Watch Nick Tosches talk Jerry Lee Lewis, 2010
'Resonant, meaningful, truthful – this music is 20th-century America's real gift to the world'
Why has no one in the history of this beautiful and damnably maddening language come up with a better and more expressive word than "culture" to refer to the good stuff?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines "culture" thus: "A particular form or type of intellectual development. Also, the civilization, customs, artistic achievements, etc., of a people, esp. at a certain stage of its development or history." Rightfully this definition is placed well below the primary and more respectable: "The action or practice of cultivating the soil; tillage." Even if we turn from a Latin derivative to Greek – an intellectual if desperate act in itself – we end up back whence we fled, with "eidos": "The distinctive expression of the cognitive or intellectual character of a culture or social group."
I refuse to buy any book that has the word "culture" in its title, subtitle, or jacket copy. It is a word that reeks of the classroom and stultifying academia. It is a dead, boring word, and neither denotes nor connotes anything good. And yet I am about to use it. But only once. I promise.
American culture is a five-car wreck on a highway. The United States is a young country. To look on it with optimistic eyes, it is a brattish child of a country. To look on it with a colder eye, it may be seen as an infant mortality waiting to happen.
When I refer to that five-car wreck, I refer to its music, for its music and its literature of the last century and a half are all that it has given to the world in terms of that thing whose repellent name shall go unspoken.
Rock'n'roll and the rest of it, and all that led up to it – balladry brought across the sea by early settlers and re-made in the strangeness of a new land, the subdued plangent songs of the enslaved in that strange new land, the urban song-mongers of Tin Pan Alley, small-town and big-city buskers, the nova express from black rag-tag post-bellum marching bands, and the accelerating theft and flow of all this between black and white, rural and metropolitan, field and stage – it has been a glorious wreck.
I tried to pry apart the wreckage and delve what lay in, behind, and beyond it in a book called Where Dead Voices Gather, and I probably added to the wreck:"And, of course, that is what all of this is – all of this: the one song, ever changing, ever reincarnated, that speaks somehow from and to and for that which is ineffable within us and without us, that is both prayer and deliverance, folly and wisdom, that inspires us to dance or smile or simply to go on, senselessly, incomprehensibly, beatifically, in the face of mortality and the truth that our lives are more ill-writ, ill-rhymed, and fleeting than any song, except perhaps those songs – that song, endlessly reincarnated – born of that truth, be it the moon and June of that truth, or the wordless blue moan, or the rotgut or the elegant poetry of it. That nameless black-hulled ship of Ulysses, that long black train, that Terraplane, that mystery train, that Rocket '88, that Buick 6 – same journey, same miracle, same end and endlessness."
Those whose portraits appear here represent all that I'm talking about. Their stories, while often enthralling, do not need to be told. You can read them in these pictures, each an evocation, each a celebration and a summoning.There are a few here whom I don't like. I'm not talking about the portraits; I'm talking about those, and the music of those, they portray. Everyone will probably have a few about whom they feel the same. But what would any party or barroom gathering be if there were not a few presences we didn't like? Unimaginable.
Together the music these characters represent is the lament, wail, and bang of that magnificent wreck that has spoken more resonantly, meaningfully, and truthfully to the world than any American statesman since Thomas Jefferson (whose "distinctive expression of the cognitive or intellectual character" of himself and his country had far more in common with Jerry Lee Lewis's or Little Richard's than most recognize).
This gallery is wondrous. I would not be so foolish as to say that you can hear the music by gazing at these portraits; but I will say that I am right now about to dig out Little Richard's Get Rich Quick, and then, after that, the Contours doing Smokey Robinson's First I Look at the Purse; then maybe Wanda Jackson's Fujiyama Mama, followed by Dave Brubeck's Take Five or perhaps Ornette Coleman's Empty Foxhole.So, if you want what's good for you – an escape from that thing so fatally coupled to that word I promised not to use again – just get in the car, like the man says, and don't buckle that cheap, plastic safety belt of intellectual achievement and civilization. Those things will kill you. Just go. OMM
Nick Tosches is the biographer of Jerry Lee Lewis, Dean Martin and Sonny Liston, and has written extensively on American music.
