American Music: New Roots logo by the fabulous Lindsay Starr.
This week we announced a new book series I’m editing for University of North Carolina Press, a place I’m glad to be. UNC Press has published my lasttwo books, and that’s been a good experience. Plus starting up a new series with a local publisher is appealing.
So the series is called American Music: New Roots, and it has some similarities to the American Music Series I co-founded at University of Texas Press and edited for nearly a decade. Like the UT Press series, American Music: New Roots will be leaning pretty heavily into Americana music at the start.
Officially, the rollout will start this fall with publication of Eddie Huffman’s biography of folk-guitar icon Doc Watson, followed by Sam Stephenson on jazz pianist Bill Evans and Tommy Goldsmith on bluegrass legends the Stanley Brothers. Lots more to come about all three of those books, and further projects we have in the works at various stages.
Since Monday’s series announcement, I’ve been hearing from folks inquiring about what kind of books we’re looking for. To anyone interested in pitching us book ideas, I’d recommend that you start by reading the series mission statement plus this Q&A interview. Those should give you a sense of what we’re looking for, and what makes sense for us to take on. While you’re at it, take a quick look at UNC Press’ submission guidelines, too, and then let’s talk.
I always urge prospective authors to strive to come up with a book they and they alone could write; a passion project, with a viewpoint that’s unique to their own vision and voice. Very occasionally, obvious instances of this happen, and those tend to feel like gifts from above.
Probably the best book that the American Music Series published during my time there was 2015’s “Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt” by the musician Kristin Hersh, who was (a) an absolute genius writer and (b) such close friends with the late great Chesnutt that she had genuine insights to offer. It’s an amazing book.
Sometimes that unique idea is a result of fortunate happenstance. The last American Music Series book I was involved with editing was 2021’s “Where the Devil Don’t Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers,” by Stephen Deusner. Stephen grew up in McNary County, Tenn., literally right next door to the house where the real-life scandalous events in the Truckers’ 2010 song “The Wig He Made Her Wear” took place. That was a coincidence Stephen made the most of, as it inspired him to tell the band’s story through the geography of the band’s songs rather than chronological history. He did a brilliant job with it.
But you don’t necessarily need a lightning bolt like that if you can come up with an unusual, intriguing angle on a worthy subject. And that subject doesn’t have to be a topic or artist in a style that’s typically thought of as “roots music.” Our whole “New Roots” philosophy of this series is to take a broad approach. We really are interested in thinking and writing about genres up to and including hip-hop as roots styles, the way scholars and critics have been writing about country, blues, gospel and such for generations.
Dexter Romweber died on Feb. 16, 2024, at a much-too-young 57 years old. Cause of death was a cardiac event, and his passing occasioned a huge outpouring on social media, with fans, friends and peers posting tributes, pictures and memories. It made for a busy weekend for me, assisting Dexter’s family with publicstatements as well as penning an obituary. There’s also been talk about me writing an honorary proclamation about Dexter for the Town of Carrboro, similar to the one I did for his sister Sara when she passed five years ago. I’ll be doing that soon.
You might think that would be more than enough words from me about Dexter Romweber. But you would be wrong, because he’s not just someone I’ve listened to and written about a lot. I have followed, studied and obsessed about Dexter for more than half my lifetime. It’s a consuming passion that has manifested as journalism, broadcast as well as print; when I had a radio show, Flat Duo Jets’ “Pink Gardenia” was the theme song I opened every show with. There was also history, like writing 9,000 words worth of liner notes for Flat Duo Jets’ 2017 box set “Wild Wild Love.” And last but not least, a lot of my writings about Dexter have taken the form of thinly veiled fiction.
Somehow words like “super-fan” or “obsessive devotee” or even “would-be stalker” seem insufficient to describe myself. More like witness-bearing disciple. We go way back, Dexter and me, although it’s been almost entirely one-way — me paying attention to him — as it should be. Between owning just about every record he’s ever made and a few pieces of his artwork, I’ve amassed a fair amount of artifacts. But what I treasure most are the memories of him as a performer.
The first time I ever laid eyes on him in person was more than a thousand miles away and one-third of a century ago, 1990 in Denver, Colorado. I’d heard a bit of Flat Duo Jets before, but seeing Dexter onstage as opening act for The Cramps was next-level — still one of the most amazing things I’ve ever witnessed. He was a dervish that never stopped moving as he laid waste to every synapse and eardrum in the joint with an artillery barrage of guitar and a howling voice that sounded as powerful as time itself. He appeared to be locked in struggle with himself at a deeply profound level, as pure and uncut an expression of rock ‘n’ roll spirit as I’ve ever experienced. I was instantly smitten.
