When David Sanjek died in 2011, still in his fifties, the now-familiar mode of tributes and memories posted online was swift and heartfelt. (Popular Music 31/2, 2012, carried an obituary by Reebee Garofalo.) Comments emanated principally from Sanjek's former colleagues in the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) in the USA, alongside those from IASPM UK: he had died while in employment at the University of Salford. The volume under review reflects Sanjek's transatlantic connection: concerned with the specifically American music of its title, it is edited by three British colleagues. The editors’ initiative and industry in bringing the work to publication are generously to be commended, and their helpful introduction indicates that the book was all but complete at Sanjek's untimely demise (p. xi).

Based on wide reading in studies of popular music, principally in history and biography, Stories we Could Tell discovers at its heart eight ‘narrative’ models that can be understood to order such studies. The book's proportions are immediately striking: taken together, the eighth narrative and conclusion take up more space (just short of a hundred pages) than the previous seven narratives put together (just over 85) while, at the 12 or so pages of pp. 155–67 (including eight for Mystery Train), the author Greil Marcus has more continuous space than each of the first five narratives (as well as the seventh) as individual chapters. It takes quite a while to reach the narratives: among much interesting and useful introductory material, a first chapter (‘Blood Sausage and the Building Blocks of Memory’) is a sterling defence of history that, as we shall see, characteristically starts at the cinema. I shall attempt patient explication of the narratives: further helpful summaries are found not only at pp. xvii–xix (by the editors) but also at pp. 22–6 (by the author).

First, then, the ‘instinctual narrative’ celebrates artists that ‘succumb to their instincts and bypass their intellect’ (p. 22). Little Richard kicks off, and writers include Nik Cohn, George Melly, and the lively trio of Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer and Nick Tosches. Andrew Sarris's history of cinema enters for auteur theory (p. 35). Second, the ‘Darwinian narrative’ adopts Charles Darwin's evolutionary outlook, but its four representative authors (Donald Clarke, Martha Mayles, Mark Gauvreau Judge and James Miller) all importantly contain, for different reasons, an element of decline (‘and fall’, in Clarke's title) in their historical accounts. Chuck Eddy enters at the close (p. 47), admittedly somewhat out of place in the ‘Darwinian’ context. Third is the ‘heroic narrative’, motivated by the Romantic idea of genius. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is an appropriate first example, before Sanjek heads to the movies, with a series of three biopics or documentaries (of Ray Charles, Jandek, and the two rock bands featured in the 2004 film Dig!). Nik Cohn's 1973 collaboration with the artist Guy Peellaert provides fit conclusion to a largely visually focussed chapter, although it is also worth noting that the ‘anti-heroic’ appears fleetingly as a category at p. 93.

Fourth is the ‘ritual narrative’: this is more of a mere assertion or proposition that music is something that takes place among other activities in life. Alongside Raymond Williams's idea of culture as a way of life (p. 23), Christopher Small's idea of ‘musicking’ looms large, while case studies include Robert Gordon on Muddy Waters, Albert Murray and Mike Bloomfield's memoir of Big Joe Williams. Why the narrative is termed ‘ritual’ isn't altogether clear, and Small at p. 63 remains the best guide. Fifth is the ‘alluvial narrative’, deriving from images of water and flow (the seventh ‘stream’ of Philip H. Ennis's book). This one celebrates multiculturalism, the melting pot or, as Sanjek puts it, ‘the inherently democratic nature of American music’ (p. 73). Geography and food provide analogies (p. 74), Ian Whitcomb's two books receive attention, as does Ennis's work (the editors are remiss in rendering Ennis's neologism ‘rocknroll’ as ‘rock n roll’ (p. 76, in the book's title) and ‘rock and roll’ (p. 78)). A brief example of ‘crossover’ (The Delmore Brothers in 1949) provides rapid end to a brief chapter (p. 79).

