“Johann Sebastian Bach” by Rick Marschall (Thomas Nelson “Christian Encounters” Series)

This slim volume comes from a series of short biographies entitled “Christian Encounters”, issued by Thomas Nelson, a major publisher of religious books. The series examines the Christian lives of famous people, some obvious (such as Saints Patrick, Francis, and Nicholas), some less so (Jane Austen, Galileo, for example). Johann Sebastian Bach probably falls somewhere in the middle, because while he was not a clergyman as such, a considerable percentage of his musical output - and his life as a whole - was devoted to the church.

As one might expect, this book is deliberately slanted toward a Christian readership rather than the academic musicology audience. Author Rick Marschall, who has a definite gift for reducing complex issues to easily understandable basics without downplaying their true complexity, intends to show that not only did Bach write much music for the specific purpose of worship, even Bach’s secular music was composed with the thought of praising God, and was written under the guidance of divine inspiration.

He makes his case, and he does it very well, if sometimes a bit repetitiously. But in the process, he has come up with an interesting book that may have a difficult time reaching out beyond its target market. While he effectively encapsulates the major events in the composer’s life (adding a few less crucial, but entertaining anecdotes to add color and humanity to his subject), there simply isn’t space in a book this size for the kind of detail and original research an academically-oriented reader would demand from a biography of a major intellectual figure. Moreover, while there is some light analysis and streamlined explanation of concepts from music theory and music history with which a general readership might not be familiar, he makes no attempt to really dig into the sort of intricate technical examination that a college music professor would like to see.

But this is not really a criticism, since the book was not written for scholars, but for the intelligent layman, particularly Christian readers who love Bach’s music and want to know more about the man and the impetus behind his music. Marschall carefully guides these readers through sacred and secular compositions, relating them to events in Bach’s life, exploding a few common myths along the way. For instance, he makes it clear that Bach was not a failure in his time, though his greatest renown outside his home territory was as an organist. He also makes it clear that the reason Bach fell out of fashion almost immediately after his death in 1750 is that the dominant styles in music changed drastically right around that time, not necessarily because he was considered a less-than-worthy composer. We also see how highly regarded Bach was by the major musical figures of the Romantic Era, so that his 20th-century “revival” was more an expansion to a mass-media level, rather than a re-discovery of a totally forgotten figure, as has often been portrayed. The scholars know all this already, but the casual fan may have been misled by less fastidious comments in the popular press. (I know I was deceived on these points during Bach’s burst of popularity in the late 1960’s.) It’s good to have a popularly-written book settle these matters for the general reader.

For the right audience - which need not be limited to the “solid-core” evangelical Christian book reader - this will be a most welcome examination of an often misinterpreted major figure, one who self-identified as a Christian and wrote his music - not as an artistic expression for his own glory - but for what he saw as the glory of God. This thought colored Bach’s work, therefore it colors this book, and author Rick Marschall is perfectly justified in steering this delightful little book in this direction.

“Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage” by Kenneth Silverman

I don’t think it would be too far off the mark to consider John Cage as the single most influential figure in non-popular music during the second half of the 20th century. Love him or hate him, he changed the way “art music” is written, is heard, is notated, is presented, is danced to; well, you get the idea. He set into motion several balls which haven’t stopped rolling yet. Even so, to the public at large - at least that portion to which his name has any meaning whatsoever - he is known almost solely because he composed a “silent” piece of music.

John Cage lived 79 years, 79 intense years filled right to the very end with almost feverish activity, creativity, an unstinting lack of compromise and, in the end, after decades of struggle, world-wide fame and all the others perks which come with long-fought-for acceptance. He lived a complicated, controversy-filled life, one which would be impossible for the average biographer to make sense of. But Kenneth Silverman is not just any biographer. His previous accomplishments include highly regarded books on Houdini, Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel F.B. Morse, Cotton Mather - all easy subjects to write about superficially, but difficult subjects to put into their proper perspective. John Cage, a complex man who never seemed to comfortably settle into one mode of expression or one personal philosophy for very long before he was off on another artistic quest, might very well have been Silverman’s most difficult task yet.

But Silverman tackled the job with a diligence that less thorough authors might spurn. He searched through hundreds of print sources, interviewed people who knew and/or encountered Cage, pored over correspondence, checked facts, compared opinions. The result is a fresh, comprehensive, uncensored, meticulously detailed, carefully explicated examination of a man whose life was filled with contradictions, stubbornly held convictions, and difficult to fathom twists and turns.

