Stanley steers well clear of these classical pioneers (even those, such as Kurt Weill, who dipped a lot more than a toe into popular music), but does an inspired job of identifying and describing all the tangled roots of pre-rock popular music. He’s not pompous enough to put forward anything as scholarly as a thesis — but a sort of thesis emerges anyway. It’s that, for the first time in history, technology became the driving force behind music’s development ... One of Stanley’s main achievements is to bring to life the giants of the era — Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Glenn Miller and the like — and many half-forgotten figures. His enthusiasm for the quirky Boswell Sisters (who recorded their best numbers after midnight with drunk session musicians) or the pioneering mixed-race female bandleader Ina Ray Hutton is so infectious that I spent a whole evening hunting down their tracks on YouTube ... Along the way, too, he includes vivid anecdotes that capture not just the essence of a single life, but an entire era ... Stanley isn’t afraid to deliver contentious verdicts on famous names either ... Such provocations will be endlessly debated by wrinkled connoisseurs like me, but I hope Stanley’s book has a far wider readership than us. It also needs to inspire younger generations. Contrary to the impression given by most writing about pop and rock, popular music did exist before Elvis — and a vast amount of it is far too good to be forgotten.
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