Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music

If his peer Robert Christgau solidified the consumer-guide approach to rock criticism, examining each new release as a self-contained unit, then Greil Marcus pioneered the opposite path: not only tracing the full arc of an artist's career, but also linking their work to the artists that came both before and after. In his classic first book, Mystery Train, Marcus pretty much invented the cultural studies wing of American rock criticism. Marcus connected four then-current artists—Sly Stone, The Band, Randy Newman and Elvis Presley—to a pair of rock's progenitors (blues legend Robert Johnson and hillbilly obscurity Harmonica Frank) and, crucially, to a wider reading of American cultural history. If Marcus was not the first critic to find common ground between Little Richard and Walt Whitman, he was certainly the first to take that concept mainstream. As Marcus himself admits in the introductions of later editions, all four of those current artists collapsed shortly after the book's original publication in 1975: Presley died, The Band split up, Stone was lost to drug abuse and Newman slid into genial Hollywood-soundtrack mediocrity. So the focal point of later editions is the ever-expanding "Notes and Discographies" section, which as of 2008's fifth edition is now longer than the original book itself. Here is where Marcus indulges his now-characteristic fondness for speculative connections and scholarly digressions: in particular, his lengthy exposition on the real-life roots and seemingly endless variations of the Stagger Lee myth is masterful.