A very moving story about a forgotten life. A life that was essentially over long before death. ( )

I went into this book expecting to like it more than I ultimately did. Tosches, who died just last year, was one of the first "rebel" music writers on the rock music scene of the 1960s. He was credited, along with Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer and a few others, with elevating rock journalism to a more literary and raucous level. In fact, Bangs, Meltzer and Tosches became known as the "Noise Boys." By 2001, when this book was published, Tosches had expanded into all sorts writing, from novels to very well received biographies of Sonny Liston, Jerry Lee Lewis and Dean Martin. I, however, had never read any of these books, and I was looking forward to this one. So what is this book?

Where Dead Voices Gather is Tosches personalized and opinionated account of the life of Emmett Miller a by-now very obscure black face performer who had a brief moment in the sun in the 1920s, when minstrelsy was already beginning its decline, leaving behind a handful of recordings that have since been rereleased. Miller had a singular vocal style, full of leaps and whoops. He is considered one of the earliest yodeling singers and it is known (according to Tosches) that he was an influence on Jimmy Rogers and Hank Williams. There is, however, very little known about Miller's life. What was known, however, was enough to create an obsession for Tosches that he spent decades indulging, finally tracking down enough information to write this book, sort of.

I say, "sort of" because this book is not just about Miller, or about Tosches' search for Miller, which was really what I was expecting: sort of a travelogue that would take us through the American south with Tosches as he did his research, followed up leads and reported not just on what he'd found out but also on the experiences he'd had, the people he'd met and places he'd seen, along the way. What the book is instead is mostly Tosches' presentation of the research he, and others, have done on Miller and his life and career. What we get for much of the book are details about recording dates, songs and bandmates. Tosches will often then spin out the narrative to provide information about the careers of those bandmates, and then about the careers of people they've performed with, across the realms of minstrelsy, blues and early jazz, black and white. This all could be quite dry if one doesn't already come to the material with one's own love of music and fascination with American music history. The effect of all this is a tapestry of information, a weaving together of the almost infinite strands of influences and counter-influences in American music. Tosches, in fact, is not shy about bringing his strands all the way back to the ancient Greeks, to Homer and his unknown influencers. The dead voices of the book's title are all of those unknown ones, the musicians, particularly American, who's names and faces are lost to our recorded national history and to our memory, the ones who came before and created the foundations of all we now know. Tosches relatively frequently writes quite rhapsodically, and quite wonderfully, about all these threads, connections and reverberations.

But in fixating about Miller, Tosches also comes to identify very strongly with the era of minstrelsy, wherein white singers appeared in blackface and created a false nostalgia for a South that never was and a compliant, easy-go-lucky, sly but ignorant black people who certainly never were. Tosches sees this as benign, more or less, it seems. After all, says he, there were black musicians who also put on blackface to perform in these shows, so how bad could it have been? And anyway, most of the most famous minstrel songs ("Dixie" and "Swanee," for example) were actually written by northerners. Tosches, instead, reserves his strident contempt for basically anything to do with the 1960s (other than Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones). The folk movement of the 60s was fraudulent, in itself the worst kind of "minstrelsy," as middle class kids dressed up in working class clothes and pretended to be poor, and those who promoted the "blues revival," whereby dozens (if not more) bluesmen were rediscovered and recorded because they insisted (says Tosches) that these musicians don the trappings of poverty, regardless of what their real life situations might have been. We can agree to the fact that there was a level of disingenuousness in all of this without insisting, I think, that it was just as bad as the decades long, nationwide, show biz objectification of blacks as ignorant and shambling. Tosches draws, toward the end of the book, direct lines between minstrelsy and the modern, corporation-dominated music industry. Well, OK. Point taken. So it's only hypocrisy, then, to react with distaste toward minstrelsy. There, he loses me.

