Book review: Finding the right tune to chronicle music history in modern society

Now in his mid-80s, Joe Boyd defined the term ‘multi-platform’ decades before it was coined in the digital age. 

A fabled music producer who worked with Nick Drake, The Incredible String Band, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and a host of others, he’s a recurring if reluctant presence in any credible history of popular music.

His 2006 memoir, White Bicycles, spins an often-incredible yarn and is one of the great music books in the canon.

There are regular references to that life scattered throughout this mammoth, wide-ranging thesis that takes its critical thrust, literally, from Boyd’s own records. 

From a vast library of music from numerous cultures, continents, styles, and genres that he has assembled during a life-long obsession with — and devotion to — the power of song.

Weighing in at over 800 pages and forensically researched, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain is an imposing history of music in modern global society.

Claiming popular culture as a political weapon, its core conceit is a lofty one, ‘the stories in this book show how unstoppable music is’. 

‘Profound … and beyond’, claims the singer Robert Plant in a testimonial note on the sleeve. But is it?

Written history has long been dominated by academic treatments of social, military, economic, and political conflict. But where does popular culture sit in the telling or the shaping of a history? 

Is it possible to trace the development of a society or a country by advancing a cause for its music? Can societies be sculpted and defined by the pull of a song or a signature dance?

Boyd certainly believes this to be the case and makes a series of strong arguments on music’s behalf, his expansive treatise powered by his own excellent powers of recall and that fabled personal archive. 

To that end he’ll often use a unique personal experience — Boyd was Bob Dylan’s roadie at the seminal Newport Folk Festival — or a reference to a rare elpee to bolster what is often heavy academic jelly. It makes for a fascinating, if often attention-sapping compound.

Tracking the evolution and development of indigenous music in Latin America, Russia, and elsewhere, Boyd argues that music has long been fundamental to political liberation. 

Referring to the South African townships during the years before Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, he suggests that, for some dwellers, ‘singing became the weapon of choice’.

Boyd has a light writing touch too, in keeping with another of his core values: Namely that music is at its most powerful when it is at its most exposed. 

But yet he still resorts to star turns to access the heavier theoretical elements within his essays, and big names and events are dropped frequently. 

The book opens with an essay on Paul Simon’s ground-breaking 1986 elpee, Graceland, as an entry point into the evolution of popular music in South Africa. Indeed the book itself takes its title from ‘Under African Skies’, one of the key tracks on that album.

Similarly, his excellent chapter on the origins of Latino jazz in Cuba starts with Desi Arnaz and the ‘the conga’ in a nightclub and develops into a long love-letter to Dizzy Gillespie and the great jazzmen.

But at regular junctions he’s in acquired taste territory and And the Roots of Rhythm Remain requires a lot of investment. 

In keeping with Boyd’s standing as a keen-eyed and catholic collector, he moves swiftly and widely: Blink and he’s already moved onto the next syncopated rhythm, traditional dance, or prodigious pioneer. 

In one of the closing paragraphs, he references Django Reinhardt, Stéphane Grappelli, Dmitri Pokrovsky, Scratch Perry, Stevie Wonder, and Fela Kuti in the same dizzying lung-burst.

Such scatter-gunning asks an awful lot of the reader, which is why And the Roots of Rhythm Remain is at once a spectacular achievement and also far more of a battle than it might have been.