Rock & Roll Books

• Rock & Roll Books

  All the Townes Van Zandt, Texas Troubadours, Southern hip-hop, Zen punk, and Phil Spector, Warren Zevon, and Joe Strummer you can shake a bottle of sunblock at

• To Live's to Fly: The Ballad of the Late, Great Townes Van Zandt

  BY DOUG FREEMAN

• He's a Rebel: Phil Spector: Rock and Roll's Legendary Producer;
  Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

  BY AUDRA SCHROEDER

• Texas Troubadours

  BY RAOUL HERNANDEZ

• Lonely Avenue: The Unlikely Life & Times of Doc Pomus

  BY SHAWN BADGLEY

• Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe

  BY MARGARET MOSER

• Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer, The Definitive Biography

  BY DAN OKO

• Babylon's Burning: From Punk to Grunge

  BY MARGARET MOSER

• I�ll Sleep When I�m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon

  BY JIM CALIGIURI

• Nirvana: The Biography

  BY CHRISTOPHER GRAY

• Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music

  BY DAVID LYNCH

• Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries;
  My So-Called Punk: How Neo-Punk Stage-Dived Into the Mainstream;
  Punk Love

  BY DARCIE STEVENS

• Third Coast: Outkast, Timbaland, & How Hip Hop Became a Southern Thing;
  Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women;
  To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic

  BY GRAHAM REYNOLDS

• Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life

  BY CHRISTOPHER GRAY

• Modest Mouse: A Pretty Good Read

  BY MELANIE HAUPT

• You Don't Love Me Yet: a novel

  BY JAY TRACHTENBERG

• Inside the Music of Brian Wilson: The Songs, Sounds, and Influences of the Beach Boys' Founding Genius

  BY GREG BEETS

• Jimmy Page: Magus, Musician, Man, an unauthorized biography

  BY AUSTIN POWELL

• Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry

  BY JIM CALIGIURI

• The Rockabilly Legends: They Called It Rockabilly Long Before They Called It Rock and Roll

  BY GRAHAM REYNOLDS

The Rockabilly Legends: They Called It Rockabilly Long Before They Called It Rock and Roll

by Jerry Naylor and Steve Halliday

Hal Leonard, 278 pp., $45

The first flip through this coffeetable volume is a primary experience. The pictures are many, the font sizes range from very large to gigantic, and the arc of the content is understood with a quick perusal. The fancy graphics are nice at times and distracting at others, and many of the pictures would do better straight up, without color filters or quotes draped across them. Co-author Jerry Naylor is a rockabilly veteran in his own right, part of the scene in Texas from the very beginning and lead singer of the Crickets after Buddy Holly's death. His tale is a personal one: Performing as a country act, he opened for Elvis, and his world changed forever. The stories of rock & roll's pioneers are classics and often-documented, but here, insider details make them come to life. Naylor's personal take is the chief thing separating The Rockabilly Legends from a thousand other books about early rock & roll, and it's obviously for the person who loves the Fifties. It won't be the pride of their collection, but they'll like it all the same.