One Man's Music: The Life and Times of Texas Songwriter Vince Bell

One Man's Music: The Life and Times of Texas Songwriter Vince Bell

Vince Bell's autobiography doesn't begin with the brutal car wreck on the early morning Austin streets of 1982, a disaster that nearly took his life and left him clawing for more than a decade through the lonely and incommunicable purgatory of severe brain injury. Instead, One Man's Music opens simply on the resilient memory of his 1968 Martin D-28 dreadnought acoustic guitar, a raw, unwieldy beast that defined the trajectory of the songwriter's life even as it was steered devastatingly and uncontrollably off course. Bell's prose flows with the same direct and poetic Texas style as his songs, unflinching and wrought with subtle detail. Even as his narrative becomes necessarily distracted with the at times awkwardly interjected recollections of his friends and family filling in the gaps of memory that the wreck provoked, Bell brings the reader into the struggle and isolation of his plodding recovery. Triumphs are registered in the smallest of improvements, all leading back to his remarkable restringing of the rugged Martin and the slow chiseling of confused phrases back into incomparable songs. One Man's Music is less the story of a music lifer than of a life resurrected by music.