'Effing the Ineffable Obsession

“If It Sounds Good, It Is Good,” by Richard Manning, 2020

Music is a refuge crossing ideological or cultural boundaries. It’s also an ancient method of broad social connection. It trips and trains right into our ears and body as is, unmediated. Manning wrote this book as a banjo and folk guitar player. He tries to explain how players play well. To him it’s a form of Taoist ‘zen’ – of muscle memory, of 10,000 hours of practice, of the emotional and rhythmic gut, of the mimicking ear. I.E. you join a band to learn how to play. He thinks that reading music in this context is a barrier and this book reflects his theory.

Manning clearly points to the origins of U.S. roots music in Africa and Europe. He thinks the banjo’s African origins and pentatonic scale and the fiddle’s Celtic roots fused in Appalachia, then flowed down to Nashville, Memphis, St. Louis and New Orleans, where they united with the North American guitar and the African drum. This process birthed blues, jazz, bluegrass, country, rockabilly, western swing, old time music, Cajun, folk and rock. Drums were predominantly African and became part of the hostility to the music by Christian religionists, a.k.a. ‘jungle music.’ Improvisation became part of some of these styles, a form of collective social playing. At bottom he understands these styles are proletarian, sometimes of grinding poverty, with roots in labor and social connections. 

As a journalist, Manning recounts his musical life, including his teachers. He meets the talented groundlings of the music world, who labor in democratic obscurity but carry the obsession. He learns how to overcome performance anxiety and later learns to play a guitar without a pick. He discusses the battle between clawhammer and finger-picking styles in bluegrass. He has a passion for the classic and mythic varieties of Martin and Gibson guitars and gets one restored. He wrestles over the role of drugs and alcohol among so many musicians that seem to ‘unlock’ the doors of perception. As an atheist, he tracks the ecstatic musical roots of older traditions of Christianity, illustrating the conflict between Dionysian and Apollonian attitudes. He covers a bit of the history of U.S. music and insists in the mists of time that music and language are the roots of what it means to be human, not labor - although music is a product of creative labor!  He explains that music is made up of sound and physicality, directly connecting to the human voice, dance and movement. He dissects the identitarian falsity of ‘cultural appropriation’ by looking at the origins of hybridized rice. He interviews scientists on the roots of music in science and brain studies. 

Part of his look at the reality of music merges with pop culture popes like Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell, TED talks, along with the idealist musings of Einstein, where time and space actually disappear. This is a small but weak bit of the book, verging on mysticism.

This book is for players and listeners, written in a personal and explanatory way, dropping many names, known and relatively unknown. Rock is not on Manning’s radar, as his focus is U.S. roots music. Bands like the Grateful Dead blended many of the aspects of music he recalls – dancing, drugs, ecstatic atmosphere, improvisation, a broad roots palette, visuals and the social context of the ‘Dead Heads.’ Jerry Garcia, their lead guitarist, started as a bluegrass musician until he found it restrictive. Phil Lesh came out of classical music; Pigpen out of the blues; Kreutzmann inspired by funk and R&B; Hart specialized in jazz and world music; Weir out of rock. Their solution was to help build ‘jam’ music, which merged these styles and extended improvisation, not just short breaks or bridges. Manning is a player in the older folk culture so this doesn’t seem to be his thing. Bluegrass or ‘hillbilly jazz’ is his version of improvisation. 

Except for a short mention of political blues, political songs don’t get a mention in Manning’s book either, though he is clearly a lefty, a socialist, a subversive of sorts. That might be because political lyrics are in more of the intellectual realm. Nor does he dip into the understanding that there are 9 kinds of intelligence, not just two. Musical intelligence and physical intelligence are two of those 9. A worthwhile book for those who like music and have always wondered about its beauty and origins. 

Other prior blog reviews on music, us blog search box, upper left: “In Search of the Blues,” “Cool Town,” Kids”(Patti Smith); “Zappa,” “Laurel Canyon,” “Grateful Dead,” “Mississippi Delta,” “Life”(Keith Richards); “Janis Joplin,” “We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years,” "33 Revolutions Per Minute," "Searching for Sugarman," "Marie and Rosetta,” “The Blues – A Visual History,” “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Echo in the Canyon,” “The Music Sell-Outs,” “Palmer’s Bar,” “Treme,” “Subculture,” “The Long Strange Trip.” 

And I bought it at May Day Book’s cut-out section! 

The Kulture Kommissar 

November 21, 2020