Mystery Train Research Articles

Rocking Chair Pop

Rocking Chair Pop

Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of The Great Gatsby

Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of <i>The Great Gatsby</i>

“Visions and Versions of America”: Greil Marcus’s Rock Journalism as Cultural Criticism

This article seeks to elucidate to what degree Greil Marcus’s rock journalism can be considered an American cultural criticism. Is it legitimate to advance the idea that his rock journalism is more than rock writing? And what role does America play in this context? When both early American rock journalism and the field of American studies try to answer the question “What is America?” it becomes obvious that the latter would profit from analyzing rock writing. This promising dialogue, however, exists only in rudimentary form. By discussing Marcus’s texts (especially Mystery Train and his writings on punk rock), this article offers one possibility of establishing this dialogue.

Who Did It First: Great Pop Cover Songs and Their Original Artists BobLeszczak. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman &amp; Littlefield, 2014.Who Did It First: Great Rhythm and Blues Cover Songs and Their Original Artists Bob Leszczak. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman &amp; Littlefie

Who Did It First: Great Pop Cover Songs and Their Original Artists Bob Leszczak. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.Who Did It First: Great Rhythm and Blues Cover Songs and Their Original Artists Bob Leszczak. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013Who Did It First: Great Rock and Roll Cover Songs and Their Original Artists Bob Leszczak. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014Bob Leszczak has delivered three marvelous books that capture much of the history of American popular music over the last seven decades. As the titles indicate, these books are organized around the concept of one singer or group recording (or covering) a song that had already been recorded by another singer or group. Covering is quite common in the music business, and it takes many forms. It could be the hit of an original artist recorded by a subsequent artist who might have as big or even a bigger hit than the original artist. Or it can be a song that initially did not have much commercial success but was taken by another performer- to-hit status. There are many stories associated with cover songs, and Leszczak seems to know close to all of them.One of the more unusual covers-at least in the sense of commercial success (or lack thereof) and history-is Elvis Presley's recording of Mystery Train. Presley's rollicking ride on that train long ago entered the annals of rock history as a masterpiece, and he would still be performing it in concert in the 1970s. The song was written by Little Junior Parker and recorded by Little Junior's Flames in 1953 for Sun Records. The original version was a minor regional hit but did not chart nationally. Elvis would record it for Sun Records in 1955 in what would be his last release on the Sun label. Elvis's rendition also would be a regional hit that did not chart nationally. Nor would its RCA single re-release in 1956 hit the national charts. So here we have a legendary song given a legendary performance by a legendary artist, and neither this performance nor the original enjoyed commercial success in the typical use of that term.In these books, Leszczak discusses 1,173 songs that have been covered. They go as far back as at least 1928 (Al Jolson's My Mammy covered thirty-nine years later by The Happenings), although most are from the 1940s on. More than these 1,173 songs, however, are discussed. Leszczak often takes the opportunity to discuss other songs related to the artists or to the covered song at hand. He also discusses other notable covers (often album cuts) of the song being discussed. These discussions are uniformly informative and interesting. The breadth of Leszczak's knowledge is so great that even the most informed reader will likely come away thinking on more than one occasion, I did not know that.These books are well organized, and everything is readily accessible. At the beginning of each book, there is an alphabetical listing for each song, e.g., Act Naturally by Buck Owens before The Beatles. …

Keeping It Real? Authenticity, Commercialisation and Family in Australian Country Music

Keeping It Real? Authenticity, Commercialisation and Family in Australian Country Music

If I Had Possession over Judgment Day: Augmenting Robert Johnson

If I Had Possession over Judgment Day: Augmenting Robert Johnson

Echo and reverb: fabricating space in popular music recording, 1900-1960

Echo and Reverb is the first history of acoustically imagined space in popular music recording. The book documents how acoustic effects-reverberation, room ambience, and echo-have been used in recordings since the 1920s to create virtual sonic architectures and landscapes. Author Peter Doyle traces the development of these acoustically-created worlds from the ancient Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus to the dramatic acoustic architectures of the medieval cathedral, the grand concert halls of the 19th century, and those created by the humble parlor phonograph of the early 20th century, and finally, the revolutionary age of rock 'n' roll. Citing recordings ranging from Gene Austin's 'My Blue Heaven' to Elvis Presley's 'Mystery Train,' Doyle illustrates how non-musical sound constructs, with all their rich and contradictory baggage, became a central feature of recorded music. The book traces various imagined worlds created with synthetic echo and reverb-the heroic landscapes of the cowboy west, the twilight shores of south sea islands, the uncanny alleys of dark cityscapes, the weird mindspaces of horror movies, the private and collective spaces of teen experience, and the funky juke-joints of the mind.

