Are You Ready For the Country: Elvis, Dylan, Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock. By Peter Doggett. Viking. 562pp, £12.99 in UK
Country Roads: How Country Came to Nashville. By Brian Hinton. Sanctuary. 474 pp, £12.99 in UK
White boys can't play the blues was once the catch-cry of purists. But their idea of the blues was dominated by the colour of skin and the status of class. While white boys can, and do, play very well what we call the blues, the poor white people of the southern United States have long had their own blues music - the bitter-sweet sounds of country.
Who would deny that the lonesome cries of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash echo the mood-filled rhythms of Leadbelly or Muddy Waters? Long before country music was seen, as in the Robert Altman film, Nashville, as the sound of right-wing reaction, country music was the voice of poor rural America. In the Appalachian Mountains neighbour exchanged tunes with neighbour, handing on the Scots/Irish/English tunes and ballads brought to the US by their forefathers. In turn they exchanged influences and styles with their black neighbours.
It was only when the American record industry came onstream with the invention of mass-market phonographs in the early 1920s that country music evolved from the front porch into the marketplace. The journey from there to present-day Nashville has been bumpy enough. For many country music is synonymous with cheap emotion, trite lyrics and limp melodies. But that is not the whole story. The banal is championed and celebrated, but there are an increasing number of artists who step outside the stifling Nashville prescription of garish conformity - as, indeed there have always been. Today they are termed Americana or alt.country. Previously the likes of Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson were known as Outlaws.
However, the influence of country has spread beyond the realms of Nashville. In the late 1960s Bob Dylan, along with The Band, The Byrds, and others helped push rock into its arms, creating a hybrid which became known as country rock. This has gone through many flavours but country-tinged music remains at the core of rock today, influencing some of its most creative forces, such as Beck.
These two aim to spread some light on the origins and influences of country. It is a tale of an underachiever and an overachiever both obsessed with country music. Between them there is the guts of an interesting, even fascinating book, but in an overload of detail it is hard work sorting out the valuable from the mundane and the irrelevant.
This is particularly unfortunate as country music deserves all the good publicity it can get. Both these British writers set out with the best intentions; they are enthusiasts with knowledge in abundance. Their chosen speciality is the rockier end of the country spectrum, particularly the music created since Dylan's famous conversion to the Nashville skyline in 1969. This is when Peter Doggett kicks off his book, and for him it is the seminal moment in rock's relationship with country.
Doggett opts for a piecemeal approach. So we get chapters on Dylan and Johnny Cash; the roots of country rock; Mike Nesmith and the Monkees; Gram Parsons - the early years, the middle years and his early untimely death; and so on. He divides his history into three phases: country-rock (effectively post-1966, The Byrds, Dylan and Gram Parsons et al), country into rock (effectively pre-1966, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Hank Williams etc) and parallel lines (effectively post-1975).
The book's scattered structure does not flow easily. The problem is that while each chapter is generally authoritative in itself, it is difficult to discern any central theme. So we bounce from chapter to chapter, enriching ourselves in Doggett's wealth of detail, but left to ourselves to form any key arguments. Doggett does provide a feast of recommended reading and also lists 100 albums he considers essential, but this book most critically lacks a driving mission.
Brian Hinton, on the other hand, has mission in abundance. But then in 474 densely printed pages he has a lot of everything. He sets out his stall in the introduction: "My particular brief in this book is to redress the balance (as distinct from other influences) by exposing the continuing influence on country of the European folk traditions".
He is not the first. Many have noted this connection, not least the Irish duo, Nuala O'Connor and Philip King, in their book and documentary, Bringing It All Back Home. While Hinton covers much the same territory as Doggett, he does angle his evidence to support his thesis, remarking that even to this day there is a rich exchange between the American country traditions and European/Celtic traditions. While he has lots of time for Irish artists such as Maura O'Connell, he is a little too dismissive of country'n'Irish; mawkish it may be, but it is a valid reflection of a deeply-rooted culture.
But if Hinton knows where he is going, he has an irritating habit of stopping off at any and every cul-de-sac en route. This is a book which cries out for firm editing. Hinton throws in everything that occurs to him; movies, books, poetry, albums, songs are paraded before us, swamping the reader with irrelevant detail. The chapters are too long, the text too convoluted, the type is too small. The irony is that he has a case to make. The problem is that he takes an age to make it.