As mentioned above, Tosches came of age professionally in the 60s, making his mark as a music writer on the rock scene. Like quite a few people who experienced those days first hand, he seems to have eventually reacted quite strongly against the era and the people and all that the times have come to represent. There is "nothing to be said for them." So instead of trying to tell us what there was about the culture of the days of minstrelsy's heyday that would have led talented musicians--people who were used to working with and, one would guess, respecting--their black musical peers, to be so blind to the harms brought about by the music they were making and the performing group they were touring with, Tosches lands instead on a "how is that any worse than this" misdirection which gives him an opportunity to rail against the source of his own cultural aversions. Unfortunately for Tosches, and for the reader, here, nobody likes a know-it-all.

I learned a lot, a whole lot, about music history, about minstrelsy, and about the confluence of musical influences that have worked together to create the great, expansive body of American music. I've even come to appreciate those dead voices that Tosches evokes. But in the end I'd only recommend this book to people with a very focused interest in the subject matter. ( )

I finished Where Dead Voices Gather by Nick Tosches this afternoon. I had more issues with this text than any other by the deft stylist. I was reading deep into last night, when I took out Carter Family disc I bought myself recently and replaced it with an early Gilian Welch (my wife rose from her slumber and deadpanned, there she is again, my rival.) Tosches extends a nod, the gist of which is the cathartic of song has been with us eternally, like some airborne Dutchman, yet the idea of minstrelsy is being vilified by sentimentalists and academics who don't understand anything. I was not impressed. There may not be anything scientific about race as a designation, Tosches proudly points to research in that regard. There still is a concept of human history, and, no, no one alive withstood slavery. These arguments do not mean that this legacy and all its subsequent horror have not had an implacable effect upon people of color.

Tosches needs to cease his incessant blowing of Dylan as well. It isn't becoming. cheers. ( )

Nick runs down names and places, labels and producers, songs and dances, etc. to the point that sections of the book bring to mind the Iliad's catalog of the ships. These sections are valuable as reference though, and worth the slog for the insights (e.g. his criticism of the white demand for "authentic" blues/suffering; his digressions about modern forms of minstrelsy; the unfathomable depths of origins; his surfeit of creative and poetic juxtapositions; etc.) and the occasional maniacal bursts of ostentatious prose:

"...1927: the year that Furry Lewis, Jimmie Rodgers, and so many other luminous voices came to be heard; the year of Emmett Miller's glory; the year that the great flood of the Mississippi, the great flood of the Delta, the great flood, ignivomous and exundant, which seemed to sunder the chthonic sacrarium, Κτύπησε Ζευς χθόυιος, and bring forth the tombaroli, the holy grave-robbers and thieves; to loose the cestus of Mystis, sweet tectonic mama, and raise, in skirl and sigh and yodel and moan, in epiclesis, in aestus, in quietus - stile vecchio, stile duro, stile nuovo - the tessitura of it all, the dark and myriad-voiced antediluvian song and resurrection in the light of new mornin, matutina lux, Viva-tonal and electric, wild-souled and endlessly rocking."

This book is all at once deeply felt, obsessive, single-minded, boring, and brilliant. ( )

Tosches is a collector and docketer of facts, snippets, similarities, opinions. His masterful biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, Hellfire, is quite a read (and in dire need of an update). So this biography of a long-forgotten blackface minstrel man from the early twentieth century should be good, though some might think it odd. Though structured around Emmett Miller, whose routines and songs influenced Bob Wills and Hank Williams and scores of others, it is really about how jazz and blues and country and et cetera intersect, intersected, and played on one another in the early decades of this century. In the meantime Tosches shows that perhaps it is too simple to say that jazz was black, country was white, whites stole jazz, blues only came from the Delta, etc. These things are often taken for granted, but they're wrong. (Tosches really should write a book about Bob Wills.) That said, Tosches does sometimes get a bit chatty, and tries to get too pedantic and erudite for his own good, and sometimes he holds rash, harsh opinions for no reason. Still, a weird window into the birthplace time of rock, country, jazz, etc. Worth it if you can find it cheap, and, thanks to YouTube, you can listen to many of the songs mentioned. ( )