Nick Tosches’s Mysterious Minstrel
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Tosches calls his new book, Where Dead Voices Gather (published by Little, Brown), a “synthesis of all that I have written regarding Emmett Miller, and of all that I have learned regarding Emmett Miller.” But aside from positively ascertaining dates of birth and death for the singer, the 300-page book adds little of significance to the available biographical information. Countless questions–when did Rodgers first hear Miller? did they ever meet?–remain unanswered, which Tosches addresses thus: “True history seeks, it does not answer; for the deeper we seek, the deeper we descend from knowledge to mystery, which is the only place where wisdom abides.”
What seems to be for sure is that Miller, a white man born in Macon, Georgia, on February 2, 1900, had an obsession of his own–minstrelsy–and he made a go of it in the 1920s, even though blackface entertainment was well past its prime. (Tosches draws a masterful sketch of minstrelsy’s roots and history, although his attempts to diminish its offensiveness are unfortunate–he takes the position that it was more about money than social pathology, going to great lengths to describe a long tradition of black performers who blackened up their own faces.) By mid-decade Miller had become popular enough to start making records; he cut 14 that we know of, the bulk of them in 1928 and ’29 with a studio band called the Georgia Crackers, featuring jazz musicians like Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Eddie Lang, and Gene Krupa. These met with minor success, but by 1930 his career was effectively over. He made a few more recordings for RCA in 1936 and then faded away, dying in Macon on March 29, 1962.
Last month John Corbett’s Unheard Music Series label reissued Nuclear War, an ultrarare 1984 album by Sun Ra. The title track, whose lyrics (“Talking about nuclear war, yeah / It’s a motherfucker, don’t you know / If they push that button, your ass gotta go / Now whatcha gonna do without your ass?”) most likely dissuaded U.S. labels from releasing the album, was inspired in part by the 1979 partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island, about a hundred miles west of Philadelphia, where the Sun Ra Arkestra was by then based. The LP was eventually issued by the British postpunk label Y Records, also home to the Pop Group and the Slits–but only in Italy. With the exception of “Nuclear War,” which is basically a long stripped-down call-and-response groove with no solos, it focuses on standards and swing-based material, foreshadowing the primary direction Sun Ra would take for the remainder of his career.
