Where Dead Voices Gather

by Nick Tosches

Book Overview

A forgotten singer from the early days of jazz is at the center of this riveting book -- a narrative that is part mystery, part biography, part meditation on the meaning and power of music.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316895075
• ISBN13: 9780316895071
• Release Date: August 2001
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.6" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

thank you

finding stuff on emmett miller is very hard i bought The Minstrel Man from Georgia and fell in love with his voice right away and emotion behind it thank you for providing info behind the voice and the man, i am far from a racist and anybody who claims emmett was a racist is covering up their own problems. this book is perfect for anybody who likes roots and blues and early country wish there were pictures though

The Whole Shebang and MORE

Nick Toches has written a loving, rigorous and MAJOR history of music in America. One other reviewer in these pages writes that he feels the author was bored by the time he wrote this information down. For this reader at least, NOTHING could be further than the truth. Toches shows us that his compendious heart and brain are not satisfied by anything less than EVERYTHING.It's a book about human memory and the hunger to set the facts and liner-notes straight by reaching out to touch the men and women who once lived by their music. Toches' hunger is ravenous and overwhelming. As the poet Jonathan Williams has written: GET HOT OR GET OUT! To read this book you need patience, the patience to love the richness of all the twistings and turnings, the hidden connections, the links of these songs and their singers with our own times. If you want to know about histories of the Blues links to Minstrel singers and Country and Rock and the age of Crooners...and...You'd like to walk with the Devil but God Bless You Mr Toches for bringing back a world.A Stunning Achievement.

Beyond the Valley of Dead Horses

It's hard to know if Virgil sat and wondered, dismayed, at the withering of the Word, listened to words crumble from the mouths of fools with all the decay of ruined cities but none of their beauty. In the heaps of books written about everything, badly, and about things whose innate qualities make anything about them from the start dubious, to find, to trust a writer with your/our time is a thing not easily done. Music today defies critique like a handicapped person being graded on a test that's beyond their ability. This is not to equate them, for a handicapped person has far more substance, intelligence, beauty, honesty, in short, true humanity, than the music being made today and the pawns playing it; but, it is to say that something incapable of a certain level of intelligence and responsibilty, will never meet the requisits of worthy criticism. Through Emmet Miller, Nick defines what these requisits are.Like Ezra Pound and Picasso taught us last century, the true critic is the artist. These are the people that take the soil, fertile from the dead that lived before, and create life; who take the changes of old and make the rock of new that is always filled with the ancient and holy ghost, soul, living now. Through Nick's eyes and ears, we are escorted beyond the walls that keep our songs and poems, our muti-colored peoples seperate, into a realm where everything corresponds and reverberates in relation to everything else, no matter how distant.Where Dead Voices Gather is not just a book about Emmett Miller, the great minstrel singer, but about all the living and all the dead and how we conceive of ourselves and the surruounding world. From the blackened face of these performers to the ladders of dna that will ever climb and entwine through our bodies and limbs, we find answers that rework what we thought before.

It's about time.

Emmett Miller's name has been whispered in hallowed tones for years in serious music circles. He is a true source point for the "blue yodel' so populorized by Hank Williams and countless others which came in his wake. This book delivers the goods with style and sincerity. Buy It! Also, get the cd of Emmet's outstanding work. it's really something to yodel about.

The completion of a 25-year quest

We all have our obsessions that can lead to our downfalls. Our Moby Dicks. Our black pearls. For Nick Tosches, that obsession over the past quarter-century has been Emmett Miller, a now-obscure minstrel singer from Georgia who recorded for OkeH and Victor in the '20s and '30s. When Tosches first wrote about Miller in the mid-'70s (in his book "Country"), little was known of Miller. No photographs of the man were known to have survived, little biographical information existed, and his music was difficult to find in print. Over the course of the next 26 years, Tosches and a few associates tracked down leads and rumors about Miller's origins, until a somewhat better picture of the man started to emerge during the '90s. A few photographs turned up eventually. His grave was found in a bad section of Macon, Georgia. And one by one a scant few people who had known Miller or had worked with him turned up with hazy, somewhat unreliable tales of his career. Which raises the question of why Tosches would spend so much time and energy chasing after the ghost of an obscure singer who had died - alcoholic and penniless - in 1962? Part of the answer is that Miller was a truly gifted vocalist whose unique style influenced the likes of Bob Wills, Tommy Duncan, Leon Redbone, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, and others. Part of the answer is also that Miller's music is nearly uncategorizable; his unusual vocal style made a strong impression on country singers in years to come, but his music wasn't country by any stretch. In fact, with backing on his records by the likes of Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, guitarist Eddie Lang, and drummer Gene Krupa, Miller was rubbing shoulders with some of the best jazz musicians of the era. Finally, Miller's career took place during the final years of minstrelsy (the history of which Tosches devotes musch space here), and Miller represented a last flickering spark in the embers of blackface musical comedy before dying completely during the Great Depression. Ultimately, Tosches' quest was only partially successful at best. We get a picture of the major events of Miller's life; his birth, the essentials of his career, his marriage (late in life), and his death. But of the man himself only dim hints; brief glances at the contents of a room in the split second after a light bulb flashes, then burns out. Gaps of knowledge still exist, as Tosches freely admits, but he's followed the trail as far as he thinks he can and leaves it now to younger scholars. A consistently fine work, in the now-well-established Tosches style. If one complaint can be made, it's that photographs of Miller and the book's other subjects might have been included. But perhaps it's for the best that none are present. Pictures of Miller aren't all that hard to find at this point - they're out there if you know where to look - and if anything the lack of photographs lends to the ghost-like portait of Miller that Tosches paints.