More Spotify fun with “Step It Up and Go”

A wonderful aspect of this wired world we live in is that it’s very easy to point people toward music, and let them hear something you’ve written about. To that end, I’ve been slowly but surely getting Spotify playlists together to accompany various parts of “Step It Up and Go: The Story of North Carolina Popular Music, from Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk.”

I started out with a single playlist covering the entire book, “Songs from ‘Step It Up & Go'” — 54 songs clocking in at more than three hours (whew!). It’s a decent overview, but kind of cursory by necessity given how much ground there was to cover.

The next one I did covered Raleigh, assembled at the behest of the Greater Raleigh Convention & Visitors Bureau. “‘Step It Up & Go’ Songs: Raleigh” is a comparatively modest 17 songs, ranging from the Monroe Brothers to Corrosion of Conformity in a bit over an hour.

Now there’s one for greater Chapel Hill, on behalf of the Orange County Arts Commission. “‘Step It Up & Go’ Songs: Orange County” has 19 songs in 75 minutes, with a little of everything — Libba Cotten, Red Clay Ramblers, Superchunk and so on. I hope you’ll check all three playlists out, maybe as background listening while reading the book.

“Step It Up and Go” — the Spotify playlist

You can’t publish a book about music nowadays without at least one Spotify playlist to go with it. So after my folks at University of North Carolina Press told me I should put one together to accompany “Step It Up and Go: The Story of North Carolina Popular Music, from Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk,” I went through the book jotting down artists and songs.

That quickly got out of hand as the list swelled to more than 250 titles, which seemed like a bit much. So I whittled that down by around 80 percent, shooting for something more manageable that a normal non-obsessive person might actually listen to.

Thus we have the Spotify playlist Songs From “Step It Up & Go,” a comparatively modest 54 songs ranging from Charlie Poole to Corrosion of Conformity. The selections touch on all 16 chapters, plus the Prologue and Epilogue. James Taylor to Jodeci, The Drifters to Doc Watson, Let’s Active to Little Brother, Etta Baker to Ben Folds Five — those and more are all there. Check it out.

Down the road, I might do more detailed playlists that get a little more into the weeds of each chapter. But for now, I think this one is a nice overview.

https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/7MYqYqBUenZB1ZtC8WVy3A

 

 

The “Losering” playlist, courtesy of largehearted boy

In an ideal universe, each copy of “Losering” would come with a compact disc of songs you’d listen to while reading the book. That obviously didn’t happen, but here’s the next best thing: a playlist of songs that I feel are particularly relevant to Whiskeytown’s story — which the book-centric music blog largehearted boy was kind enough to let me do as today’s installment of its Book Notes series. So fire up Spotify and plug in these 13 songs to optimize your reading experience.