Drawing on interviews with members of N.W.A.—which founding member Ice Cube once famously called the “World’s Most Dangerous Group—their friends, families and musical associates, journalist Gerrick Kennedy vividly tells the fast-paced, captivating story of the group’s rise, fall and enduring legacy in Parental Discretion Is Advised.

With the staccato, sure-fire delivery of a rap artist, Kennedy chronicles the early lives of each of N.W.A’s members—Eazy-E, who died of complications of AIDS in 1995, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren and DJ Yella—and how they came together to form N.W.A. Dre and Eazy met up as members of the World Class Wrecking Crew, mixing and sampling music at crowded venues around Los Angeles; the two saw rap as way of achieving a better life for themselves. The two eventually meet up with MC Ren, DJ Yella and Ice Cube, who writes many of the lyrics for the group’s biggest hits, including “F*ck Tha Police” and “Gangsta Gangsta.” When the group releases Straight Outta Compton in 1988, the album launches their careers even as it marks the beginning of the end for the group. Kennedy chronicles the now well-known story of Ice Cube’s financial disputes with Eazy and Dre and his subsequent move to a successful solo career, as well as the predatory management practices of their first manager, Jerry Heller. As Kennedy points out, N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton was a “sonic Molotov cocktail that ignited a firestorm with acidic lyrics which shocked the world.”

Kennedy’s compulsively readable book shines a glowing light on a brilliant group once accused of destroying America’s moral fabric but now occupies a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for their astonishing contributions to music.

James Brown’s impact on American popular culture reverberates so deeply through music and race relations that writers are still attempting to uncover the man behind the legend. In Kill ’Em and Leave, acclaimed writer James McBride (The Color of Water) seeks to explain why, for African Americans, Brown remains the “song of our life, the song of our entire history.”

The troubled soul singer revolutionized American music—fusing jazz and funk, for example—but he didn’t appear on the cover of Rolling Stone during his lifetime, and music critics often treated him as a joke.

McBride’s portrait of Brown is part cultural history, part music criticism and part memoir—as a child, McBride stood across the street from Brown’s house in Queens, waiting for a glimpse of his hero. Drawing on interviews with the singer’s family and friends, many of whom have never before spoken on the record about Brown, McBride paints a gloomy portrait of a man haunted by the demons of insecurity and mistrust, a musician whose career ascended rapidly and descended just as quickly, and an individual who insisted that children stay in school and who left most of his fortune to provide financial aid to children caught in the web of poverty. Brown so distrusted banks that he hid money everywhere and, McBride writes, always walked around with $3,000 worth of cashier’s checks for the last 20 years of his life. 

Brown’s insecurity filtered down to members of his band, whom he mistreated, paid poorly and often spied on to see who was speaking badly of him behind his back; in short, McBride points out, he “dehumanized them.” In the end, Brown is a product of the South—a land of masks, in McBride’s words—where no one, especially a black man, can ever be himself.

McBride’s energetic storytelling, his sympathy for his subject and his deeply personal writing tell a sad tale of one of our most influential musicians.

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The story of how the Internet brought the imperious music business to its knees has never been told more succinctly and readably than it is here. Beginning his narrative in 1995, when the compact disc format reigned, Stephen Witt focuses on the transformative importance of four primary figures. They are Karlheinz Brandenburg, developer of the MP3 compression technology that enables the vast amount of digital sound data on a CD to be “squeezed” down to a more manageable size for easier playback and transfer; Doug Morris, the aggressive and musically adventurous head of Universal Music Group who presided over the volcanic rise of rap music; Bennie Lydell “Dell” Glover, an hourly worker at a CD manufacturing plant in North Carolina who sneaked thousands of copies of superstar albums out of the plant to post on the Internet before they were released for public sale; and “Kali,” a shadowy presence who, through a network of leakers like Glover, masterminded the Internet distribution of this enormous trove of pirated music.

The tragic flaw of the record companies—Morris’ chief among them—was believing they could ignore culture-shattering technology. After all, CD duplication had advanced to the point that they could manufacture albums for a few pennies each and sell them for $16.98 and up. Who’d want to disrupt such a cozy setup? So instead of coming to terms with this new world, the record labels fought back—quite ineffectually—with public relations campaigns and lawsuits against individuals, seeming like bullies every time they won. The upshot is that record stores have all but vanished and the CD is a withering format.

While Witt streamlines his account, he doesn’t oversimplify it. He covers the creation of iTunes and the iPod, the expansion of broadband, the brief but flamboyant life of Napster, Steve Jobs’ futile attempts to hire Morris and the wily Morris’ ability to prosper even as the empire he built crumbles. How Music Got Free cries out for a movie treatment like The Social Network.

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

As host of “The Thistle & Shamrock” on National Public Radio (NPR), Fiona Ritchie has bewitched many a listener with carefully curated playlists of traditional Celtic tunes, stories of her native Scotland, and, of course, that accent—mellifluous with a bit of a burr. No one is better qualified to take stock of Scots-Irish music than the NPR host, and in Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia, she does just that. Ritchie co-authored the book with Doug Orr, a longtime advocate of folk music who is president emeritus of Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina. Although their backgrounds are different—Orr is a North Carolina native—the two music lovers achieve perfect harmony on the page, offering in-depth perspectives on a migratory and enduring art form.

Bascom Lamar Lunsford, known as the Minstrel of the Appalachians, performing at “Singing on the Mountain” at Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, ca. 1940. 