Now, the sixth narrative, the ‘agoraphobic narrative’ is important for the book, not least because it allows Sanjek briefly to acknowledge his father's work on the business of popular music (p. 82). However, the term ‘agoraphobic’ is confusing: Sanjek finds it in Scott DeVeaux's study of jazz historiography, which bluntly identifies ‘agoraphobia, fear of the marketplace’ (DeVeaux Reference DeVeaux1991, p. 530). ‘Agora’ in Greek does or can mean the marketplace, equivalent to the Latin ‘forum’ – both terms are found in the OED – but of course ‘agoraphobia’ also has a more familiar meaning: the ‘fear of entering open or crowded spaces’ (OED), antonymous to ‘claustrophobia’. Assuming ‘agoraphobia’ to mean the broadest antipathy towards commerce, capital, business and so on, is a burden for the reader. The two flaws that the always-italicised word attempts to capture are spelled out at p. 84: to write history as though there were a sharp divide between ‘art and commerce’, and the danger of treating ‘the music industry as a monolith’. Both perils are hardly news to the sophisticated readers of Popular Music! As it is, the chapter reviews very many studies of business and industry: from a novel by Bill Flanagan, through Stan Cornyn's biography, through many studies of record labels. Tony Palmer in 1976 is the bad guy at pp. 91–3, while Keith Negus's work on the music industry is commended at p. 96 ff. Sanjek is on firm ground in this chapter.

Two to go. Seventh is the ‘Manichean narrative’, and difficult to distinguish from the Darwinian narrative, for the earlier chapter's focus on decline. Case studies include evaluative dichotomies found in accounts of the folk revival (authenticity), of punk (‘selling out’), in Joe Carducci's memoir (brilliantly juxtaposed with Charles Keil's ‘participatory discrepancies’ at p. 108), and in country music (Jimmie Rodgers vs. the Carter Family at p. 111).

The eighth and final narrative is the ‘mythic’, and divided in three. ‘Personal’ myth is concerned with the memoirs of three writers on music – Donna Gaines, Ann Powers and Chuck Klosterman – and cleverly sets up (at p. 121) some of Ray Davies's work with The Kinks, as well as Davies's memoir, understood as a subtle synthesis of Powers and Klosterman (pp. 121–2). However, the section again gives way to a lengthy sequence of reviews of films about music (pp. 124–32). Incidentally, Gaines and Powers are once, twice, but not three times a lady, in a book chock-full of chaps getting worked up about their record collection. Section two, ‘formal’ myth is little to do with form, but more to do with magic and voodoo: seven pages are devoted to Robert Palmer and six to Robert Ventura, who wrote only fleetingly on music (pp. 145–6). In a spirited drama of sources characteristic of the book, Robert Christgau's objection to gospel music answers to William James on religious experience (p. 135), only for James himself to be answered by ‘funkmeister George Clinton’ at the section's conclusion (p. 149). The final ‘national’ myth arrives with Greil Marcus centre stage. (I may be alone in sensing that vin Marcus is ageing worse than eau de Savage, Christgau pilsner, Penman cru: the second indented extract from Marcus at Sanjek's p. 164 a locus classicus of sonorous vacuity, like Dylan Thomas on a bad day.) There's doubtless something of the ‘heroic’ and ‘alluvial’ in this national myth, but a more telling trick is missed at the section's start, as Sanjek juxtaposes an antipathy towards popular music in the 1950s (around p. 151) directly with the inclusion of a diverse range of popular music in the National Recording Preservation Board from 2007 onwards (p. 153): as well as illustrating an ‘alluvial narrative’ in its inclusivity (p. 154), the shift in evaluation surely inverts the deleterious or worsening aspects of the ‘Darwinian’ or ‘Manichean’ narratives.

Sanjek's weighty conclusion (‘words escape me’) again divides in two. The first presents three ‘parameters’ that have received ‘insufficient attention’ (p. 173). These are first, the sheer quantity of recorded music and its inconsistent publication; second, a lack of attention to place, with examples taken from the Mississippi, Chicago and New Orleans; finally, agoraphobia, again a lack of interest in business or commerce. Its cri du coeur is ‘Once we finally abandon the attractive but ultimately empty melodrama of culture contaminated by commerce, we will be able to focus upon the infinitely more interesting and revealing drama of how music becomes commodified’ (p. 199). Since this sentence replicates the case already made at, for example, p. 84, it's not clear why the ‘agoraphobic narrative’ is repeated in the conclusion (at pp. 192–9).

