Talk about bad timing: the Goodreads servers went down just as I was cracking Eric Weisbard's Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music. I'll just have to go through the book again and add titles to my reading wish list...but then, I knew that once would never be enough to explore this treasure trove.

Songbooks is almost too meta for a Rock and Roll Book Club selection: it's a book about books about music. Starting with 1770's The New England Psalm-Singer (the first collection of original songs published by an American) and running up to Jay-Z's Decoded (2010), Weisbard considers the entire history of American literature related to music.

If the book, which seems almost to expand as you read, is wide-ranging, that's because American popular music itself, as Weisbard writes, "has connected to seemingly everything: race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, class and capitalism, technology and modernity, theater and fashion, subculture and spectacle, Culture and culture."

Weisbard lists several dozen works in a series of short chapters arranged chronologically, but Songbooks actually encompasses much more: each work is just a jumping-off point for other books that touch on the same theme or topic. Thus, an entry on Michael Braun's "Love Me Do!": The Beatles' Progress (1964) is actually a five-and-a-half page historiography of that much-dissected band. (Weisbard notes that only the Beatles could inspire a 1,728-page book that ends in 1962.)

Songbooks is decidedly not a bestseller list, and Weisbard isn't interested in rounding the most obvious bases. Many popular music memoirs, for example Keith Richards's lauded Life, go unmentioned (in fairness, Richards is British); even Patti Smith's Just Kids, which The Current's audience recently voted the single most essential music book, gets covered in the Jay-Z chapter about "performer as writer in the era of the artist as brand."

Weisbard's interest is fundamentally literary; hence the inclusion of several books that might surprise a casual browser, like Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (which helped to define America's lyrical style) and William Gibson's Neuromancer (I'd be lying if I said I entirely understood how, precisely, the quintessential cyberpunk novel relates to Fleetwood Mac and Jenny Lewis, but I'll take Weisbard's word for it).

It's a fascinating read if you share the author's reference points, but that may be a tall order for many: a sweeping understanding of both music and literature, and an abiding interest in the many intersections between them. Weisbard clearly gloried in the process of writing Songbooks, and like many of the authors he references, he's most fun to read when he's fanning out. Greil Marcus's Mystery Train, for example, Weisbard regards as "the book on" rock and roll. It's an example of the kind of writing he likes: writing that embraces the multifarious connections and inherent contradictions of American music, resisting what Weisbard characterizes as the "baby-boomer reification" of Rolling Stone.

One of the most important contributions of Songbooks is the elevation of crucial texts by women and BIPOC writers who haven't been given their proper place in the canon. You'll close Songbooks, for example, regarding Ellen Wills as the rock writer you deserve to be shaken violently if you've never read. If you haven't been reading Black writers on Black music, you'll find plenty to fill your reading list. (There are entries for Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Trotter, known as "America's first Black music historian"...not to mention artists like Louie Armstrong and Chuck Berry.)

Given the vast scope of Songbooks, it would be understandable to think it might be a discouraging read for anyone contemplating their own addition to the library of music writing. Far from it, Songbooks is downright inspiring. Weisbard celebrates the contributions of each voice — yes, even the author of Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe. Want to write a book about Dylan? Go for it: "there was never a great Bob Dylan book" until the singer's own 2004 memoir, writes Weisbard. (We can agree to disagree about David Hajdu's 2001 book Positively 4th Street.)

Looks like Goodreads is back up...what books will I add to my list first? Glancing through Songbooks again, I'm thinking Decoded (stuck on a stack in my pandemic-neglected cubicle); Sammy Davis Jr.'s Yes I Can (along with its follow-up, Why Me?); Ellen Willis's Beginning to See the Light (Willis, quoted by Weisbard: "far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from the commercial exploitation of blues. It is bourgeois at its core").

Oh, and Loretta Lynn's Coal Miner's Daughter. The country icon has told her story in song and on film; why not read the book? Weisbard draws an unlikely but intriguing connection between Coal Miner's Daughter and the bestselling Led Zep book Hammer of the Gods: both celebrate artists as larger-than-life figures who elevate themselves above their origins. By contrast, he notes, Bruce Springsteen's more contemporary autobiography draws on the Boss's therapy sessions and identifies its author as "a bit of a fraud." It's okay, Bruce: we can't all be Loretta Lynn.

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Upcoming Rock and Roll Book Club picks

Tune in to The Current at 8:30 a.m. (Central) every Thursday morning to hear Jay Gabler and Jill Riley talk about a new book. Also, find Jay's reviews online.

July 1: An Oral History of Tupac Shakur by Sheldon Pearce

July 8: The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (Second Edition) by Jessica Hopper

July 15: Please Please Tell Me Now: The Duran Duran Story by Stephen Davis; and 33⅓: Duran Duran's Rio by Annie Zaleski

July 22: You're History: The Twelve Strangest Women in Music by Lesley Chow