Beginning with medieval-era ballads, Wayfaring Strangers traces the history of Celtic music from its European roots to its arrival in America via Scots-Irish immigrants during the 18th and 29th centuries. Many of the new arrivals from the Old Country settled in the southern Appalachians, where their lonesome ballads and sprightly fiddle tunes became part of a rich mix of regional sounds. Meeting and melding with English, German, and African-American styles, their music became part of a blend that would provide the underpinning for bluegrass and modern folk. 

Naturally enough, Wayfaring Strangers lingers in the misty glens of Ireland and Scotland. Paying tribute to Celtic culture, the book provides plenty of background on the instruments, themes and song styles prevalent in those countries. Special sidebars spotlight the fiddle, the harp, and the bagpipes, as well as ballad types and traditions. The authors move smoothly through 400 years of history and arrive in contemporary times to consider the Scots-Irish-influenced music of Doc Watson, the Carter Family, Bob Dylan and Bill Monroe. Interviews with musicologists further clarify the musical ties between Scotland and Ireland, which are symbolized, respectively, by the thistle and the shamrock.

Acclaimed singer-songwriter Doc Watson playing guitar in 1987.

“’Connection:’ how often we use this word,” Ritchie writes. “It holds the promise of tangled textures below the surface, of stories to be told, of discoveries to be made.” As it happens, she shares a special connection with her co-author. During her inaugural trip to the United States in 1980, Ritchie studied for a semester at UNC-Charlotte, where Orr, coincidentally, was a vice chancellor. Impressed with the city and its dynamic music scene, she settled there the following year. She found an early supporter in Orr, who was instrumental in establishing Charlotte’s NPR affiliate, WFAE-FM. Ritchie started out at the station as a volunteer and made her debut, at Orr’s urging, as a radio host in 1981 with “The Thistle & Shamrock.” Two years later, the show was launched nationally by Public Radio International. It’s now one of NPR’s most popular offerings.

No doubt it’ll be Ritchie’s voice fans hear in their heads as they read Wayfaring Strangers. Filled with maps, woodcuts, paintings, and photographs of impossibly picturesque Scottish and Irish locales, the book is a treasure trove of imagery and information. A companion CD with 20 tunes by folk favorites like Dougie McClean, Pete Seeger, Jean Ritchie and Dolly Parton, who contributed the book’s foreword, is bound to inspire a bit of impromptu string-band jamming. Music lovers, prepare to be transported.

Photographs by Hugh Morton; © North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Woody Guthrie’s place in American culture is well established. Despite a peripatetic, disjointed life lived under sometimes very painful circumstances, Guthrie nevertheless emerged as our quintessential folk balladeer and outspoken traveling troubadour.

In celebration of Guthrie’s 100th birthday in 2012, Robert Santelli, executive director of the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, has written This Land Is Your Land: Woody Guthrie and the Journey of an American Folk Song, which gathers the basics about the Guthrie legend, with special focus on the origins and legacy of the fitful folksinger’s enduring and well-beloved collection of American folksongs and anthems.

In no way a full-on biography, Santelli’s work nevertheless offers a useful, general chronological overview of Guthrie (1912-1967) and his infernally maverick ways, through which he somehow carved out a career as musician, poet/lyricist, radio personality, recording artist, synthesizer of folk songs and children’s ditties, and as the author of the fictionalized autobiography Bound for Glory.

Guthrie was born in Oklahoma, later moved to Texas, then eventually found some success in California as a wandering minstrel who sang songs that chronicled the plight of the Depression-era poor, Dust Bowl migrants, union workers and the otherwise marginalized. Guthrie gained both notoriety and necessary public exposure on the coast, then proceeded to criss-cross the country in pursuit of haphazard work, finally finding some semblance of a professional and personal life in New York. Alas, Santelli’s coverage also includes Guthrie’s miserable track record as a husband and father—a man with a penchant for dragging wives and children around the country in pursuit of sketchy projects.

Guthrie’s rootlessness was a huge part of his mythology. It made him famous and a beloved spokesperson for the underdog, while also underpinning the insecure lifestyle that made living with him so difficult. Worse, Guthrie developed Huntington’s disease, and the final decade of his life was spent in hospitals fighting an affliction that robbed him of his ability to communicate as before.

Of necessity, much of Santelli’s factual narrative comes off as fairly bleak, though throughout there is a hagiographic tone in his treatment of Guthrie, the man’s single-minded dedication to his purpose and his ultimate place in American history. To that end, the author expends an almost equal amount of words on the Guthrie song catalog, with deep focus on “This Land Is Your Land,” taking the reader through the song’s many versions and the public performances that eventually helped solidify its place in the patriotic repertoire. This includes extensive discussion of Irving Berlin and his “God Bless America,” which Santelli sees as the candy-coated thematic forerunner to Guthrie’s more realistic classic. Other personalities that emerge in this story include folk pioneer and Guthrie colleague Pete Seeger, singer Kate Smith, producer Moses Asch, Bob Dylan—who copped the Guthrie modus operandi by way of exploiting it to his own artistic ends—and even Bruce Springsteen, who never knew Guthrie but acknowledges his debt to the original.

Santelli’s engaging opus is studded with interesting photos, and appended material includes the various texts of “This Land Is Your Land” and a wide-ranging bibliography. The book’s foreword is written by Guthrie’s daughter Nora.