The conclusion's second half attempts the risky task of sketching out in 13 pages a better approach than the eight narratives can achieve. The basic idea seems to be to move from ‘vertical’ to ‘horizontal’ narrative, motivated by Charles Keil's distinction between ‘white writers on the blues’ and ‘black writers’ (p. 201). This quickly mutates into a contrast between text and context: Sanjek's example of ‘vertical’ narrative is, without reference, ‘treating a piece of popular music merely as a combination of words and music’ (p. 202), and one has indeed wondered, given the book's presiding disciplinary assumption of cultural history, how long it would take for a smack at music theory or text-based criticism. Three ‘horizontal’ stories follow: first, Sanjek imagines in three paragraphs a non-existent example where Andrei Tarkovsky makes a film (again, again) about Little Richard. The second takes up from Barney Hoskyns (p. 207), and returns to the emphasis on geography earlier in the chapter (pp. 192), this time focussing on Los Angeles and the businessman John Dolphin. Michael Bracewell's history of English pop music is finally commended (p. 209), including his account of Billy Fury in the 1950s, and Bracewell's linking Fury to Lindsay Anderson's film O Lucky Man! As a fourth illustration, the book's ‘coda’ not only presents a short poem on Johnny Shines (and Robert Johnson) by Stephen Windham, but also usefully spells out (at p. 218) how the poem and its subject demonstrate four of the earlier narratives. All four demonstrations of a ‘horizontal approach’ (p. 213), then, attend to the marginal or ephemeral, assuredly resistant to grand narrative. They're also cultural studies, inclusive of business studies; and if musical history can be narrated in a way that links to place and to cinema, all the better.

Ferociously well-read, the book nevertheless makes little reference to historiography per se as a discipline: there are only brief references to Keith Jenkins, E. H. Carr and Marc Bloch. Despite being interested in place – historians should ‘make sure that they situate their narratives in the tangible details of geography’ (p. 192) – Sanjek is surprisingly uninterested in time: he'll dart from book to book, track to track, with little attention to historical period or setting. For example, during the sixth narrative (in Chapter eight), in only five pages (91–6), Tony Palmer gives way to two novels by Daniel Fuchs, to Charlie Gillett, to a New Yorker profile of Ahmet Ertegun, to Keith Negus alongside Serge Denisoff: this is a roller-coaster ride. Here a contrast could be made with Erin Torkelsen Weber's Reference Torkelson Weber2016 book on The Beatles (which I reviewed in Popular Music 37/1, 2018), more explicitly situated in historiography as a discipline, and whose four ‘narratives’ are historically sequential. ‘How do Sanjek's eight narratives work in time?’, we're left to ponder.

As will be apparent, by far the greatest reference external to music is to cinema: film history, film theory (‘theory-lite’, I suspect) and films themselves, film upon film. So consistent was this aspect that I wondered if it could have made it to the title: ‘putting words to American popular music and cinema’. Just when you think a point is settling, the author has gone off to the movies! Sanjek's authority in American cinema – and European, as references to Jean Renoir, Tarkovsky and Anderson demonstrate – is as fearsome as his musical reach and breadth of reading. No expert in writing on film, however, I did wonder about Sanjek's own quality as a writer in that crowded field (p. 127: ‘one has to admit that, like marzipan or fillet mignon, a little bit of Jack Black goes a long way’; p. 131: ‘this must be one of the happiest sequences that I know of in any recent commercial film’).

True to its title, the study is firmly American: ‘our nation's history’ at p. 72 is exclusively so and the musical concerns, often race-based, are those of the American styles, in their walls and bridges: jazz, blues, country, folk, rock. How Sanjek would have admired David Brackett's study of the musical genres!

My unwieldy attempt to sum up Sanjek's eight narratives motivates my sense that they're unlikely to be widely applied, at least not before a good rethink. A course in popular music's historiography will benefit from Sanjek on the reading list, not least for its impressive breadth of reference. Readers of selected critics – such as Marcus, Cohn and Christgau – will find much to ponder, while reasonably allowing that other critics and repertories fall outside the book's remit. Ultimately, the book may stand as Sanjek's own best tribute: a writer who evidently loved popular music and reading about it, and a devotee of the cinema, but whose skill as an author was always liable to succumb to an endearing fascination with the sheer complexity of things.