Step It Up and Go: The Story of North Carolina Popular Music, from Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk by David Menconi (review)

In Step It Up and Go: The Story of North Carolina Popular Music, from Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk, David Menconi delivers a series of profiles of musicians and movers and shakers, from the famous to the obscure, from North Carolina. He details each artist's origin, work ethic, good and bad luck, and ultimate contribution to the state's musical past. Menconi sees his work as a corrective to American music's standard regional narrative, which he believes privileges the Mississippi Delta, Nashville, and Seattle (in their respective moments) at the expense of Durham, Winston-Salem, and Chapel Hill. He argues that music created by residents of North Carolina's cities and small towns is "embedded in the DNA of some of the most important strands in American popular music" (p. 8).

Beginning with the hardscrabble rambling of North Carolina's blues artists and hillbilly musicians, Menconi winds a path through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Along the way, he advocates for the overlooked men and women who brought the world country music, R&B, classic rock, grunge, hip-hop, and an underappreciated form called beach music. For example, according to Menconi, Charlie Poole should have been Jimmie Rodgers; Blind Boy Fuller's bad luck kept him from the acclaim afforded to Robert Johnson; and while we recognize the genius of James Brown, we have wholly forgotten the 5 Royales. The same is true with the post-1960s rockers Nantucket, pop alternative band Let's Active, and the genre-averse Squirrel Nut Zippers.

While the could-have-beens fill most of the book's pages, there are bona fide successes. Small record labels make their mark, and country-guitar player Arthur Smith commanded the airwaves and television sets. Doc Watson and Earl Scruggs continue to be valorized by fans and critics alike, and the Avett Brothers still attract fans worldwide. Yet as popular and influential as these figures have remained, they are rarely associated with North Carolina itself. Even in triumph, North Carolina's claim to prominence goes unrecognized.

Menconi habitually lists album sales and placement on the Billboard charts as measures of relevance and indicators of failure. His real interest, however, is in the qualitative, not the quantitative. North Carolina's artists, he argues, share a couple of common traits: humility and determination. Perhaps it is the roots of their collective raising, but the state's musicians have traditionally contained their egos, shied away from believing their own press, and focused their energies on rigorous touring, long studio sessions, and humble approachability. This understated disposition and lack of grandiosity, in turn, has kept North Carolina's musicians from placing their state in the spotlight—hence the state's musical invisibility.

In a book of unsung heroes, Menconi saves some room for disdain. As a music journalist, he intimately knows the nature of the music industry. The business of entertaining the masses is cold and unforgiving. For the earlier artists, the machinations of the nascent entertainment industry left many musicians with little to show for their all-consuming efforts. Later, major record labels that grew to behemoth strength by the late twentieth century mined young artists, profited from their labor, and discarded them at the first sign of a sales decline. Menconi also has little respect for artists like Ryan Adams, who came out of North Carolina but rejected the state as his fame grew.

This is not—and is not intended to be—an academic work. Though based on dozens of interviews and deep research, the book has no citations and only a limited bibliography. Step It Up and Go may be one of the few books on the...