, I scroll through the New Releases on iTunes. I used to look to Rock’nRoll or Country but those spots rarely grab me anymore. Now,  it’s world music or classical that I find interesting. But, I look, I still do because you never know. Of course, my ears change, and not just me going deaf. Arooj Aftab’s “Raat Ki Rani” has been this year's new jewel. When Ilived in NewYork and I worked at Pottery Barn Lincoln Center, I’d go to Tower on Tuesdays for lunch and listen to whatever cover caught my eye in the sampler kiosks. 

Photo by the author 

The book, You’ve Never Heard Your Favorite Song is by Matt Doucet, writer editor, currently living in Pittsburgh, PA. It’s published by Cider Mill Press where Matt plies his trade. Full disclosure, I recently came onboard at Cider Mill Publishing.

Matt’s  book goes deep into the stacks with lots of lush, smoky, tropical, meditative records that are transportive. This collection and talking to Matt took me to Baeleric music, something that I had at best a passing awareness of. Finding those areas where you aren’t used to listening but finding something that sings for you is the tone of the book. It’s got Reggae, Electronica, Pop, folk, from the last 30 or so years that disappeared from the usual lists. There are a few names I know, funnily they come from a section titled, “Who’s This?” 

Jan Hammer, Junior Parker, Carol King, Jimmy Page, Little Richard but the songs mentioned were deep crate finds. It’s not Tapestry. It’s definitely not Led Zeppelin IV. 

The only song in the book I could really lay claim to is Jose Feliciano's version of “California Dreaming.” There is “See and Don’t See” by Mary Lyons that I first heard from The Afghan Whigs. I knew it was a cover but I don’t think I ever dug up the original. That’s the trip here, the obscure cover’s original. I mentioned to Matt that I might return the favor and make him a playlist of prewar 78s. He said, it’s always good to have a guide when you go into the stacks.

That got me thinking. 

The Guide Economy

I worked at a record store called The Disk Exchange in Knoxville, Tennessee in the late 90’s. We had to figure out what song a customer wanted, by them humming, telling us what few words they knew, or where they heard it if they didn’t know the artist or title. There were 8-10 employees with 6 or so of us on the clock at any time. Between all of us, and our collective music knowledge we could usually get it. You had to pass a test to get a job at the record store. I passed the test because I’d been perusing the shelves since the late 80’s.  Cats Records in Oak Ridge. Turtles in Farragut and I’d been reading the Rolling Stone record guide front to back, and the magazines, like Rolling Stone, Spin, Guitar World, anything, everything you could get in East Tennessee back then. When we got to be teens with cars on occasional Saturdays we hauled ourselves out to Tower Records in Nashville. 

Around the time I started at the Record Store, a computer appeared on the showroom floor. Some friends remember it being called MUZE. Others remember it as Phonolog. It’s suggested that TOWER had this machine as well, or something similar. 

This machine made it possible for a  customer to come in and do the work that happened in the employees heads. At the time, I remember it was mostly used by the sales team. We looked for records we didn’t know about. We poked around for holes in the data. But looking back, this took that knowledge in our heads and made it a tool for anyone walking off the street.

One Man’s Trash 

“You know, "nerd culture" is mainstream now. So, when you use the word "nerd" derogatorily, it means you're the one that's out of the zeitgeist Tom (Haverford,)”                                                              -Ben Wyatt Parks and Rec.

There is a Reddit, Facebook Group or Substack for any interest no matter how arcane. My neighborhood has a Facebook Group. The power is out? Yes, it is for all of us. 

Ted Gioia talks about this in his  Substack article, the Tension Between Macroculture and Microculture Will Turn into War

 The modern era has made that less or more fun depending on how you look at it. Mystery, excitement, thrill of the chase, in having to track things down in the real world takes all the fun out of life but you can find more fans and more information about whatever you're into so maybe it’s a net win? 

Obscure things are not so obscure anymore. Right? Because how obscure is it if I can find it immediately on my computer? Well, that’s the pickle. Almost anything can be found and by that reality it becomes obscure. It seems oxymoronic. We are left in this overwhelming moment where it’s harder and harder to find worthwhile results. Add to it the fact that an author can release three books a day on Amazon. Three a day! Asking who can write that much isn’t even the point and with every minute more and more is added to the mix. The search engine capabilities powered by Ai propose to give you better answers than you ever had before - but there are directions out there on how to search without Ai results coming up because they are muddy if not misleading.

 Some  advise to specify your results are from before 2024. Seems almost sci-fi in its implications. We need the proverbial flashlight in the dark. I call this the Guide Economy. Marketers probably have a cool phrase for it, it’s nothing new but I feel like it’s hotter than ever. 

The Guide Economy Movers are the New Gatekeepers

I miss the gatekeeper economy of books and music. But at the same time I’ve released 10 albums and a novel with just as much availability as a major release so do as I say, not as I do.

