Interview with Barry Mazor

If you read a lot of music journalism you have no doubt run across the name Barry Mazor. A Senior Editor for No Depression, his work has appeared in many of the magazines and he has two articles in the new No Depression bookazine. In addition to that, he has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, the Nashville Scene and many others. He currently writes a bi-weekly column at the new No Depression Web site and has recently finished his first book.

Music Tomes: How did you get into music writing?

Barry Mazor: If you’d asked me the “What do you want to be when you grow up?” question when I was a kid, most of the time I would have answered “A writer,” even then. It was that basic and inevitable for me; I wrote for my junior high school paper, high school paper and yearbook. Meanwhile, one of my main childhood joys was getting to pick and buy a 45 record of the week — and my choices by age 5 or 6 were already pretty rootsy! I grew up in a fairly show business-oriented family, and music always loomed large, and during my college years, in Washington, D.C., in 1967-’71, I just immersed myself in the whole history of country music, blues, folk — and, of course, the rock and pop was everywhere. I was, in effect, though there was no term for it, an on-air “Americana” college disc jockey, too, circa 1969-’71. After graduating college, I immediately went to work in publishing in New York. I began writing about pop and roots music professionally in my twenties, in the ‘70s; you could have found my writing about more or less the same sorts of acts I cover for No Depression or The Wall Street Journal today in Crawdaddy magazine or the Soho Weekly News. I’d, in fact, stopped doing music writing for quite a while when I returned to it in the late ‘90s.

MT: What is the hardest part of the writing process for you?

BM: I think the honest answer would be transcribing all of those interviews! Just for my oncoming book Meeting Jimmie Rodgers I did about 90 of them. I bet that I would have had it done sooner if audio interviews magically typed themselves out. The technology is not really quite there for it to be that easy—though it’s getting closer.

MT: Can you tell us a little about your new project?

BM: It’s my attempt to do something that I think is a pretty fresh idea — to trace the impact of a major popular music performer and innovator from his time to ours, over 80 years, and around the globe. (The full title is Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America’s Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century.) With Jimmie Rodgers as my subject, that means I need to go into - and get to go into - country, blues, folk, rock, bluegrass, cowboy, Western Swing, pop, jazz — you name it — because his music’s been taken up and built on, mutated even, in all of those fields. As far back as I can. I get to the “what happened and how did that happen” aspects of it and where they were gone before I could get to them, through a fairly massive amount of research, to find such testimony back in the historical records. It’s been quite a trip. The book is done now, it will be out next spring from Oxford University Press, and I’d have to say that it’s been the most exciting project I’ve ever been involved with.

MT: You have written a lot about music and are a recognized expert in the field of vernacular music, but this is your first music related book, I believe. Were there things about the book writing process that surprised you?

BM: No, you’re right, Eric. This is the first book on music of this scope that I’ve done, and it is, shall we say, something else again! The process has made more real to me — for all of the work I’ve done in publishing, as an editor as well as a writer — to another hard part of the work, which is tracking the overall thrust of the argument and keeping all the material coordinated and well-employed. That’s very different when you’re working at the length not of a two or eight-page article, but a 350-plus page book. You turn to a part of an argument in chapter eleven you first raised, in a different context, in chapter 4, and you have to get them to gel with each other. And you may have written the second half of the argument before the first.

You contributed to the new No Depression "bookazine" that was recently released. How do you see the "bookazine" differing from the magazine aside from the business aspects?

BM: Well, I’m not involved with the business aspects per se, but the No Depression bookazine is sold in bookstores and online at the NoDepression.com website — and carries no advertising. The first one’s out now, and it’s a twice a year periodical — sold more like a book — which has the room for those semi-famous No Depression epic artist profiles, stories large enough that most people don’t seem to want to stick with something of that scope online. A lot of news and reviews, columns and shorter features are being updated on the website, on the other hand, and more frequently than before. I’m one of those with an every-other-week column on the site, which changes daily.

MT: Can you recommend any essential reading?

BM: I’m happy to have the chance to do that. For country music, I’d say that the best fast introduction to what it’s all really about is a short book by Bill C. Malone — Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers; it clears away a lot of clichés, misconceptions and preconceptions in one afternoon’s reading. A fresh, important book out just last year, The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry, by Diane Pecknold, is very good at looking at how what the audience has wanted from the music, and how the audience’s willing participation in country’s promotion has shaped it.

A book that played a big part in setting me off looking into the musical places between the benches for all these years is another short one, Tony Russell’s phenomenal Blacks, Whites and Blues. It spells out the scope of the musical interchange in American roots music — and points to the records you need to hear. It was out of print for a long time but is available again as a part of an anthology called Yonder Come the Blues. Another important book in the blues area: Big Road Blues by David Evans.

With endless books about the life and work of Bob Dylan out there, I’d mention Paul Williams’ Performing Artist: The Music of Bob Dylan, Volume One, as the one you shouldn’t miss. It stresses the performances, which always matter to me, rather than just his songwriting. Colin Escott’s Hank Williams bio is masterful. Also, to me it’s really important that this reading and writing about music that moves and shakes us not be some sort of painful obligation. It’s allowed to be fun and in that regard, as well as its ability to get hold of a complicated, fascinating character, I’d recommend Nick Tosches’ Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story, as another all-time keeper.