Follow the song, not the stars or the waves: The History of Rock’n’Roll in Ten Songs

The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

Author: Greil Marcus

ISBN-13: 978-0300187373

Publisher: Yale University Press

Guideline Price: £16.99

'The official, standard history of rock'n'roll is true, but it's not the whole truth. It's not the truth at all." So writes Greil Marcus in his introduction to The History of Rock'n'Roll in Ten Songs.

And he’s right.

Rock’n’roll history is usually linear and a bit daft, like the Irish history I was taught in primary school in the 1960s, the straight line from the Fianna to Brian Boru, and on to the Fenians, to the men of 1916. It was religious and preordained, the chalice passed from one hero to the next. (It’s in Gerry Adams’s cutlery drawer at the moment.) It was fun – I died for Ireland each day between the ages of eight and 11 – but it wasn’t history.

If rock'n'roll history has a Pádraig Pearse, it's Elvis Presley. Everything leads to Elvis, and away from Elvis. Elvis was the King, and there can only be one of them. He himself is fascinating and much of his music is glorious. But would rock'n'roll have existed if Elvis hadn't walked into the Sun studio in Memphis? It already did exist. Bill Haley's version of Rock Around the Clock came out early in 1954, before Elvis's first hit. Chuck Berry was on his way. Jerry Lee Lewis was never going to be an accountant. Would the lads from Liverpool have formed The Beatles if they'd never heard an Elvis record? Yes. They loved Buddy Holly. They loved Motown. Rock'n'roll history as a straight line, the guitar passed from legend to legend, is tempting but unconvincing.

Greil Marcus suggests that "a richer and more original understanding . . . might be to feel one's way through the music as a field of expression, and as a web of affinities". Follow the song. There is no reason to be constrained by chronology. Phil Spector recording his song To Know Him Is to Love Him in 1958, at the start of his career – he was 18 – is one thing; Amy Winehouse singing the same song 48 years later is another. Spector and Winehouse – huge names, 50 years of history, stories beautiful and grotesque – brought interestingly, unexpectedly together by examining a song that lasts less than three minutes.

Concentrating on songs instead of decades, or "waves", of music, isn't sentimentality, or just our habit of attaching moments, personal or momentous, to songs. We all do this; we hook ourselves to songs. Yet we do know that Leonard Cohen didn't write Hallelujah for our cousin's wedding and that Samuel Barber didn't compose Adagio for Strings to commemorate the death of Willem Dafoe in Platoon.

Etta James and Beyoncé

A study of Etta James singing

All I Could Do Was Cry

in 1960, alongside the same song as sung by Beyoncé in 2008, in a brilliant scene from an otherwise forgettable film,

Cadillac Records

– a moment, according to Marcus, “so powerful it can make the rest of her career seem like a cheat” – is an opportunity to explore the different recording techniques, the role of the producer, the singing styles, the careers of both women and the worlds they were, or still are, singing out to. It makes great reading and goes some way towards explaining why some of us can recognise an Etta James song from half a mile but aren’t really sure who Beyoncé is – “Which one is she?” – or what songs she’s sung. And it isn’t just because we’re old.

Marcus won me over quickly, if only because he writes so well about songs. He always has homed in on songs. The titles of some of his other books tell us that. There is Mystery Train, his exploration of American music and myth, using the song made most famous by Elvis Presley. If a major writer can be allowed just one masterpiece, Mystery Train is Marcus's. There is also the more recent Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, a book devoted entirely to just one song and its recording.

Brainy love

Marcus is a man in brainy love with the music. I don’t know of anyone else who writes as beautifully, and deeply, about songs and singing. This is on Amy Winehouse singing

To Know Him Is to Love Him

: “. . . in the three seconds it took her to climb through the first five words, to sing ‘to know, know, know him’ you were in a different country than any the song had ever reached before . . . each word as she sang it demanding to be the last word, or merely wishing it.”

Written by Phil Spector in 1958, the words inspired by the inscription on his father's tombstone, it was "a song that took 48 years to find its voice". It's lovely to read, and to listen to as you read. But it works as history too. The chapter includes solid, arresting material on doo-wop, Spector, his music, his work as a producer, and the music – The Shirelles, The Shangri-Las – that made Amy Winehouse the artist she'd become by the time she recorded her second album, Back to Black.

My favourite chapter is devoted to Money (That's What I Want), sung by Barrett Strong in 1959, co-written by Berry Gordy, who founded Motown. Barrett Strong might not be a familiar name, but the hits he co-wrote a few years later – I Heard it Through the Grapevine, Papa Was a Rolling Stone – certainly are. The song was covered by the Beatles in 1963. The Beatles are a bit of a mystery – how did they become what they became? – until you hear John Lennon singing Money (That's What I Want). Then it makes sense.

What I like most about this book and its approach to rock'n'roll history is that it will never be finished, or definitive. It is always going to be open history. There will always be more songs, and more interpretations. There's a similar book, or at least a list of chapters, in all of us. What about Walk On By, sung by Dionne Warwick in 1964 and, 14 big years later, by The Stranglers? I read recently that Aretha Franklin had recorded Nothing Compares 2 U, a song written and recorded by Prince in 1985, made wonderfully famous by Sinéad O'Connor in 1990, and recorded again, in 2014, by the woman who sang I Say a Little Prayer in 1968. There's a chapter. There's a book.