Nanci Griffith & Joe Jackson: Nanci Griffith's Other Voices: A Personal History Of Folk Music

Folk icon Nanci Griffith is a gifted songwriter, an insightful interpreter, and a wonderful performer. But is she really so talented that an entire book needs to be dedicated to the recording of one of her records? Other Voices: A Personal History Of Folk Music is a poorly realized and narcissistic peek at the making of Griffith's Other Voices, Too: A Trip Back To Bountiful, a collection of cover songs that shows more passion for folk music than any half-assed (if well-intentioned) book can reveal. Griffith has a wealth of information when it comes to folk, a veritable encyclopedia of Americana. But instead of capitalizing on her first-hand grasp of folk's history, Griffith, with the dubious help of Irish music journalist Joe Jackson, opts instead to write a relatively uninformative, nearly 300-page press kit for the companion record. How else to explain her limited, redundant prose and the not especially pointed interviews conducted by co-author Jackson? Other Voices, Too, the sequel to her well-received 1993 collection of covers, Other Voices, Other Rooms, is an impeccable selection that boasts the presence of several country, folk, and rock luminaries. But Pet Sounds it is not, and this paperback trifle seems superfluous and self-congratulatory. Worst of all, over half the book is dedicated to track-by-track discussions of the songs Griffith plays on the record, as if there's a point to Griffith affirming a love for the songs that's already implied by the very nature of their inclusion. How redundant is that? If Griffith's intent was really to write a personal history of folk music, and not just a personal history of her latest album, she would have included more material like the Pete Seeger interview that closes the book. Griffith clearly reveres pivotal and influential figures like Seeger, Townes Van Zandt, Alan Lomax, and Buddy Holly, but by wasting her book writing about a record that speaks for itself, she squanders a great opportunity to renew that sense of reverence in readers.