Anne Trubek has an interesting essay titled Publishing Didn’t Used to be Better. that hinges on the notion that no one really made money in the past, at least not the way we think they did and that there was not a diversity of represented voices. Ultimately it was a closed society boy’s club as opposed to a culture of literary advancement that we rhapsodize as. 

In its essence though, there was an order to things. I would rather live in a system where there is an established idea of greatness and quality and there are decision makers that determine what that is and then make it available to the public in an organized manner through magazines and adverts. But every time I say something like that, someone tells me how wrong I am. I even tell myself how wrong I am. “Who decides what is quality?!?” Well, we had Thelonious Monk on the cover of TIME, so tell me how that happened. 

Time Magazine - Feb 28th, 1964

I digress. This is a topic for the bar, over Palomas. I think we can all agree we live in strange times for discovery. As a friend recently texted me, “The robots are suggesting music for us…made by robots.” 

I submit the idea of the guide, in other words Gatekeepers, Curators, and Bespoke makers, nothing new really,  is becoming more and more a business model. I feel like it’s kicked into high gear lately. 

Dan Levy and Heidi Garnder in a commercial for Homes.com  will infiltrate small town football games to get the skinny on a prospective new neighborhood so you don’t have to. 

In Nashville, for books there is  Joelle Herr’s The Bookshop-it’s highly curated and excellently so. She picks books that are hot and new with a solid blacklist representation but sprinkled in are choices made on the tactile visual experience of the book. Etsy's current marketing is about human pick - a move that anticipates the Ai-ifcaition and mass manufacturing of the world 

Romance only bookstores are popping up to give fans of the Bodice Rippers a place to focus their reading . Even without a guide per se, in 2023 Apple broke out Classical from the rest of their music. If you look into why Apple did this, you’ll get this answer from the internet, via Ai no less

“... to support the complex data structure of classical music and to address the specific interests and needs of classical music listeners:”

Do Not Sell any Price Pre War 78s

Matt’s book got me thinking about the bespoke, the guide economy, the macro and that reminded me of Do Not Sell At Any Price, by Amanda Petrusich, a book I’ve meant to read since it came out. I avoided the book because I worried it wouldn’t be very good, or about what I thought it would be about but the book is what I hoped and better than I could have imagined. 

PreWar music fascinates me in an almost Spiritual way. I started this year planning to only listen to music that was prewar. When this year started I was yearning for emotional quiet.  I was making a playlist from Classical records from the 20’s-30’s, Caruso, to Blues and Jazz. I was going to stay off Instagram and read my prayer book every night and every morning. I don’t know how long I made it but I think The Pogues stepped in by February.

Do Not Sell At Any Price -author photo

I know my interest in prewar music is not like the interest of PreWar Vinyl collectors. It would be cool to have a room with a 78 Player and shelves lined with the shellac discs in  paper sleeves with Art Deco print on them. Shoot, I’d like a few ferns too. An anti gravity chair. I’d like to smoke cigars. But I live with four people and I like convenience a lot. Mostly, I listen to them on my iPhone with a little BlueTooth speaker on my desk. 

If you were wondering why I offered Matt to make a list of PreWar music, it’s because this is where I’ve spent the most time with a shovel. 

I remember the Robert Johnson box set coming out in 1990. I had already bought the tapes in 1986 because of the movie Crossroads. From then on any time I saw a tape or CD that said Colombia Legacy,  Chess, or Rounder, Smithsonian, Columbia Roots and Blues Legacy collections at the record store, I made a note to buy it when I had coin. Then later I discovered Bear Family and Country Reissues. Their releases were big gold rocks in the water trough. I read Guitar World when they had blues issues.  Any record store I went to- I went to the collections section at the end of blues, rock, or country b/c that’s where these types of things would be. 

Old songs would find me and then I had to go find them. 

When I saw the movie Wild at Heart, I waited for the credits for the song “Smoke Rings” by The Casa Loma Orchestra, I looked for it for years. I finally found it on a swing compilation CD. Movies are probably where I heard a lot of stuff. Woody Allen movies hipped me to 30s jazz for sure. 

Around the turn of the century I was on a rooftop in Chicago, drinking beer with some friends, freezing our asses off listening to Blues Before Sunrise. I heard a strange old blues song with a bicycle bell. It was Honey in the Rock by Blind Mamie Forehand. 

I waited till the DJ went over the plays, and wrote the name on a scrap of paper. I finally found it on American Primitive Blues with Charley Patton on the cover. I think I found it when I lived in New York at the Virgin Megastore. 

I saw a Zydeco show in Knoxville at some point so when I saw Cajun Dance Party: Fais Do Do around 1994 I bought it. I thought the pictures of Cleoma Falcon were smoking and what a name but  Amedee Breaux’s song Ma Blonde es Partie has been one of the most romantic things in my life since I first heard it. 

Cleoma and Joe Falcon 

In 1997 a friend bought the Harry Smith Reissue. This was the coolest thing on the planet. I think that was when I realized this is a thing. All of this strange weird ancient mystery was captured. 

