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Same Journey, Same Miracle, Same End and Endlessness:
Nick Tosches's
Where Dead Voices Gather
by Chris J. Robinson
Read an excerpt.
 I
will read anything Nick Tosches writes. His jaw-dropping research, opinionated, fiery
prose that combines Faulkner, Dante and obscenities (I
challenge anyone to find a more poetic use of the word ‘fuck’ from Tosches’
masterful Dino: Living High in the Dirty Dreams of Business) turns any topic (Jerry
Lee Lewis, Dean Martin, Opium, and hey, even cooking) into something unique and beautiful.
The same is true of his recent book, Where Dead Voices Gather. The book is framed
around the life of a little known minstrel singer named Emmett Miller who was quite likely
an inspiration to Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills and Hank Williams. Where Dead Voices Gather is also an
excavation of early 20th century American music. In examining Miller’s
time, Tosches travels from Homer to Dante to Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Dylan, John Cougar
Mellencamp and Matt Johnson of The The.
Emmett
Miller
Tosches,
who first chronicled Miller in the book Country, believes that Miller’s songs
were “Definable neither as country nor as blues, as jazz nor as pop, as black nor as
white, but as both culmination and transcendence of these bloodlines and more…”
and that Miller is “a Rosetta Stone to the understanding of the mixed and mongrels
bloodlines of country and blues, of jazz and pop, of all that we know as American
music.” These are mighty big claims and
while Tosches takes us on an interesting and riveting journey, I ain’t convinced.
Without
doubt, Miller had a unique, ‘clarinet’ voice that could, like George Jones,
carry the corniest piece of shit into something magnificent and almost genuine. Just take
a listen to Anyway, I Ain’t Got Nobody, Lovesick Blues and the
gorgeous, God’s River from the 1996 Miller CD The Minstrel Man from Georgia
and you’ll begin to understand Tosches passion.
Miller was certainly more than a black-faced buffoon. The man could sing.
But beyond the voice, the music, for the most part, is standard, unimaginative tripe. And
the idiotic minstrel routines that precede some of the songs certainly don’t enrich
the experience. Beyond that most of the people Tosches interviews are, despite playing or
performing with the man, barely able to recall much about him. Miller’s fame was
brief and came as minstrelsy was reaching its end. Miller spent the rest of his life
touring with variety acts and getting drunk. He died penniless.
Miller
had a few years of performing success; virtually no recording success, and that was that.
And in the end, we really don’t feel we know Miller any better than we did at the
start, but you do feel like you understand a little bit more about the world he occupied.
As with Dino, Tosches uses Miller as a starting point to drift into other worlds.
In doing so, Tosches captures the essence of his subject better than any authorized
biography could ever hope to.
IMPORTANCE
OF THE PAST
And,
of course, that is what this is – all of this: the one song, ever changing,
ever reincarnated, that speaks somehow from and to and for that which is ineffable within
us and without us…
In
Tosches’ best writing (Hellfire, Trinities, Dino) he reminds us,
through his tracings, of the importance of the past. As Gavin Stevens says in
Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead, it is never even
past.” In a society that has become
increasingly amnesiac, moving forward without acknowledgment or awareness of the past,
Tosches’ writing provides that necessary vessel to the breaths of the past. The past
is something we cannot escape. This is not to say we must live in the past…but we
must acknowledge its breaths. Even when we think we are escaping it, it is always living
within us.
As
Tosches traces the roots of Miller and Minstrel performance, he takes us on all sorts of
marvelous detours examining the roots of opium songs (a 1904 song called Willie the Weeper
to Cab Calloway’s 1931 classic, Minnie the Moocher); ‘talking blues’ songs
from the 1928 “Talking Nigger Blues” to Bob Dylan’s 1963 “Talking
World War III Blues”; the roots of words like hep, hip and pickanniny (Portuguese
origins meaning ‘little one’), and cocaine references in pop culture from
Sherlock Holmes through Dick Justice’s Cocaine all the way up to Johnny Cash.
Where
Dead Voices
is in many ways merely an extension of Country and Unsung Heroes of Rock and
Roll, but this time Tosches just does away with the chapters and delivers an almost
stream-of-consciousness style that merges his love of detail with occasionally beautifully
delivered musings on the nature of Stuff.
RACE
ISSUE
But
enough with Miller and the breezes of Homer, let’s take at look at Tosches’
rather disturbing monologue about race and the image of minstrelsy. It takes up only a few pages of the book, but the
tone and ideas are something that should not be brushed aside (as many reviewers seem to
have done).
After
the mandatory bashing of scholars and their “parlor games” with issues of race,
Tosches just as quickly embraces scientific scholars and in particular a study called
“The Human Genome” by the Science Editor of The Economist. The article asserts, according to Tosches, that
race, at least on a biological level does not exist.
