Popular music heritage is big business. Pilgrims flock from all around the world to places where they believe magic once happened – Liverpool, London, Los Angeles, Lubbock. Academic popologists have long been exploring the connections between pop heritage, cultural memory, and local identity, working with museums, talking to the public, publishing (of course), and publishing some more, just to work out what 'place' means and how to define 'heritage'.
Peter Finch has spent his life in thrall to American roots music, and this book is in part a love letter to it. The first 72 pages of The Roots of Rock trace Finch's introduction to the world of high fidelity, and provide a vivid snapshot of mid-century Cardiff streets, cafes, record shops, and front rooms, all with their changing soundtracks. Early rock’n’roll is often written into autobiography, biography, and fiction, but very rarely is Cardiff the setting for the action. In this regard The Roots of Rock adds an important dimension to an otherwise familiar story. Much of the narrative is coloured by Finch's particular attention to difference:

Some of the material was actually okay. Most of it featured singers with Christian names I hadn't ever come across. ln my school people were called things like Trevor, Martin, Terrence and Ronald. At Cae'r Castell Secondary Mod there was no one called Bo, Pee Wee, Sunnyland, Peppermint, or even Big Joe. The nearest we had to a blues nom de plume was the sports master and Harlequins rugby player who went under the name Cowboy Davies.
[p. 24]

For a young man whose life was so consumed by American music, it is surprising to discover that he only took his first trip to the States in 2003. But had the younger Finch gone on a musical pilgrimage in the 1960s or 1970s this would have been an entirely different story, and not nearly as good. What is effective about Finch's account is the vibrant memories that he's carried from his Cardiff youth of the 1950s and l960s, and the shadows cast on those memories by the business of pop heritage in the 21st century.
It is not news that the Elvis Presley estate continues to capitalise spectacularly on the King's enduring legacy. Indeed, Finch's chapter on the Porthcawl Elvis Festival considers nostalgia, kitsch, and mortality in equal measures, with commercialism and class creeping up from behind. Those latter two are at the base of a lot of academic literature about rock 'n roll in general and pop heritage in particular Finch touches a bit on authorship and originality in The Roots of Rock, but the bigger questions, about who benefits financially from blues tourism, about whose 'roots' are actually being unearthed, about musical appropriation and systemic racism, are largely left unposed.
Where Finch's storytelling strength lies is in his ability to connect the furthest reaches of American culture back to Wales. Occasionally this takes the form of spotting familiar surnames and meeting expats, but also, more effectively, when Finch casts a critical eye not only on American consumption but on Wales’ own sense of cultural history:

Music Halls of Fame, it turns out, exist as a sort of twentieth century rash right across America. Unlike in Wales, land of song, where we have precisely none, the Americans have realised that as music is part of their world-dominating culture it should be celebrated as such. We have a tradition going back a thousand years and we hide it in the bowels of our museum of folk life and resited buildings, St. Fagans.
The Americans invented theirs somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century and have been celebrating it with bells, whistles and constant dollar investment ever since.
[p. 183]

This speaks volumes about the differences between reputation and ostentation, about cultural timidity and self-confidence. As an American living in Wales, I confess that I have found the Welsh tendency toward cultural understatement beguiling and frustrating in equal measure. But given Finch’s descriptions of the alternatives, of tourists gawping at replica shotgun shacks, of endless parking lots and overpriced souvenir shops, I’m not convinced that St Fagans doesn’t offer the more alluring experience.

The Roots of Rock has a great deal to say about history, adolescence, and cultural belonging, and Finch’s timeline offers all the historical context the casual reader might need to access the music. I applaud Finch for including a basic bibliography, but there are some fairly standard, non-academic titles that I did not see on his list: Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train and Dead Elvis; Charlie Gillett’s The Sound of the City. Wearing my mortarboard and academic robes, I would take issue with Finch’s consistent misplacement of footnote numbers (they should go outside of punctuation) and incomplete discographical references (release dates, please). I would have liked a tighter sense of chronology in the narrative and a more meticulous proofreader (it’s Haight-Ashbury, not ‘Height Ashbery’). But as a trip back through time to Cardiff at a pivotalmoment in pop culture history, and forward to that historical moment’s afterlife, this is a vivid and engaging read that breathes new life into some great old music.

Dr Sarah Hill is a Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at Cardiff University. Her latest book is San Francisco and the Long 60s (Bloomsbury)