Book Reviews

Various artists
Round the Town: Following Grandfather's Footsteps, A Night at the London Music Halls
Bear Family BCD 16021 DK (2000),4-CD plus book

Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination
by Veit Erlmann
Oxford University Press ISBN 0195123670; $65.00; 312 pp.

Bear Family, which has set a high standard with meticulous box sets of C&W and R&B artists, offers here a four-CD compilation devoted to London Music Hall performers. This set includes a lavishly-illustrated 130-page hardback book with biographical sketches of the performers and words to the songs. Translations for Cockney and other obscure terms are thoughtfully provided, and annotator Tony Barker does an excellent job of filling in entertaining background information. The main attraction, of course, is the singers themselves, few if any of whose names will be known to contemporaries on our side of the pond. But Charles Chevalier, Charles Coburn, and Florrie Forde were big draws in the glory days of the Music Hall, which were well under way by the time recordings began to document the music. One name, George Formby, is actually familiar because it was borrowed by a later singer who was much beloved in the Depression years, when he sang songs like "I'm Henry the Eighth" (also covered by Herman's Hermits in the 60s). The original Formby is heard here, as is the original "Henry," recorded in 1911 by Harry Champion.

Humorous songs predominate, and they are generally clever enough to still raise a smile, though of course political correctness is in low supply (demand was even lower). Connections to traditional music are few and far between, but one very surprising item is the song "Bedeliah," which somehow wound up in Rev. Gary Davis' repertoire, as "Deliah." An unexpected pleasure is hearing several songs to which references have been made in English books, films, and comedy shows over the years, like "Kelly From the Isle of Man."

Surprisingly, this utterly charming collection dovetails perfectly with Veit Erlmann's rather daunting Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination, a scholarly study which examines some of the terms that modern society has used in creating myths about itself. Erlmann looks at late Victorian London to examine the way that the sense of Empire was felt and expressed, and the Music Hall songs offer many perfect examples. The fact that Africans, Orientals, Spaniards, Irishmen, and Scots are stock subjects for humor is part of the picture, though Erlmann's focus is on the way that a London bourgeois norm is implicitly defined by contrast. The tour by the African Native Choir in 1891 is studied at length, as is the later success of a group that was a direct stylistic descendant, Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Though the perspective is unsentimental, it is not anti-sentimental. Thus while even great works like Conrad's Heart of Darkness are seen as supporting the world view of Empire, their artistic merit isn't thereby discounted. Not an easy read, this is very rewarding, even important book. The concept of "Hell time," by which mass marketing is always presenting something "new," whose value consists entirely of replacing last year's or last week's commodity, should resonate with lovers of things traditional. And, as the Bear Family set makes clear, the pressures for finding a new pop hit were already enormous two generations before the "Top Forty" was ever thought of. We are, indeed, following in Grandfather's footsteps. — Duck Baker (Richmond, CA)

Electric Guitars,
the Illustrated Encyclopedia
by Tony Bacon
Thunder Bay Press/Advantage ISBN 1-57145-218-8 (2000), 318pp, $29.95
When electric pickups were grafted onto a wood body and neck in the early 1930s, the already phallic guitar became a much flashier tool for self-expression, visually as well as musically. This lavish coffee- table book begins with a brief history of the guitar's origins, electrification, and subsequent stylistic diversification, followed by an alphabetical overview of virtually all electric guitar manufacturers. The book features more than 1200 color photos of cool guitars, both on display and in the hands of an impressively diverse array of popular musicians. This book not only makes a strong case for electric guitars as visual art, but also shows just how wild an assortment of colors and shapes they have morphed into in the last seven decades. This book is user-friendly enough to entice the neophyte and detailed enough to enthrall the guitar techie. It is simply a must-have for anyone who is enamored of the visually and aurally alluring electric guitar.
— Michael Parrish (Downers Grove, IL)