As fate would have it, less than a year later I moved to Dexter’s North Carolina home turf to take the rock-writer job at the Raleigh News & Observer. My boss was even married to Dexter’s manager, Dick Hodgin, which gave me plenty of behind-the-scenes peeks at Dexter’s world. Hearing about his doings in and out of the music business was revealing, endearing, sometimes poignant, often hilarious and at times even shocking. While I wouldn’t say his musical gift drove him to madness, it did seem to land him in that general ballpark a lot of the time.
Dexter and I never really hung out, but I was an attendee at most of his shows, where I lurked around in observer mode. Most of our conversations were interviews or chatting at shows between bands. He’d talk about things he was reading lately, Baudelaire and such, along with music, art, Jesus, voodoo. And I wrote about him often, whenever and wherever I could. I don’t remember Dexter ever complaining to me directly regarding anything I wrote about him, but Dick was only too happy to relay his client’s objections. Once when I wrote a review likening Dexter to the high-strung actor Crispin Glover, he fumed to Dick, “That guy’s nuts!” Yeah, well…
Trading Dexter stories was a regular pastime on the local music scene, because everyone had them. I remember Dick relating a conversation where he had called to ask producer Jim Dickenson how things were going with recording Flat Duo Jets’ 1991 album “Go Go Harlem Baby.”
“I asked Dickenson how it had gone the night before,” Dick said, “and he told me, ‘Well, there was a fight.’ So I asked, ‘Who?’ ‘Dex.’ ‘Who else?’ ‘A jacket.’ He got into a fight with a jacket. ‘Well,’ I asked, ‘who won?’ I don’t remember who won.”
Painting by Dexter Romweber, 2016.
It was inevitable that, when I started writing a novel in the mid-1990s, Dexter would creep into it. I called it “Off The Record,” a music-business equivalent of Peter Gent’s NFL tell-all novel “North Dallas Forty.” By then I’d been working in newsrooms for a decade, accumulating notebooks full of tall tales, tawdry anecdotes, wild rumors and gossip about the record business. It was pretty over the top, and the book’s rock-star character needed to be a feral, confoundingly brilliant tortured soul, larger than life. Dexter, in other words.
And so Dexter became my first fictional model for Tommy Aguilar, doomed one-hit-wonder star of “Off The Record.” At a certain point, Ryan Adams would enter that character, too, thanks to his love-hate relationship with stardom; while Dexter had that, too, Ryan just looked more like the character I imagined. But the music my fictional Tommy Aguilar Band played — space-age rockabilly/punk jacked up to the speed of light, with to-die-for hooks and a singing voice for the ages — that was Dexter. Flat Duo Jets were what I imagined as I wrote.
“Off The Record” was published way back in 2000, and its real-life models were obvious enough that Mojo Nixon called it “The Dexter Romweber Story” when he wrote me a blurb for it. I’ve always felt a little uneasy about that. The only time Ryan and I ever discussed this, he said he hadn’t read the book but he’d been told that the main character was “an unholy cross between Dexter Romweber and myself.” I told him the only thing I could, which was that he was not wrong about that. As for Dexter, he never mentioned it. I expect “Off The Record” was too low-brow for him to bother with, as his reading tastes ran toward much weightier books.
In the decades since, I continued writing about Dexter in the N&O and beyond, everywhere from No Depression magazine to the Orange County Arts Commission’s monthly newsletter. I kept going to see him play, too, through his many ups and downs as he gave spirited performances for too-small crowds. I would liken Dexter to someone who had seen an elephant for only an instant, and then spent many years trying to express to the world what it looked like. Sometimes he was able to bring forth a glimpse for the rest of us. But over time, he grew frustrated because of how few people got it or were even paying attention.
“People would come up to Dex and tell him, ‘I don’t understand why you’re not more famous,'” his former tour manager Randy Evans told me this week. “You could see that just weighing on him, almost torture. But he kept going. The standard listener will never understand the burden that man carried for his love of music. The fire he carried was huge. I really want people to know how much he sacrificed mentally and physically. The gift he gave us came with a cost.”
