Description
Book SynopsisIn
The Birth of Rock and Roll, Americana collector Jim Linderman has arranged a storyboard of sorts that dramatizes the spirit of rock and roll in its early dayswhen a juke-joint with fifty patrons was a big show, as Linderman writes in his introduction. A church with fifty congregants was a full house. The annual square dance at the town hall, a rent party, a fish-fry, the honky-tonk piano in the whore house, the union meeting There was no real money in it. A performer was lucky to be fed, get drunk and get laid. The photographs have little to do with the conventional iconography of the birth of rock and roll: conspicuously absent are pictures of young white men in Memphis, poodle skirts, Alan Freed and Bill Haley''s Brylcream. These photographs instead document and celebrate the pure but indefinable essence of rocking. Ordinary, anonymous men, women and childrensome white, some blackare holding guitars and strumming while looking relaxed or frantic, but nearly always blissful
Trade ReviewThe new work doesn't come with companion music, but it doesn't need it. Rather, Linderman guides the reader through a silent meditation on sounds that long ago ceased to exist, their only remaining echo courtesy of a chance encounter with the yay-sayer. -- Randall Roberts * Los Angeles Times *
