Where Dead Voices Gather
By Nick ToschesLittle, Brown and Co., $25
Leave it to Nick Tosches, a jive hustler of music arcana, to suggest that the Wu-Tang Clan is the reincarnation of nineteenth-century “coon-song” shouters. Tosches’s new dense, sometimes thrilling history of American music’s racial crossroads follows pop’s missing link, Emmett Miller, a blackface minstrel whose yodeling on 1925’s “Lovesick Blues” foreshadowed Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams. Dead Voices meditates lyrically on that “wild-souled and endlessly rocking” muse binding oral historians from Homer to Ice-T.
—Joe Hagan