Yes it did. The last time I remember seeing Dexter was when he played a live set for last year’s Record Store Day. He was so shockingly thin and frail, probably 50 pounds lighter than the last time I’d seen him, that it took me a minute to recognize him. He still had that voice, but his performance was kind of a mess because he seemed overcome with sadness. Claiming he was penniless and needed to be paid in cash, he declared he hadn’t eaten in days (which looked all too believable). And at one point he reeled off a litany of things that were bumming him out, a list that included “dead siblings.”
A few days later, I interviewed Dexter for a story about his then-new album “Good Thing Goin’,” which he had “dedicated to the memory of Sara Romweber.” It would be our last conversation and he had more than just Sara on his mind. She hadn’t been his only sibling to die in recent years.
April 22, 2023 at Schoolkids Records, Raleigh.
“We were each other’s anchor,” Dexter said of Sara. “She was a lovely, lovely person, but she was also human. She had a dark side, too. The Romweber curse was something she held. Just one year after Sara, Joe and Luke died three weeks apart. I’m hanging in and I want to stay here if I can. There’s no guarantee of anything.”
Dexter also told a rambling, semi-coherent story about a long-ago “accident I had, or a catastrophe.” And even though he said it happened almost 30 years earlier, the lingering trauma was still with him. Truth to tell, I’m not sure he ever got over anything, because he just seemed to feel everything that deeply. I wish he could have found a way to make peace with the many things that haunted him. But it was not to be.
I didn’t include anything about the accident/catastrophe in the story, both because I couldn’t make sense of it and it didn’t seem relevant to a piece about a record. Unfortunately, things only got worse for Dexter last year. Six months later, his mother died, taking away another anchor.
And now he’s gone, too. So it’s farewell to one of the best I ever had the honor to hear, or write about. Dexter, you may never have been top of the pop charts. But for those of us who care, you meant the world to us.
Recently Marshal Zeringue, who oversees the highly entertaining blog “My Book, The Movie,” was kind enough to have me contribute an installment for “Oh, Didn’t They Ramble” — and he was even a good sport about not asking me to trim it down when I turned in a lot more words than he asked for. I did some dream-casting in that piece about who might play Rounder Records’ founding troika onscreen, and I came up with Florence Pugh as Marian Leighton Levy, Barry Keoghan as Ken Irwin and Ryan Gosling as Bill Nowlin. Check it out.
As noted, that took up the entire word count and then some. But afterward, I started thinking about who else might be good to appear in my fantasy “Rounder Ramble” movie in supporting roles. Who would play some of the label’s key artists from its half-century history? Here are a few that my idle daydreaming brought to mind.
Michael Shannon.
George Thorogood — While he was an unlikely signing for a primarily folk/bluegrass label, blues-rock journeyman Thorogood unexpectedly scored Rounder’s first mainstream success in the late 1970s, earning the label its first gold record. It would take some heavy makeup for him to play Thorogood in his 20s, but I would go with 49-year-old Michael Shannon, who has credibly portrayed George Jones onscreen and also performed songs by everyone from R.E.M. to T. Rex live onstage.
Kate Winslet.
Alison Krauss — Rounder’s franchise act signed with the label in the 1980s at age 14, maturing into a Grammy-winning multi-platinum powerhouse a decade later. But I’m torn on who should play her — Reese Witherspoon, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of June Carter Cash in 2005’s “Walk The Line”? Hayden Panettiere, who played a fictionalized version of Taylor Swift in the TV series “Nashville”? No, I think it should be Kate Winslet, who has thrived in both large and small onscreen roles for three decades.
Austin Butler.
Robert Plant — The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer was Krauss’ duet partner on two hugely successful Rounder albums, and he also wrote the foreword to “Oh, Didn’t They Ramble” (for which I will be forever grateful). To play him, I’d go with Austin Butler, who was start-to-finish mesmerizing in director Baz Luhrmann’s lurid 2022 bio-pic “Elvis.”
Andrew Garfield.
Bela Fleck — A banjo player’s banjo player, Fleck has an unpretentious just-folks manner even while putting out some of the most mind-blowing music ever heard in this or any other hemisphere. For the onscreen portrayal, I’d pick Andrew Garfield. Between Peter Parker in “Spiderman,” Jim Bakker in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and doomed playwright Jonathan Larson in “Tick, Tick…Boom!,” Garfield is expert at projecting an outward casualness that hides a sense of burning ambition.
Maya Hawke.
