AND THE ROOTS OF RHYTHM REMAIN

The noted record producer, sound engineer, and musicologist surveys the many sounds the world has to offer.

The title is from Paul Simon, whom Boyd, author of White Bicycles, met back in the 1960s when Simon was in the process of making a Martin Carthy treatment of the old folksong “Scarborough Fair” his own. But borrowing is the nature of the game, and musicians are often a step behind the times. Even as Simon, enamored of Zulu music, was recording Graceland, “on home ground, world music’s biggest sellers—Le Mystère des Voix Bulgaires, Buena Vista Social Club, Ladysmith Black Mambazo—were considered old-fashioned, even reactionary.” The kids, in other words, weren’t listening. Instead, hip-hop reigns in Ghana, the Rolling Stones in Rio, and heavy metal in Hungary—though Boyd adds, “even the hardest-core Hungarian heavy metal headbanger will acknowledge a fondness for Muzsikás, Márta, and táncház,” traditional sounds that world music–loving hipsters began to eat up courtesy of Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, and other explorers. Boyd’s leanings are catholic, his enthusiasms varied, and he engagingly explores how Ry Cooder gathered the traditional Cuban musicians who made up Buena Vista, Herb Alpert scrapped light jazz for mariachi, and so on. Readers should prepare for a flood of disparate data that adds up to something more than trivia: Argentine bassist Leopoldo Thompson “may have been the first anywhere to deliver percussive slaps to this normally bowed instrument”; Elvis Presley was crazy for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and thus “Dean Martin’s Italianate crooning is all over Elvis’s vocal style”; “Wimoweh” owes its title to “Pete Seeger’s mishearing of uyimbube”; and much more. It’s marvelous, sometimes careening adventure, as Boyd darts from one musical obsession to another.

A grand treat for musicophiles and an entertaining walk through world music, leading readers to countless sounds and styles.