Hitting the road to find American music
It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music
By Amanda Petrusich
Faber and Faber, 290 pp., illustrated, $25
In "It Still Moves," Amanda Petrusich enthuses about music, describes it skillfully, and travels through the South and part of the Northeast in her ambitious quest to find the "Next American Music," putting miles on her car and food in her mouth and visiting relevant places and people while drawing on solid research on American music history.
Does she find this next American music? Not in any explicable way, to a great extent because she refuses to define what it is. And when she claims to finally understand it, this "understanding" is vague and logically suspect. The final few pages are revealing. Petrusich declares a definition of Americana (music that emerges from and reflects American history and culture) as working-class music "a pretty good place to start," then immediately rejects that definition because "Americana is more complicated than any lone platitude" can describe. She follows by stating that "as far as I can tell, Americana is inherently nebulous," announces that "it's inherently fluid: a state of mind, a romantic notion, ..... a joke, a dream" and is "reinvented three hundred times a day," then adds, "At all times, it is all of these things."
Elsewhere, Petrusich offers portraits or glimpses of places and people, familiar and otherwise: Graceland, Garth Brooks, Woody Guthrie, music archivists, and little-known performers. She considers folk music, country, blues, and rock 'n' roll, and several times mentions hip-hop, yet never visits a hip-hop recording studio or interviews a performer or producer.
Her interviews and research provide plenty of material to mine for meaning; she seems satisfied with just the material. Consider another telling final-pages declaration: "I've finally established, for myself, a working understanding of how and what Americana means," the qualifier "for myself" suggesting that she is writing some personal journal rather than a book.
Had she been more self-aware than self-absorbed, this book -- and her decision to include herself as a first-person presence --might have worked. But as a participating narrator, she seems to be in over her head. Done as an informed strategy, it can add a character whose own life adds insight, emotion, and purpose. Instead, Petrusich keeps us posted on where she is driving and what she is eating, but hardly on who she is, and not at all on how this experience transforms her; evidently, it did not.
In a way, "It Still Moves" delivers as the writer says it will; it "is as much about the quest as it is about the prize." She's right: The book has no clear narrative pull or purpose, and there is no prize at the end of the road.
It also makes a kind of sense that she values music that is disjointed, writing about a songwriter who "favors tiny vignettes over narrative arcs" and music that "feels broken, nonlinear, and imagistic." Even her apparent criticism of Sun Records founder Sam Phillips sounds self-descriptive: his preference for both "passion, sloppiness, and a certain lack of sophistication" and "earnest zeal over chops."
At times her writing hits the right notes, such as during her tour of Sun Studio in Memphis, in a passage on Beale Street's inauthentic reincarnation, and in much of a chapter on Appalachia. But she-- and her editor(s)-- seem to not recognize when the writing works and when it does not. Petrusich favors "strong" verbs ("chairs congregate") and cartoonish hyperbole.
Some of her points just don't make sense: "Despite a mesmerizing performance style, [Ramblin' Jack] Elliott was never much of a songwriter." Many fine songwriters do not sing, and many accomplished performers do not write their songs. Her claim that "the classic Americana myth" depends on "objects" rather than "emotions or memories or facts" seems a glib take on a complex idea.
While Petrusich has a passion for her subject, her writing does not balance inspiration and precision. The result is a book that moves like a scratchy old record: around and around and around, making sounds but no consistent or memorable sense.
David Maloof is a writer in Belchertown. He can be reached at David@ProWriting4.com. 