Madeleine Peyroux — Singing Americana-flavored jazz in the same general ballpark as Norah Jones, this onetime street singer graduated from clubs to large venues, earning a gold record for her 2004 LP “Careless Love.” And yet she has always seemed ill at ease with the spotlight. It’s a discomfort that Maya Hawke, who has played characters ranging from a school teacher to one of Charles Manson’s murderous cult followers, could probably put across.
For years, I’ve been trying to make it onto “Sound Opinions,” the acclaimed radio show/podcast that rock scribes Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis have been doing out of Chicago since 1993. So it’s a big, big bucket-list-sized thrill to hear them spotlight “Oh, Didn’t They Ramble” as well as the half-century-plus legacy of Rounder Records on a recent seven-minute segment.
It’s part of the show’s “Desert Island Jukebox” feature, with Greg adding a song from the Rounder canon. To hear what he selected, take a listen.
It took me a while to figure out where all the music I loved came from, what inspired it, what artists built the foundation of rock, soul, hip-hop. Back in the day, I’d make the rounds at stores like the Jazz Record Mart and Rose Records to dig up the recordings of artists I’d see namechecked on the back of albums by my favorite bands. Inevitably, these giants of folk, blues, gospel, R&B, zydeco, Tejano, bluegrass and Western swing could be found on a handful of visionary labels. Labels with evocative names such as Nonesuch, Arhoolie, Delmark, Yazoo and Rounder.
These labels didn’t cater to the pop audience, but instead devoted themselves to discovering and in many cases preserving the voices and sounds of artists who would otherwise have gone unheard outside their respective regions. Their songs in many cases documented the lives of everyday people, the underclass, laborers and tradesmen who often go unnoticed.
On this week’s Sound Opinions bonus podcast, I single out David Menconi’s new book, “Oh, Didn’t They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music,” as an important addition to this legacy. Menconi’s a veteran music journalist — our paths crossed many times over the years as we covered stories for our respective daily newspapers. His book affirms his diligence as a reporter, researcher and, above all, storyteller.
He weaves an engrossing tale about a label that started with three young folk enthusiasts in New England and a $1,500 withdrawal from a savings account. Somehow they persist — more than a half-century and counting. Like many of the artists it signed, Rounder Records flew beneath the mainstream radar, but carved out a crucial niche for dozens of crucial artists: Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Ted Hawkins, Béla Fleck & The Flecktones, Professor Longhair, Bobby Rush, Ricky Skaggs, Irma Thomas, Flaco Jimenez, NRBQ, Johnny Copeland, Carrie Newcomer and countless more.
Reading Menconi’s book had me digging out records by a handful of pioneering female bluegrass artists, who broke through the glass ceiling of a male-dominated genre with a series of potent records. I particularly admire the activist bent of Hazel Dickens, the West Virginia daughter of a coal-mining family who sang and played her heart out for the working men and women in her community. My favorite Dickens album says it all: “Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People.”
“Oh, Didn’t They Ramble” isn’t just a book. It’s a guide to our essential musical past. Read it and keep a notebook at hand – you’ll want to jot down a few titles to check out.
Years ago, I encountered a sage piece of show-business wisdom that continues to resonate: If you’re doing something where you hope other people will pay attention, make sure you’re having a good time with it. Because if you’re not having fun, chances are very good that no one else is, either.
To that end, I’ve tried to make my promotional efforts for “Oh, Didn’t They Ramble” entertaining (at least to me, if no one else). And I think it’s gone pretty well, especially when I’ve used imagery of various famous figures. I’ve been putting it out there on various social-media channels, to good response.
But the downside of social media is that things quickly slip out of sight on everybody’s timeline, probably never to be seen again. So I thought I would compile a few of my favorites here — if for no other reason than to keep track of it all myself.
If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now…
Apparently, there is a an app that one can use through Photoshop to make similar facial portraits of anyone out of potted plants (although Robert Plant has the added value of being a great/groan-inducing pun, too). Someone in the comment thread of my post made a houseplant picture of me, too, and I think it’s going to be my next Facebook profile picture.
MICKEY MOUSE Disney managed to keep its iconic symbol Mickey Mouse under copyright protection for 96 years, well past the standard 70-year term. But the earliest 1928 “Steamboat Willie” version of everybody’s favorite cartoon rodent finally entered the public domain on the first day of 2024.
Since that made Mickey fair game for fair use, I asked my brother Andy (who is a Photoshop ninja) to put the cover of my book rather than a steering wheel in Mickey’s hands. It turned out great, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.
