Stomp and Swerve

September 15, 2003
Something happened to African music as it developed in North America that didn't happen anywhere else, including Africa, Wondrich observes. In other countries where the seeds of African music were sown, the result was "a loping, lilting sense of rhythm" that is quite different from North America's "harder-edged, more urgent beat." Wondrich's investigation takes readers back to the Stone Age of popular music, when West African slaves and Scots-Irish indentured servants frequently toiled alongside one another on plantations in Virginia and Barbados. As Wondrich explains, their intimacy led to musical cross-pollination and gradual homogenization into an Afro-Celtic fusion, which, in turn, produced a distinct and enduring musical dialect: "hot" music-hot as in Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Bob Wills, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and so on. Wondrich pursues the Afro-Celtic sound through minstrelsy and beyond as it begins to be assimilated into white culture. His analysis of a Celtic influence, along with his drive-and-swerve model, clarifies lines of generational development in African American music and enables readers to recognize connections for what they are, not as mere similarities or coincidences. Throughout, Wondrich is entertaining and engaging-just what one would expect of a man who writes about "music and cocktails" for Esquire, the New York Times, and the Village Voice. For extensive musicology collections.-Harold V. Cordry, Baldwin, KS

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2003
Hot American music, says Wondrich, has drive and swerve. Drive is the strong rhythmic component that gets the feet stomping. Swerve is the spontaneous bending of tempo, swinging of the beat, and embellishment of the musical line. Beginning with the minstrels who played "Negro" music on stage in blackface in a spirit of parody, Wondrich traces the evolution of hot music into ragtime ("Coon" music, it was called), blues, and jazz. Scottish and Irish music influenced minstrel music, just as Afro-Caribbean music influenced the blues and jazz--the acme of hot music. Unknown rural people and people in the (noncriminal) "Underworld" developed these musical styles, and the "Topworld" embraced this music as it came to reflect on general social conditions. Much later hot music is preserved on sound recordings, which Wondrich references while discussing major performers and composers (a CD containing some of the music will be released simultaneously with the book). Aside from his use of vernacular expletives to express strong opinions, Wondrich provides good guidance as the music gets hotter.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)