We learn that “our” John Cage was the son of a previous generation’s equally enigmatic John Cage, a scientist/inventor quite well-known in his day, but also a bit of a crackpot. Cage, Jr. decided early on to study with Arnold Schoenberg, thinking he would be his entree into musical modernism, only to discover that Schoenberg wanted his students to have a thorough grounding in classical music theory and harmony, the very things Cage was hoping to liberate himself from. His need to shake free of harmony led him to begin composing percussion music. It is almost humorous in retrospect watching him naively and over-optimistically trying to convince people to listen to new music as well as his lectures on the subject.

But Cage was not easily dissuaded. Silverman carefully follows him as he quickly moves from innovative style to innovative style, prepared pianos, electronics and tape manipulation, the beginnings of what would come to be called “Happenings”, graphic notation, indeterminate music composed with the crucial aid of the I Ching (Silverman’s explanations and illustrations of this process is invaluable) and later with the aid of computers, the concept of “time brackets”, and on and on. The author traces the development of Cage’s decades-long collaboration with his gay lover, choreographer Merce Cunningham, as the two try - in vain for quite a long time - to build enough of an audience for modern dance and modern music composed in inseparable conjunction with each other to pay the rent and put food in their stomachs. We see Cage taking on a variety of students, including a Japanese composer who was married to Yoko Ono at the time, which helps to explain what I had previously considered to be the unlikely connection between Cage and John Lennon.

As he aged, John Cage never mellowed, never played it safe. He had long since discovered that his compositional concepts could be expressed textually rather than being set out on staff paper, to be repeated the same way each time a piece was performed. So it should not be surprising to find him turning to the writing of texts for their own sake - as one might expect, texts of a rigorously unconventional nature. His interest in the writings of kindred spirit James Joyce are examined, as is the Irish author’s influence on Cage. We also follow the development of the Cage-originated poetic form, the mesostic, which made him as much an innovator in the literary field as he was in music.

Silverman looks at Cage’s consuming interest in mushrooms, his artistic experiments with stone lithography, his friendships with many world figures in music and art, friendships which often turned prickly after awhile. Indeed, there is a tremendous amount of twentieth-century avant-garde culture discussed within the 400-plus pages of this densely-written, but eminently readable book. It is difficult to imagine there will be any need to write further books about John Cage in the future.

The review copy was an advance copy (due to a variety of circumstances, this review is appearing after the publication date), so it had no index. It should be obvious that the index, which will be in the finished product, will be exceedingly helpful in keeping the characters straight. (Silverman does the reader the favor of summarizing every so often, to remind the reader of people and events which were had not been mentioned for a while). There is also a reference to a CD on the Mode label. I’m afraid I simply do not know if the CD is included with the regular copies of the book, or if it is available as a separate entity. But looking at the CD track list at the back of the book, it seems clear that the CD will be an invaluable adjunct to the text.

I can’t imagine anyone with a interest in John Cage or with a more generalized interest in twentieth-century composition not wanting to read this book. Curiosity seekers should also find much to chew on here.

“Lightnin’ Hopkins: His Life and Blues” by Alan Govenar (Chicago Review Press)

Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins (1912-1982) has been dead for 28 years, but remains an iconic figure among blues fans, including many who were not yet alive during his lifetime. To many people, Hopkins represents post-WW2 down-home blues at its purest level of authenticity, even when played on his instrument of choice, the electric guitar.

But how much do blues fans really know about Lightnin’ Hopkins, and exactly how far removed was he from the “taint” of show business, or the modernization of urban influences? Part of the reason we think of Hopkins as a bastion of rural Texas blues values is the mythology which has grown up around him. As Alan Govenar, a greatly respected chronicler of the Texas roots-music scene, makes clear in this first-ever full-length biography of the man from Centerville, Lightnin’ Hopkins in large measure created and disseminated his own myth.

To be sure, this hardly makes Sam Hopkins unique among bluesmen of any period. Not many blues artists from earlier eras have left us autobiographies in which they explain themselves and their art, though many have been interviewed and documented by collectors and historians. But even autobiographies cannot be relied upon; Big Bill Broonzy comes to mind in this regard. Many interviewees have been known to answer straightforward, fact-seeking questions with colorful tall tales, relating “experiences” which they think people would like to hear, or which they feel would fit the interviewers’ preconceived notions. Not enough documentation was done during the early, pre-war era of the blues, making it difficult for authors to check for accuracy or multiple views of the same events.

