The Flatlanders: Now It’s Now Again by John T. Davis (review)

“Very strange.” As a description of the Flat-landers’ music during their brief initial tenure in the early 1970s, offered by core member Joe Ely and quoted halfway through John T. Davis’s book (101), this phrase rings both false and true. False, because the intervening decades have rendered the Flatlanders’ voracious synthesis of American “roots” styles and genres more familiar than strange, a “Rosetta Stone of Americana music” (209), as Davis aptly calls the recordings that first found wide circulation in the 1990s. But true nonetheless, as Davis has done much here to recapture the one-time strangeness of the band’s enterprise and sound by exploring the contexts and contingencies of the Lubbock, Texas, scene in which Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, and a rich cast of supporting characters came together.

Essentially a piece of long-form journalism despite the university press imprint, The Flat-landers: Now It’s Now Again is distinctly at its best in its early chapters. Davis rather audaciously defers any detailed discussion of the band’s music to the book’s center; we arrive there only after first passing through the West Texas landscape—“the flatness, the emptiness, the dust, and the wind” (15)—and acclimating ourselves to Lubbock itself, both its conservatism and its welcoming pockets of counterculture. This attention to place, and to the history of a place, is illuminating even beyond the book’s core narrative; for example, it allows Davis to address Lubbock native Buddy Holly in relation to the geographies of early rock ’n’ roll, en route to situating the future Flatlanders in this environment. He also effectively sketches the networks of personal affiliations among musicians, club owners, producers, and other interested parties; Davis’s own connections to this milieu and his personal history in the region enhance the book’s flavor and its authority on numerous points of local detail.

Much of what follows is less successful. Davis tends to pass the buck to other journalistic sources (from Esquire to No Depression to Amazon.com) in assessing and even simply describing the Flatlanders’ music (including their twenty-first-century reunion albums and the intervening solo projects of the band’s members, all given space here). Typical of the book’s limitations, when Davis offers a list of artists influenced “perhaps overtly, perhaps subconsciously” (111) by the band, no serious analysis of the specifics of influence is forthcoming. Nevertheless, scholars of country, alt-country, and Americana of all sorts will find ideas and anecdotes here to inform more rigorous research, and fans—clearly the book’s intended audience—will gain new frameworks for understanding the Flatlanders as both a legend and a band.