Several books this season focus on the person who sits at the soundboard, refines an artist’s distinctive sound, and turns them into stars. In some cases, these producers discovered new artists and helped them develop a musical style that shaped the contours of American music. In other cases, they helped found record labels that became synonymous with particular musical genres and bands. Without Cowboy Jack Clements, for example, we might never have heard Jerry Lee Lewis; without Don Law, blues master Robert Johnson might have remained stranded down at the crossroads, waiting to be discovered.
In the 1970s, Neil Bogart founded Casablanca Records, signing up artists as diverse as KISS, Donna Summer, and Parliament-Funkadelic. His vision altered the musical landscape of the decade, and in Going Platinum: KISS, Donna Summer, and How Neil Bogart Built Casablanca Records (Lyons, Nov.), Brett Ermilio and Josh Levine draw on family archives and anecdotes to capture the glamor of Bogart’s recording empire.
When Ray Charles wanted to make a country album, a producer named Sid Feller helped the singer find the right songs. The story of this collaboration—and the producer’s impact on Charles’s sound and career—is one of many vignettes in Michael Jarrett’s Producing Country: The Inside Story of the Great Recordings (Wesleyan, Sept.). Jarrett interviews some of country music’s greatest producers—such as Chet Atkins, Bobby Braddock, Harold Bradley, and Cowboy Jack Clement—who explain their role in producing some of the biggest hits in the history of country music.
Glyn Johns has sat at the board on some of rock’s greatest albums, from Let It Be, Abbey Road, and Who’s Next to the eponymous debut albums of Led Zeppelin and the Eagles. In his memoir, Sound Man (Blue Rider, Nov.), Johns takes readers back to the halcyon days of the ’60s. “Whether he was with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, or countless others,” says David Rosenthal, Blue Rider Press president and publisher, “Glyn is the behind-the-scenes miracle worker who crafted bands’ signature sounds.” Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012, Johns continues to produce artists like Emmylou Harris, Ryan Adams, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
Perhaps the most overlooked producer in the U.S., Ralph Peer was instrumental in recording Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues”—the record that sparked the blues craze—and some of the first country 78s. He discovered Jimmie Rodgers (the Singing Brakeman) and the Carter Family at the famed Bristol sessions and helped popularize Latin American music during World War II. In a much anticipated biography of the revolutionary producer and publisher, Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Chicago Review, Nov.), music historian Barry Mazor provides the definitive account of Peer’s contributions. Chicago Review Press senior editor Yuval Taylor says, “Peer changed the very nature of American popular music from a showcase for well-crafted songs to one for vivid performances informed by ethnic musical traditions. Perhaps no more fundamental change—a paradigm shift, really—has ever occurred in its history. I have long felt that Peer, a modest man, was as important in the shaping of American music as Duke Ellington, Jimmie Rodgers, Elvis Presley, and Bob Dylan.”