Tosches
then concludes: “Racial pride? The chimpanzees perhaps are entitled to such. We are
beneath it?”
Now
biological assertions are one thing, but how the fuck does that explain decades of racial
oppression? How does that explain people being murdered because of the colour of their
skin? To simply erase historical realities because of a scientific assertion is just plain
ignorant.
Not
content to just leave his foot in his mouth and move on, Tosches decides to swallow the
other shoe. Just short of defending minstrelsy, Tosches suggests that the inherent racism
of minstrelsy is no more problematic than the Hollywood stereotyping of Italian-Americans.
In response to a New York times article on the minstrel tradition, Tosches denounces the
author’s apparent belief that blackface caricatures were any more racist than
today’s entertainment stereotyping:
[A]s
if to imply the playing of blacks by whites to be more demeaning or momentous an absurdity
than the playing of Italians by Jews and WASPS, from Little Caesar to The Godfather, and
every other manner of ethnic fraud which our popular culture has to this day been based.
“Yes.
Minstrelsy was a form of stage entertainment in which men blackened their faces,
burlesqued the demeanor and behaviour of Southern blacks, and above all, performed what
were presented as the song and music of those blacks. But it was not so simple as that.
Not all minstrels were white: many of those who blackened their faces in burlesque were
black.”
...Is
the willingness of blacks to assume the mask of gross stereotype any more baffling or
troubling than the universal tendency to masquerade?
Now
first of all, yes it is true that Italian-Americans have been reduced to mobsters by
Hollywood and television. But Christ, it’s not like anyone is trying to ridicule
Italians? In a twisted, even more fucked up way, it’s a positive model for some
people. That’s a long way from a form of entertainment that is based on the
ridiculing of a race of people. Minstrelsy portrays blacks as if they were non-human,
cartoonish figures for our amusement. We’re talking about a group of people who were
enslaved and often lynched solely because of the colour of their skin.
And
yes, it is baffling that blacks would willingly (so we assume) participate in their own
oppression. But hey, ain’t that what people of ALL races are doing every day?
I’m sure actors and take on stupid roles for damn good reason: money. Blacks
undoubtedly recognized that they could make some money off minstrelsy and hey, even offer
a taste of the apparent ‘real’ thing. (Interestingly, given that Tosches says
that Spike Lee is no different that a “turn of the century coon show hustlers”,
Lee’s ‘minstrel’ film, Bamboozled,
which examines the role black Americans have played in their own oppression, was released
after Tosches finished writing).
Later
in the book, Tosches returns to the race issue :
When
television networks offer as entertainment comedy shows in which refined suburban blacks
play at artful caricatures and white-scripted concepts of ghetto-culture speech and
mannerisms, is it really different from the coon shows, the blacking up by black men, of
the past, except that today’s black minstrels are perhaps even more a product of
white America than their forebears, and thus more akin to the blacked-up white men of
yesterday than to the black?
Does
“Cop Killer”, fine and wonderful an entertainment as it is, differ from
“All Coons Look Alike To Me,” except that it traffics in another stereotype,
sells a different and more modish candy?
Now
I do grasp the essence of what Tosches is saying. Certainly the WB black sitcoms, rap
music, and whole host of other cultural products sell an image. I mean that’s the
fundamental nature of advertising. Most of us realize that television sitcoms are cookie
cutter refuse, but can we really say that Amos and Andy are cut from the same material as
Ice T or Spike Lee? To do that would simply ignore the realities of the specifics of the
time and place they were made. It’s also ironic given that the beauty and power and
truth of Tosches’ work stems from his very ability to recognize the importance of the
past. Why he has lost the feel of these
breezes of the past in relation to race is something only he can breathe.
Despite
Tosches’ inability to convince convey Miller’s importance and his mildly
disturbing views of race, he, like Miller, is no mere clown. Like Emmett Miller, George Jones, and hey, even
Dean Martin, Tosches has a unique trick voice whose deeply passionate and beautiful
phrasings can turn trash into treasure:
…to
sunder the chthonic sacrarium…and bring forth the tombaroli, the holy grave
robbers and thieves, to loose the cestus of Mystis, sweet tectonic mama, and raise, in
skirl and sigh and yodel and moan, in epiclesis, in aestus, in quietus – stile
vecchio, stile duro, stile nuovo – the tessitura of it all, the dark and
myriad-voiced antediluvian song and resurrection in the light of new morning, matutina
lux, Viva-tonal and electric, wild-souled and endlessly rocking.
After
you recover from the beauty and truth of this passage, wipe your eyes, blow your honker,
and hop, skip, and stagger to your nearest bookstore and take a thoroughly uncivilized
journey through the “mixed and mongrel” mind of Nick Tosches. For really Where Dead Voices Gather, in its
desperate desire to uncover the darkness of being, is as much the story of Nick Tosches as
it is Emmett Miller.
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