In and Along the Mississippi

In O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Mystery Train the Coen brothers and Jim Jarmusch choose the state of Mississippi and the city of Memphis, Tennessee as the settings of their heroes' peregrinations. Music permeates Joel Coen's and Jim Jarmusch's cinematic spaces, so much that it influences their narrative and stylistic perspectives and structures their works. The aim of this paper is to examine how the Coen brothers' and Jarmusch's choice of the musical field as a territory for their reconstructions of the South enables them to collate distinct artistic domains and genres in their representations of border incidents between stories, legends and history.

The comeback corpse in Hollywood: Mystery train, true romance, and the politics of Elvis in the ‘90s

The comeback corpse in Hollywood: Mystery train, true romance, and the politics of Elvis in the ‘90s

Fans and Critics: Greil Marcus's Mystery Train as Rock 'n' Roll History

Mystery Train is not simply a book about music. Many of its tenets, in fact, derive directly from certain specific views of the academic discipline of American Studies, which Greil Marcus studied during his years at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-to-late 1960s. Mystery Train embodies strategies implicit in rock history writing that derive from larger trends in American intellectual history. The written history of rock 'n' roll is directly related to the history of those social groups whose concerns and ideals this music has come to represent—most characteristically, the American counterculture. Greil Marcus located the different periods of rock 'n' roll's history at various points in a repeating cycle: it emerges, rebels, slips back into conformity, and waits in an almost hibernatory state until it amasses enough discursive power to speak eloquently again of its cultural milieu.

Ernest Tubb: The Texas Troubadour , and: Go Cat Go!: Rockabilly Music and Its Makers (review)

discovered the benefits of maintaining a low profile. Attempts to influence politics or to participate significantly in the local community are not well received. Nor have communities absorbed muchJapanese culture. Sushi has a long way to go before it replaces barbecue. The book illuminates important aspects ofthe much-heralded globalization of business through examining the complicated interaction and mutual adaptation oftwo different cultures both within several companies and in the broader community . The types of change that a foreign economic presence can bring to a community and the limits ofthat change both become clear. In the process, Kim raises significant issues about the role and malleability of culture in business. Ernest Tubb: The Texas Troubadour By Ronnie Pugh Duke University Press, 1996 437 pp. Cloth, $29.95 Go Cat Go!: Rockabilly Music and Its Makers By Craig Morrison University of Illinois Press, 1996 300 pp. Cloth, $29.95 Reviewed by Bill C. MalonO, professor emeritus of history at Tulane University, New Orleans, now living in Madison, Wisconsin. He is the author of Country Music, USA and Southern Music/American Music. Ronnie Pugh's biography of Ernest Tubb and Craig Morrison's study ofthe rockabillies are more than worthy additions to the growing list ofbooks on southern musicians; they are also contributions to the history ofthe southern working class. Although they chronicle the lives and careers of very different types of musicians, they nevertheless tell us much about the transformation of working-class culture in the thirty years beginning with the Great Depression and about the ways in which working people coped with those dramatic changes. White working-class southerners don't 118 Reviews often get books written about them unless they become a public nuisance, as did Pretty Boy Floyd or Larry Flynt, or unless they excel in some area of public approval such as sports, military service, the ministry, or music. Musical excellence, as a matter of fact, didn't begin to inspire much in the way of academic scholarship until about thirty years ago, even though people like Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, Bob Wills, Hank Williams, and Elvis Presley had long been demonstrating the veneration that southern folk have for their musical heroes. Since that time there has been an avalanche ofwriting on country musicians and related stylists. The quality and style of this material are of course highly uneven, ranging from nothing more than fan adulation and breezy journalistic prose to serious, analytic discourses such as Robert Cantwell's Bluegrass Breakdown and Greil Marcus's Mystery Train. Whether aimed at an academic audience, or at those who get their intellectual sustenance from drugstore magazine racks, this literature should command the attention of anyone who is interested in the history of southern working people. Country-music books often reveal little more than the perceptions of their writers, but with some exceptions, they also tell us much about the way working folk dealt with the powerful forces that have transformed their region and culture in this century. Music has accompanied every successive transformation of southern life, providing a sense of identity, community, and emotional release for people who were being relentlessly removed from their older social moorings. Like most of us who have written on southern music, the authors of the two books reviewed here began as fans of their subjects. Few writers, though, have been as refreshingly candid as Ronnie Pugh is when he talks about his relationship to Ernest Tubb. With no apparent desire to sample any other kind of experience , Pugh grew up in a comfortable, religiously devout, and ardently Republican home in Marshall, Texas, far removed from the working-class environment that spawned Ernest Tubb. He tells us, for example, that he "wouldn't dream of going" to the famous Reo Palm Isle dance hall, only thirty miles away in Longview . He first heard Ernest Tubb on his television show in 1966, long after the Texas Troubadour's peak years of stardom had passed. Pugh nevertheless writes with remarkable objectivity about his musical hero, convincingly describes the beer-joint milieu that first nourished Tubb's honky-tonk style of music, and persuasively argues that he was central to most of the significant innovations that...