Lightnin’ Hopkins may have come from a slightly later era, when one would have hoped hard documentation would have replaced the gushing admiration of colorful stories. But even so, he first came to the fore when white blues collectors still had not yet done crucial research, and were all too ready to make suppositions based on insufficient knowledge mixed with stereotypes. Thus, Hopkins was able to get away with painting ever-changing word portraits of his life. Couple this with the fact that little documentation was done of African-American music (and life in general) during Hopkins’ younger years in rural Texas, and you have mythmaking opportunities galore. Alan Govenar makes a valiant effort to separate fact from fiction, to make sense of the contradictions, to follow the complex arc of Lightnin’ Hopkins’ life and career, to fill in as many gaps in the record as he can. Holes remain, and most likely always will. Nevertheless, this book strikes me as a fair, unbiased, and believable, providing unprecedented insight into the life and music of an enigmatic, self-made mystery man.

Not surprisingly, the weakest part of the book is the section dealing with Hopkins’ younger, rural years. Govenar has interviewed a few relatives and childhood friends, but by and large the trail has gone cold, particularly since Lightnin’ claimed to have left home to become a traveling musician at age 8. (He subsequently had very little schooling and remained functionally illiterate his entire life.) We find him receiving encouragement from Blind Lemon Jefferson, followed by a stint accompanying singer Texas Alexander in the years after the latter’s period of relative recording stardom. But Hopkins really emerges musically in the big city, Houston, where he spent most of his adult life. He originally performed for strictly segregated black audiences, and indeed had several Top 10 hits on the r&b charts in the late 1940’s and early 50’s. He continued thereafter to present himself differently to black ghetto audiences, with whom he felt comfortable and could identify, than with the white audiences who came to dominate the last 20-plus years of life. Govenar suggests that experiences with record companies, folklorists (including the influential Mack McCormick, who is portrayed in a most unflattering light), bookers, etc. led Hopkins to mistrust most of the white people he came into contact with. (Arhoolie Records’ Chris Strachwitz was a refreshing exception.) The combination of lack of education and mistrust led him to demand payment-in-full for every song he recorded as soon as he finished recording it, either refusing to sign contracts which could potentially have brought in considerable, much-needed royalties, or to ignore without a second thought those contracts he did sign.

Hopkins was a bristly fellow, one who enjoyed his alcohol rather too much, who gambled away what little money he earned from his music, who had a very violent streak, and a very highly developed ego. He spent (by his own reckoning) a dozen or more stretches in jail for assault and related charges. But with the right people, he could be a bosom friend and companion, in particular with the woman he called his “wife”, who actually had a legal husband and children with whom she continued to live at night while spending her days with Hopkins. His dislike of travel early in his career, followed by a virtually disabling fear of flying once he realized that he could make far more money on the road than in the bars of Houston’s Third Ward, held back his career. But his distinctive recording style and highly mannered give-the-audience-what-they-want live performances eventually made him prosperous well beyond his expectations. Govenar follows these developments in an easy-to-read, yet highly detailed manner. In particular, there is much detailed information about most of Hopkins’ recording sessions, beginning in 1946 as half of the recording duo of Thunder and Lightnin’ (with pianist Wilson Smith; it was this nom-de-disque, supplied by a record company, which resulted in Sam Hopkins becoming known as “Lightnin’).

Govenar’s portrayal is eventually a sympathetic one. Despite Hopkins’ difficulties as a person, his music and artistry far transcend his personality and defy easy analysis. I rather wish Govenar had spent more time discussing which portions of Hopkins’ improvised lyrics were indeed spontaneously generated and which were built from traditional, floating-verse sources. But this is a biography, after all, neither a musicological tome nor a study in poetics.

Because he recorded for so many labels and was subject to so many reissues and repackagings, Hopkins’ discography provides special challenges for researchers. However, Govenar includes a list of Lightnin’s sessions, complied by Andrew Brown and Alan Balfour, that is probably as complete as one can get. A full discog, listing all reissues, remains for another day.

In all, this is a very successful and satisfying book, which will appeal greatly to blues fans, and could reach a wider audience a

“A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt”, by Robert Earl Hardy (University of North Texas Press)

Buried deep within my memory banks is an unfortunately vague recollection of a Songwriters’ Special episode of “Austin City Limits”, which featured a number of writers, gathered around swapping songs and stories. (I don’t believe this was the heralded Townes Van Zandt tribute, but it was back in the 1990’s, so I can’t be positive at this late date.) Someone – I want to say Guy Clark, but perhaps it wasn’t – made a statement to the effect that Townes Van Zandt had such an enormous impact on his fellow Texas songwriters that it was almost impossible for a Texan NOT to write like Townes.

