BY JANUARY 1973, country music legend Waylon Jennings was facing ruin -- wracked by hepatitis, crippled by amphetamine addiction and emotionally awash in the wake of a third destroyed marriage. His friends urged him to hang up his guitar. Instead, he flew to New York and opened a six-day run at Max's Kansas City.
"[W]e play country music," Jennings told the crowd. "We hope you like it. If you do, I want you to tell everybody you know how much you like it. If you don't like it, don't say anything mean about it, because if you ever come to Nashville, we'll kick your ass."
As Amanda Petrusich suggests in "It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music," Jennings was canny enough to know that he needed a myth -- a fresh back story -- to save his career. He chose the archetypal Southern outlaw, armed with a bad attitude and a wide-brimmed hat. The ploy worked: Years later, he would remember the trip as a career-saving "triumph."
America's music history is filled with similar reinventions. Elvis Presley bumbled into Memphis' Sun Records in 1953 and emerged as the first white man to adapt successfully the "sound of the black cultural experience" for "a largely segregated public."
And Johnny Cash, who never served any real prison time, meticulously cultivated the "dark, bloodied-knuckles persona of the outlaw-convict."
The alchemy of our national soundtrack, Petrusich writes, is the alchemy of myth, "subject to our environs, fashioned and chiseled and sanded into shapes. We have highways for arteries and clouds for brains and sticks for bones. The sounds we make are Americana."
In 2007, Petrusich, a contributing editor at Paste magazine, spent months looping through rural America, searching for "the songs I love -- Americana music, craggy, tottering, uncontrollable country, blues, and folk -- to see where they started, and what they've since inspired." The hunt began in Nashville, ground zero for Cash and Jennings, and expanded outward, in concentric circles across the country.
"It Still Moves" is an act of synthesis. Part travelogue, part history lesson on the rise of Americana music -- "infused with the vitality of the landscapes from which it has sprung" -- it's heavily reliant on texts by Peter Guralnick, among others. Not much is new here, and that's the point; Petrusich, a twentysomething Brooklynite, is excavating a musical mosaic completed before she was born.
