If you're like me, you've always been mystified by the uncanny similarity between Hank Williams and John Lee Hooker, to say nothing of the near-identical vocal qualities of Hank Snow and B.B. King. Luckily, we have a book that explains it all. According to Ed Ward in the first 1/3 of "Rock of Ages," country and rhythm & blues evolved along parallel lines until coming together and producing the country/r&b offspring called rock and roll. Yes, this would certainly explain the vast similaries between Grandpa Jones and Muddy Waters. According to Ward, "the hillbillies were getting radical (musically)" in the early 1950s--hillbillies like Flatt and Scruggs, "Little" Jimmy Dickens, Lefty Frizzel, and Tennessee Ernie Ford. Certainly, when one listen's to Frizzel's "If You've Got the Money I've Got the Time," one can hear a musical revolution in the works. Radical, radical stuff.

As a warm-up to listing such maverick selections as T. Ernie Ford's "Shotgun Boogie," Ward provides scholarly and valuable historical background, including a one-sentence account of the origin of jazz: "In 1902 or thereabouts, someone improvised a countermelody against the one the rest of the band was playing, and the seed of an all-new indigenous American music, jazz, was planted." I frankly prefer this account to the more complicated and stuffy one contained in the 1926 pop song "Birth of the Blues," which features lyrics about new notes pushed through a horn 'til they're born into blue notes, or something like that. That may be more academically correct than Ward's account, but I'd rather be entertained as I learn. And Ward brilliantly sums up the big band era by noting the era's three types of orchestras--"sweet, corn, and swing." By the time rock and roll is born (starting on page 98 with the helpfully-titled chapter, "Rock and Roll Is Born"), we have finished the Ed Ward Roots of Rock Home Study Course, and are ready to digest all of the usual cliches about how rock and roll died (temporarily) in the late 1950s, how Tin Pan Alley took over rock and roll songwriting, etc., and suddenly we're in the 1960s.

Enter Geoffrey Stokes, who tells us all about how "rock" replaced "rock and roll" in 1963, a full 61 years after jazz was invented. (But what happened to "and roll"?)

And so it continues. There are certainly smaller volumes of crank musicology out there, but "Rock of Ages" is probably the most comprehensive collection of pop music mythology to be found anywhere. The authors don't leave a single music-journalistic cliche unturned, and some of the names and titles dropped herein are more than worth checking out. But if you are looking for serious rock musicology, hide thyself from this.

A tour de force of monumental proportions, Geoffrey Stokes has really turned an entire generation of music into a concise yet informative book that truly stimulates the intellect of even the faintest fan of American rock & roll. Clever anecdotes reveal each musician's voice behind timeless classics of the modern era. A must have for all; this book can easily complete a collection or start it. I recommend it with ALL of my critical expertise.