Music is a cultural universal among all humans for all times. It is embedded in our DNA, essential to our surivival. Academics have considered this idea to devise explanations that Richard Manning, a lifelong journalist, finds hollow, incomplete, or just plain wrong. He approaches the question from a different angle, using his own guitar and banko as instruments of discovery. In the process, he finds himself dancing in celebration of musci rough and rowdy. American roots muscic is not a product of an elite leisure class, as some academics contend, but of explosive creativity among slaves, hillbillies, fieldhands, drunks, slackers, and hucksters. Yet these poor, working-class people, built the foundations of jazz, gospel, blues, bluegrass, rock 'n' roll, and country music, an unparalleled burst of invention. This is the counterfactual to the academics' story. Manning takes us down a long, strange path, following music to deeper understandings of racism, slavery, inequality, meditation, addiction, the science of our brains, and ultimately to an enticing glimpse of pure religion.