Petrusich’s book deals with the magic of old songs and the search, the longing to find these documents and she also interviews the searchers. The men, almost all men, are eccentric, idiosyncratic, and curmudgeonly. Some like Christopher King are gracious and kind albeit a little bit of all those aforementioned things. 

It’s the real search that makes her book fascinating. We live in a world where everything is brought to us. In the book she goes to a flea market in a soaking humid warehouse. She travels on roads that the internet struggles to reach. She drives on foggy mountains where her headlights barely make a dent. 

She ends up scuba diving in a river looking for lost records. She makes the history of the music seem more real because she touches the roads where it traveled. 

She formalized this strange, prickly, fragile beauty with a readable, curious feel getting the gravity and humor. She must be a phenomenal talker because she gets a lot out of challenging subjects.  

The added bonus was Christopher King. I did not know he was in the book. He is also an excellent writer and music producer. He handled the mammoth Charley Patton Box Set, Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues. As well, he wrote one of my favorite reads from last year, Lament for Epirus. The book is an archaeological adventure deep into the countryside of Greece chasing a music that descended from some of the oldest sounds of humanity. 

I attend a Greek Church and we have a festival in the late summer every year. We have a band and they were packing up and I lent them a hand. Funnily enough I was telling them about Lament for Epirus and they could not have seemed more disinterested. They looked at me like I suggested we search for dog turds. I thought we were going to be drinking Ouzo and smoking cigarettes behind the tent but nope. The past is not for everyone. 

Charley Patton-full image, the only image of Charley.

The Past is Prologue

In the back of Do Not Sell At Any Price is an excerpt from an interview she did with Christopher King on a Radio Show. Instead of reading it, I decided to listen to it at the gym.

I go to the gym every day because as my friend Rob’s wife answered, when her Mother in Law asked what she was training for at the gym, she replied “Getting old.” I have two bad knees and a jacked up back. Core work keeps me from pretty serious surgeries. 

I’m standing there on the stairmaster, googling Amanda Petrusich and Christopher King for the radio interview and Amanda’s husband Bret came up in the results. He died suddenly in 2022. 

I don’t know that I was thinking about a guide anymore but maybe connections? It reminded me  I’d recently read Sebastian Junger’s book, In My Time of Dying. It’s about his near death experience and grappling with our fragility. The title comes from a Blind Willie Johnson song of the same name. Johnson presents a singular accomplishment for posterity. 

He has a song on the Voyager Satellite, “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” which left our solar system a while ago. Junger doesn’t mention why he named the book after the Blind Willie Johnson song, for all I know he was thinking of Led Zeppelin’s deconstructionist blues.  

In the book, Do Not Sell at Any Price, Harry Smith, the rambling, maddeningly eccentric, is described as, “He was looking for undercurrents. He was looking for ideas that were disappearing, nuances that were disappearing, trying to make connections not just among 78s from Georgia or North Carolina versus upper New York State or Canada, but connections between the string figures that he was interested in from all cultures across the world," Singh said. "He was comparing string figures to tarot cards to 78 records to creation myths to all these other things and finding the things that link all of us as humans together." 

Further Putresich notes, in her book,  “In a 1972 Sing Out! in an interview with Ethel Raim and Bob Norman, Asch confirmed his admiration for Smith’s purview, saying “[Smith] understood the content of the records. He knew their relationship to folk music, their relationship to English literature, and their relationship to the world.” 

That little sentence, “their relationship to the world,” sings doesn't it? Maybe the best guides are making connections for us? That's what I am trying to do, finding connections with these books. I’ve gone far afield but I think it’s worth telling you about it. These things are fun and visceral to figure out and muse on and at some point we are going to need guides through very dark hollows in our days and nights in or out of this solar system.

Junger’s dad studied sound using Helmholtz Resonators. One of the simplest examples of which is when you breathe over a bottle top. When I read that, I immediately thought of KC Moan by The Memphis Jug Band. I read that line in the book and immediately thought of the song “KC Moan.” and it’s bass like pump to and fro of breath over a bottle. 

Maybe that’s what really made my brain go, “It’s time to read Do Not Sell At Any Price.” The galaxy, the afterlife, and a man breathing over a jug but it made all these connections. 

Post Post

Here’s one last thing. It’s from Petrsich’s recent interview with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings for the New Yorker. Welch is talking about Guy Clark and the days before cell phones when she and Rawlings were on tour. 

“He’d (Guy Clark) tell us which exit between each town. He’d say, “Now, when you’re going between Houston and Dallas, you’re gonna wanna stop here. If you’re going between Dallas and Austin, you’re gonna wanna stop here.” This is way before cell phones and G.P.S. You needed this information! You’ve got a Rand McNally at that point. If we were in Texas, in kind of unknown territory, we would call Guy. I’d say, “Guy, we’re down around San Antonio and we need dinner.” And he’d say, “O.K.” He’d think for a minute. “All right, there’s a barbecue place . . .”

Caruso. He has a song in an episode of Boardwalk Empire