Then June Spence, who has been doing a series of wonderful promotional videos for “Oh, Didn’t They Ramble,” took it one step further. Using an Earls of Leicester song as soundtrack, she turned it into a great little Instagram video. Watch it here.
METALLICA The legendary metal band has a distinctive logo that renders the first and last letters as figurative lightning bolts (appropriate, given that one of their early breakthroughs was 1984’s Ride the Lightning). So of course there have been Metallica Logo Generators on the internet for years, and I’ve played with them a lot on social media.
For 96 years, Walt Disney Inc. has zealously guarded the copyright of the fantasy entertainment conglomerate’s longtime visual icon: Mickey Mouse. The character debuted way back in 1928 in the cartoon short “Steamboat Willie,” and the copyright should have expired after the standard term of 70 years.
But Disney lobbied Congress to pass the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (also known as “the Mickey Mouse Protection Act”), and that was good for another quarter-century. Finally, however, this earliest likeness of Mickey is in the public domain. That happened on Jan. 1, 2024, making “Steamboat Mickey” fair game for fair use, free for anyone to use in any way. So I did this.
Well, I didn’t exactly do it myself. What I did was ask my brother Andy (a Photoshop crackerjack who makes political memes for a living) to do it. I sent him the classic cartoon rendering of Mickey at the wheel and asked that my book cover be substituted.
I regularly hear from kind folks who ask how they should buy my books, in a way that puts the most money in my pocket. And while I really appreciate that sentiment, I’d rather spread the wealth around a little. So I encourage folks to buy from their closest independent bookstore.
Just so you understand, my motivation for this isn’t strictly altruistic. I’ve gone the self-publishing route before with my long-ago novel “Off The Record” — yikes, was that really 23 years ago?! — which meant I was handling distribution, publicity and everything else all by my lonesome. To that end, I put a lot of time and effort into lugging heavy boxes of books around. It worked out fine, but I was younger then.
Now that a publisher is involved, I’d much rather steer buyers to the indie stores — which can always use the business and will also get more of a benefit out of my modest sales than I will. It’s worked especially well in recent years with autographed copies of my last two books, 2020’s “Step It Up and Go” and this fall’s “Oh, Didn’t They Ramble.”
I generally refer inquisitive buyers to Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books, which will ship nationwide. And if someone wants a personal inscription to go with the signature, I’m happy to go over and add that before shipping since Quail Ridge is just five minutes away from me. No muss, no fuss, and I don’t have to stand in line at the post office.
Other North Carolina bookstores where I’ve done events for “Oh, Didn’t They Ramble” this fall have some signed copies available, too: Page 158 in Wake Forest, Epiloguein Chapel Hill and Park Road Books in Charlotte. At this point it’s not really practical for me to add personal inscriptions to books ordered from stores in other cities — but they are autographed, and the stores will ship them anywhere in the U.S. And if you don’t care about getting a book that’s signed, there’s always Bookshop.org as an independent-friendly alternative to Amazon.
Anyway, since we’re in the midst of another holiday buying season, this is just a reminder: Books make great gifts, especially if they’re signed, and good indie stores are out there ready to make it happen.
As covered recently, I do a lot of book-related mixtapes in the form of playlists — some of them even by request. One of my favorite venues for that is Largehearted Boy, a very cool book blog that bills itself as, “That spot in the Venn diagram where music and literature overlap.”
It’s always fun when a book takes you someplace new. So it is that I’ll be spending a few days this weekend in beautiful downtown Baton Rouge for the Louisiana Book Festival. I’ve been to the Texas Book Festival in Austin a few times, and also to Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, North Carolina — but never this particular shindig.
“Oh, Didn’t They Ramble” has officially been out in the world for one week, which is long enough for me to start wondering if it will ever start…you know, selling. Which is a mug’s game, foolish even to contemplate. And it’s not like I’m expecting it to burn up the New York Times Best Seller List.
Still, hope springs eternal, and so do daydreams of glory. I’m doing lots of bookstore events and interviews, trying to drum up interest and coverage any way I can. And I must confess that, yeah, I check Amazon several times a day. Just in case.
No, “Ramble” isn’t doing much on the main chart there, where all the buzz of late is about the new Britney Spears memoir camped out at #1 and on its way to being one of the year’s top-selling books. Me, I’m in the top hundred…thousand. I think I’ve peaked so far at about #19,000, which is at least encouraging in that it was bouncing around at about #100,000 and even lower for most of the past week.
Losering Books 