“The notion of American road as an unregulated gateway to freedom has been codified and repeated so many times throughout modern American literature and history that road stories have practically become their own genre,” writes Amanda Petrusich in her new book, It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music, published by Faber and Faber in 2008. “See Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Alexis de Tocqueville. See Jack Kerouac write, in 1957’s seminal On the Road: ‘What did it matter? I was a young writer and I wanted to take off . . . Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.’”
As we approach the return to classes, for those of us who have still not embarked on our own holiday road trip, living vicariously through someone else’s still offers a decent alternative, and Petrusich’s book is a good one to pick up.
It’s hard to make a dent in such a canon of highway travel literature, So Petrusich sets out on her trip with two crates of mix tapes on a mission, “to learn more about where the songs I love come from and, when I am very lucky, why,” to discover the origins and transformations of our ideas about Americana.
Petrusich, who covers American music for Pitchfork, Paste, The New York Times and a slew of other publications, is well qualified for the project. She sets out from her home base in Brooklyn driving through Tennessee in search of the beginning of the Memphis blues, on to Graceland, with a stop at the Heartbreak Hotel with its all-Elvis television channel. She goes on to Mississippi, hunting and blues and troves the Appalachian hill country for clues to the Carter family’s early, twanging country. Finally, Petrusich returns to New York and the Northeast to piece together the way this music found its audiences and where it’s gone today.
Petrusich speaks especially to the experience of traveling for those who have lived in New York. After all, she notes “possibly the biggest upside to living in New York is that nearly everywhere else in the country feels easier when (and if) you leave…Here outsider status becomes a perpetual part of the daily web of living. Suddenly, feeling a little bit misplaced seems comparably tame.”
On her own American adventure, Petrusich is trying to figure out something about where we have embraced Americana historically, and how we perceive it today. She’s frank about its intersections with the commercial world, and that those date back to its beginnings in America. She devotes a chapter to Cracker Barrel, the famous roadside general store chain with walls decorated with old-American memorabilia, starting with the “Old Timer’s Breakfast.” She writes about Woody Guthrie’s habits of playing his audiences politics for his own entertainment. Lurking over the project are questions about authenticity, questions Petrusich doesn’t try to answer directly, but to which she offers her acute observation skills all along her cross-country journey. “Americana music is as perplexing and mottled and gripping as the people cranking it out,” Petrusich says.
It’s good material for a road trip.
