Book Review

American historians and American studies scholars have been notoriously shy about constructing thematically oriented overviews of American music. Where is the book that will try to tell the story of how migration and urbanization shaped twentieth-century American music? Or one that will examine "crossover" (folk to popular, sacred to secular) as a central concept of the music? Benjamin Filene and Bryan K. Garman seem aware of this timidity in the scholarship and have developed useful analytical frameworks for approaching large sections of the American musical landscape.	1
The unacknowledged model for both Filene and Garman is, I think, Greil Marcus's important book Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music (1975). Methodologically, Marcus is much more inductive, subjective, and allusive than either Filene or Garman. But Marcus's major structural move, to juxtapose one set of "ancestors" (for him Robert Johnson and, improbably enough, a hokum singer named Harmonica Frank) against a pool of "inheritors" (The Band, Randy Newman, Sly Stone, and Elvis Presley), provides Filene and Garman with a starting point. What Marcus did—and what Filene and Garman attempt to do in more strictly academic fashion—was to try to create a cultural family tree, one in which kinship is determined by performance stance, thematic concern, tropological investment, and so on. "And so on" in this case also includes gender identity: all three authors construct lineages remarkably free of women, and it is only Garman who makes analytical hay out of this single-gender orientation.	2
Garman and Filene are both concerned with unpacking the invention of certain cultural traditions. Filene is interested in describing and analyzing the establishment of a musical canon that served as "roots" for practitioners of popular music throughout the twentieth century; Garman, in a distinct (if related) way, is interested in tracing—all the way back to Walt Whitman—working-class masculinism as a major subject position for American creative artists. What is most fascinating about Filene's excellent book is how he adapts Marcus's "ancestor" paradigm in order to demonstrate how fluid that concept has been for American musical practitioners. Between the 1890s and the 1960s or so, according to Filene, American musicians, folklorists, government officials, journalists, record label owners, and so on, developed competing conceptions of American roots music and the "concurrent formation (and continual reformation) of a canon of roots musicians." Without dwelling too much on it, Filene makes it clear that this roots work was the musical equivalent of the search for a "usable past" called for by Van Wyck Brooks and others. Filene is nicely catholic when it comes to identifying all the sources of American vernacular music in the latter half of the twentieth century and does a particularly fine job of explaining how, in a ten-year period, the Chicago blues musician Muddy Waters transformed himself (with a big assist from Willie Dixon) from a pop singer who relied heavily on "roots" sources into one of those sources himself. Romancing the Folk usefully problematizes the whole notion of roots, showing very clearly that "roots" has never been simply defined as one set of cultural actors or materials; it is rather a signifier of a cultural conflict about what matters in musical history.	. . .