Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This book is about four remarkable young men who transformed themselves into promoters and performers of a tradition they were not born into but which they adopted and which, in turn, adopted them. In doing so, they helped recover both the living roots of most American popular music and a distinctly American art form which was a fusion of African, European, and Native American cultural sources. I know (knew in one case) all four, some better than others, as well as many of the other people discussed in the book, but I did not previously have access to so many personal and other details of their lives and experience, arranged systematically, and combined with personal testimony and commentary by all of the principals. I have inevitable small quibbles on omissions and errors (the funniest is a typo in which Mike Seeger's droning fiddle became a "drowning fiddle") and on some other features of the book, but, on the whole, the author did a fantastic job of assembling and presenting a lot of information and of delineating the fascinating issues of identity and culture posed by the lives of Mike Seeger, Tom Paley, John Cohen, and Tracy Schwarz.
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