LITMIR.BIZ

      This book is the product of an oral history project begun by Aaron Beam at the beginning of the 1990s. As a music lover and club owner, Beam had made friends with the bands that played his venues, and he became interested in Birmingham’s rock ’n’ roll history as he listened to their stories. Southern musicians are essentially storytellers, and to tell a good story well is to perform. These recollections can cover the rise to fame of a group of musicians, the rags-to-riches stories that are at the heart of rock ’n’ roll mythology, and the corresponding, but no less dramatic, fall from grace. There are creation stories about bands, the writing of a great song, and the early years of a local musician who went on to become famous. Many of these rise-and-fall stories have a moral: the dangers of hubris, the pitfalls of sudden wealth, and the consequences of forgetting one’s friends. Every working musician can be relied on to recount at least one notable adventure of the road, or in a performance in the kind of place one only sees in the movies. The stories often begin: “I remember one night we were playing …” and then, acknowledging a comrade, “He tells it better than I do.” Longtime session man Roger Clark, looking back on forty years in the business, said: “I got a lot of stories. Some of ’em I can’t tell you about … I’d have to leave home … I can tell you a lot of stories, and some of them I wasn’t there.”

      Giving interviews to journalists or historians could be taken as merely another performance. I have heard the same stories wonderfully recounted by authors like Peter Guralnick and Robert Gordon in their books duplicated more or less word by word by the same storytellers, at different times and different places. I have also heard the same story told by several different respondents in which the leading role had been appropriated by whoever was telling the story. No matter; these are good stories, and Aaron Beam heard

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