The exact statement – and certainly there’s a bit of hyperbole involved here - the person who said it, and the televised circumstances may have lost itself in my over-crowded brain, but the underlying truth behind the assertion remains. The distinctive features that distinguish Texas country/folk singer-songwriters from those who hail from other backgrounds were first set into motion in the late 1960’s by Townes Van Zandt. Certainly, there have been developments, refinements, and personal innovations by a number of artists through the intervening years. But Townes is inarguably the origin point.

Even so, there are many people for whom the name Townes Van Zandt does not resonate, just as there is a smaller group of people for whom Townes has become a touchstone, a standard against whom others are judged, an icon. Townes Van Zandt virtually defines the term “cult figure”, someone who has taken on a near-god-like character among many of his followers, but who remains virtually unknown to the public-at-large. The sad fact of the matter is that there was virtually nothing god-like about Townes Van Zandt the person, regardless of how high in the pantheon of great songwriters his body of work places him.

For an idea of how non-god-like Townes Van Zandt the person was, one need only turn to Robert Earl Hardy’s biography of Townes, “A Deeper Blue”. Certainly, the basic thrust of Townes’ sorrowful tale of degradation and dissipated potential will come as no surprise to his followers, regardless of their opinion of his songs. It has never been a secret that he suffered from extreme depression exacerbated by severe alcoholism and rampant drug abuse (including, but hardly limited to, heroin addiction). Hardy meticulously traces the fall from grace of this intelligent, seemingly well-raised scion of a family whose involvement in Texas business and politics dates back to the days when Texas was an independent republic. Indeed, Hardy may be a bit too meticulous. As the book progresses, the reader begins to weary of reading about yet another alcoholic episode, yet another forced attempt at rehab, yet another ghastly drug incident, yet another example of Townes letting down the people who loved him and continued to forgive him (and thus continued to enable him) no matter how low he continued to sink, until the inevitable tragic ending.

But Hardy is a conscientious biographer, who will not ignore important parts of the Van Zandt saga, however redundant their accumulation may seem to the reader, since these continuing self-inflicted wounds play an important role in the development and roller-coaster instability of Townes’ career, with its long gaps in between fertile periods of transcendent activity. His addictions and the turbulence of his personal life are reflected in the poetic brilliance of his best song lyrics, and help to account for the early burn-out of his muse and its subsequent occasional reappearances. To know what makes Townes Van Zandt’s finest songs so special, it is necessary to understand the up-and-down curves of his life.

Townes poses particular problems for a biographer. For one thing, the shock treatments he received at a mental health facility during his late teenaged years wiped out his memories of what was, by all accounts, a mostly-happy childhood. Any knowledge of his youth that he may have shared with interviewers over the years came second-hand, through what his family and friends told him. Even more confusing is the simple truth that Van Zandt altered many of the “recollections” of his subsequent years from interview to interview. For example, he told multiple stories of how he came to write his most famous songs, “Pancho and Lefty” and “If I Needed You”, in fabrications which would often bear little resemblance to the memories of people who were around him when the songs came into being. Hardy is careful to quote as many sources as possible to try to construct truthful accounts of the incidents he writes about, rather than falling into the all-too-common journalistic trap of believing whatever an interviewee wants you to believe.

Hardy also offers brief analyses of several of Townes’ best songs, mostly early ones, along with brief discussions of the circumstances of their writing, and occasional interpretations of some of the more obscure lyrics. One wishes there would have been more of this sort of thing, but the door is left open for future critical examination of Van Zandt’s total body of work. Another area with potential for future biographers is additional research into Townes’ first forays into Europe and the international scene. His performances in Texas, Nashville, and on tour in the US and Canada are dealt with at some length, but it would be interesting to know how this quintessentially Texan performer was regarded overseas, and how he behaved on these early jaunts. (The response was obviously quite positive, as he was asked back several times, and even recorded an album in Ireland.) Certainly there must be many people who were involved with these first foreign tours who have interesting stories to share.

The book is filled with fascinating anecdotes, not just about Townes, his family and friends, but also many of the musicians in his circle, such as Guy Clark, the ill-fated Blaze Foley, Mickey White, among others. There are also amazing tales of woe courtesy of his three wives and a few girlfriends, plus his three official children. Hardy successfully captures the ethos of the Houston, Austin and alternative-Nashville scenes during the periods relevant to his story.

There is much here to recommend to anyone who loves Townes Van Zandt, the singer, the finger-picking guitar master, the awesomely gifted songwriter, the spellbinding performer. As much as I find myself shaking my head aghast at the travails of Townes the man, I still admire Townes the artist. But one can only wonder if Hardy, by being honest and open in recounting these harrowing details of wretched excess, might scare away people who have yet to make the acquaintance of Townes’ music.

This may well be the saddest book I have ever read, but so far as I am aware, it tells the truth.