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  • Restless Giant: The Life and Times of Jean Aberbach & Hill and Range Songs
  • Elisabeth George
Restless Giant: The Life and Times of Jean Aberbach & Hill and Range Songs. By Bar Biszick-Lockwood. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. 304 pp. Hardbound, $75.00; Softbound, $25.00.

Bar Biszick-Lockwood has written an extensively detailed and illuminating biography of Jean Aberbach, an Austrian-born, twentieth-century, music publishing magnate. Through her engagement with Aberbach’s life vis-à-vis memoirs, [End Page 380] daybooks, and interviews with his family, friends, and business associates, Biszick-Lockwood traces the footsteps of a man who essentially was responsible for changing the business practices of the music publishing industry. In the process, she offers a rich cultural history of the emergence and development of various music genres (i.e., bluegrass, country western, folk, and blues).

The author’s use of oral history is consistent throughout the narrative in order to convey an important message about Aberbach’s life: that hard work, personality, a commitment to ethical standards, and an instinct for choosing up-and-coming songwriters and artists undoubtedly resulted in his unparalleled success. Biszick-Lockwood highlights the development of an industry oftentimes overlooked due to a “negative perception” (ix) of those working in music publishing. The author, rather than pretend that Aberbach is not one who capitalizes on business deals, fleshes out the tension between his pursuit of clients and the maintenance of a certain amount of integrity.

Biszick-Lockwood portrays Aberbach’s life as one oftentimes fraught with struggle, especially during his younger years while working as an escort dancer in Berlin. The remarkableness of his rise is tempered with the author’s interwoven accounts by family and friends of their perceptions of Jean, most notably interviews with his wife, Susan, and his brother, Julian. Using New York City and Los Angeles as their base, Jean and Julian successfully managed to build a music publishing empire by employing a keen sense of business acumen that altered the relationship between the publisher and the artist. It became characterized by a partnership through which the artists could trust that the publisher would regularly pay them a set percentage rather than the publisher acting as the sole authority and oftentimes, invariably withholding due profit. This revolutionized the music industry business and became a business model that the Aberbach brothers utilized throughout their lives.

Perhaps because this book was sixteen years in the making, Biszick-Lockwood demonstrates a command of Aberbach’s life without drawing unnecessary conclusions based on little or no evidence. The book is divided into twenty-one chapters, which might seem like too many, but end up convincing the reader, by the end of the book, to feel as if Aberbach’s life was rife with experiences that enabled him to turn mere possibilities into full-scale realities. Scattered throughout the text are portraits of Aberbach and his family as well as people influential in the emergence and development of Hill and Range Songs, Inc. The portraits, primarily from the Susan Aberbach collection, aid in placing the reader closer to the subject of the book. Two appendices at the end of the book outline in detail (and supplement) what is covered in the text in terms of the companies Jean and Julian owned and the songs that were published by Hill and Range. [End Page 381]

Biszick-Lockwood compiles her portrait of Aberbach’s life by beginning with his birth on August 12, 1910, near Vienna. His brother, Julian, was only eighteen months older, and their close relationship endured throughout their lives. Oftentimes, Jean would work for a music company and finance Julian’s attempt to start their own company. Biszick-Lockwood emphasizes the brothers’ ability to maintain a collective interest in their business, both working hard, oftentimes with one on the east coast and one on the west, in order to “find” the best songs and talent.

Although Elvis’s photo appears on the front of the book, his personal life figures very little in the main narrative. Biszick-Lockwood remains faithful to her task of telling the story of Aberbach’s life and writes about Elvis from the perspective of Jean...

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