"Just Like Eddie" or as far as a boy can go: Vedder, Barthes, and Handke Dismember Mama

“Just like Eddie”1 or as far as a boy can go: Vedder, Barthes, and Handke Dismember Mama Stephanie Barbé Hammer 1. can’t find a better man2 A feminist hitchhiker/hijacker on/of the rock and roll culture bandwagon, I grab the wheel and direct a critical detour from the wild and wooly trail mapped out by Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces. I track his assumption that rock culture — the stars of whom have replaced both heroes and cinema icons — provides a useful, crucial set of metaphors for thinking about contemporary high-culture, and extend the route with my conviction that both high culture writers and theorists are canonized within and beyond academe in ways that mimic the vagaries of rock and roll “fame.”3 Marcus notes in his earlier work, Mystery Train, that rock music is not so much an object of interpretation as an interpretive enabler for our own particular situation — a hermeneutic which “acts upon” the listener/viewer and which produces different meanings at different moments (Street on Marcus, 157). So, I will use one man to get another; I leave Marcus I and turn on Eddie Vedder, lead singer of Pearl Jam, whom I turn into an apparatus rather than a mere object (although he is this also) in order to shed light upon the work of Roland Barthes and Peter Handke. It is also apropos; Barthes repeatedly expressed his admiration for such underground masculine icons as professional wrestlers (one wonders what he would have made of grunge), while Handke has frequently cited rock lyrics in his most seemingly neo-classical works, as in the pastoral poem Beyond the Villages (Über die Dörfer), which is prefaced by a quote from Creedence Clearwater Revival. I would like Barthes and Handke to meet (and jam) on Eddie Vedder’s stage for several reasons. First, I bewail their relegation to the esoteric heights of high literary endeavor; they have become so “important” that no one knows who they are, as opposed to Vedder who is so unimportant that everyone knows about him. Like the critically acclaimed art films that no one sees and that can’t be found on video, and the avant-garde art exhibitions which no one goes to, Barthes and Handke are writers that no one reads, because their work can’t be located at Super Crown or at B. Dalton. No one, meaning, regular people; no one meaning everyone who isn’t an intellectual. Second, I distrust the fact that they have consistently been written about in such complete accordance with the stereotypes about French and German language and culture which have functioned for at least 200 years (i.e. since the Enlightenment). Third, I suspect that Eddie Vedder is indeed “important,” in spite of himself. Fourth, in my fem-fan capacity, I want to introduce questions of gender, sexuality, desire, and pleasure/pain to the mix of rock and roll, cultural studies, postmodern writing and see how they play, for play they must. Will their (my) presence wreck the party which is postmodernism/ity? Maybe, or maybe their presence make any party more interesting, as Leslie Gore once tearfully implied. Joni Mitchell, Simone de Beauvoir, Bjork, Desree, and Avital Ronell second that emotion — that it is necessary for girls to deconstruct boys who deconstruct. Clear nationalist biases are at work in the general understanding of Barthes and Handke, and these transparently “obvious,” genetic differences between the French and the German — between a wry ironic pederasty and an ascetic, parzival-like heterosexuality — are tempting, for they look very neat; Barthes and Handke become, according to such orientations, mere inverted mirrors of each other, and on the surface (if only there) this binary holds. The French one moved from semiotic criticism to a writing which increasingly proclaimed itself to be personal, eccentric, and unscientific — a creative writing which made the essay into a kind of internal theater, a critical strip-tease which resembled the disreputable joints Barthes frequented on the night he was killed. Not surprisingly, the written words about Barthes mimic the perception of him; they spill over the pages in a testimonial to bliss, they break the rules, they invoke photography...

Blue Moon of Kentucky Rising Over the Mystery Train: The Complex Construction of Country Music

Research Article| January 01 1995 Blue Moon of Kentucky Rising Over the Mystery Train: The Complex Construction of Country Music David Sanjek David Sanjek Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1995) 94 (1): 29–55. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-94-1-29 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation David Sanjek; Blue Moon of Kentucky Rising Over the Mystery Train: The Complex Construction of Country Music. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 January 1995; 94 (1): 29–55. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-94-1-29 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSouth Atlantic Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1995 by Duke University Press1995 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Riding the "Mystery Train": An Interview with David Wojahn

Riding the "Mystery Train": An Interview with David Wojahn

Postmodernism and American Cultural Difference: Dispatches, Mystery Train, and The Art of Japanese Management

Postmodern discourse has always been most at home on the margins. Through its cultural practices and the pronouncements of theory, postmodernism has characteristically presented itself as the sign of the eccentric or of the many ways in which difference might be enabled to speak outside of, and in opposition to, the traditional encodings of gender, politics, authority, and ethnicity. Within contemporary American culture, however, postmodernism might also be read as a discourse that is at once liberating and cynically symptomatic; its subversive irony and disruptive gestures can be, and have been, seen as both resistance and "hip" resignation. This is perhaps the inescapable condition of postmodern culture, particularly if the postmodern is read as the cultural correlative of late capitalism, and it is this homely condition that I want to address in what follows. If postmodernism might be defined in Jean-Frangois Lyotard's terms as an "incredulity toward metanarratives," then the question of postmodernism's ground for the authority of difference might also be put into ques-

Junior Parker, James Cotton, Pat Hare: "Mystery Train"

Junior Parker, James Cotton, Pat Hare: "Mystery Train"

Lipstick traces: a secret history of the twentieth century

Greil Marcus, author of Mystery Train, widely acclaimed as the best book ever written about America as seen through its music, began work on this new book out of a fascination with the Sex Pistols: that scandalous antimusical group, invented in London in 1975 and dead within two years, which sparked the emergence of the culture called punk. 'I am an antichrist!' shouted singer Johnny Rotten - where in the world of pop music did that come from? Looking for an answer, with a high sense of the drama of the journey, Marcus takes us down the dark paths of counterhistory, a route of blasphemy, adventure, and surprise. This is no mere search for cultural antecedents. Instead, what Marcus so brilliantly shows is that various kinds of angry, absolute demands - demands on society, art, and all the governing structures of everyday life - seem to be coded in phrases, images, and actions passed on invisibly, but inevitably, by people quite unaware of each other. Marcus lets us hear strange yet familiar voices: of such heretics as the Brethren of the Free Spirit in medieval Europe and the Ranters in seventeenth-century England; the dadaists in Zurich in 1916 and Berlin in 1918, wearing death masks, chanting glossolalia; one Michel Mourre, who in 1950 took over Easter Mass at Notre-Dame to proclaim the death of God; the Lettrist International and the Situationist International, small groups of Paris-based artists and writers surrounding Guy Debord, who produced blank-screen films, prophetic graffiti, and perhaps the most provocative social criticism of the 1950s and '60s; the rioting students and workers of May '68, scrawling cryptic slogans on city walls and bringing France to a halt; and, the Sex Pistols in London, recording the savage Anarchy in the U.K., and God Save the Queen. Although the Sex Pistols shape the beginning and the end of the story, Lipstick Traces is not a book about music; it is about a common voice, discovered and transmitted in many forms. Working from scores of previously unexamined and untranslated essays, manifestos, and filmscripts, from old photographs, dada sound poetry, punk songs, collages, and classic texts from Marx to Henri Lefebvre, Marcus takes us deep behind the acknowledged events of our era, into a hidden tradition of moments that would seem imaginary except for the fact that they are real: a tradition of shared utopias, solitary refusals, impossible demands, and unexplained disappearances. Written with grace and force, humor and an insistent sense of tragedy and danger, Lipstick Traces tells a story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself.

The Mystery Train: Portugal's Military Dictatorship 1926-32

The Mystery Train: Portugal's Military Dictatorship 1926-32

Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music

Part 1 Ancestors: Harmonica Frank, 1951 Robert Johnson, 1938. Part 2 Inheritors: The Band - Pilgrim's Progress, Crossing the border, Stranger blues, the weight Sly Stone - the myth of Staggerlee, Staggerlee, Sly stone, Riot, Sly versus superfly, A quiet rebellion Randy Newman - every man is free, Pop Newman's America, Newman's failure, Newman's success Elvis - Presliad, Fanfare, Hillbilly music, raised up, the rockabilly moment, Elvis moves out, the boy who stole the blues, the pink Cadillac, Elvis at home, Mystery train.