And the Roots of Rhythm Remain
About
Background summary — AI-generated; not source-grounded.
And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music is a 2024 book by Joe Boyd, the record producer behind Pink Floyd’s debut single, Fairport Convention’s Liege & Lief, and R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction. Seventeen years in the writing, it is a history of music from outside the Anglo-American mainstream — Cuban son, Congolese rumba, Indian classical raga, West African griot traditions, Brazilian tropicália, and more — tracing how these traditions formed, travelled, and were reshaped by colonialism, urbanisation, and the twentieth-century recording industry. Boyd writes from decades of first-hand professional involvement rather than as an outside historian: he toured and recorded many of the artists and traditions the book covers, and uses that vantage to challenge the commercial framing of ‘world music’ as a single, homogeneous genre.
In the wiki
- Joe Boyd on the Birth of Rock, World Music, and Being There for Everything — the book is the occasion for Boyd’s conversation with Tyler Cowen. He draws on its research to argue that ‘world music’ named a customer profile, not a musical style — record buyers seeking a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan album were the same customers for a Peruvian, flamenco, or Scottish piping record — and that music modernises through urbanisation everywhere in the world, with no exceptional process reserved for a ‘developing world’. His book research also grounds a technical claim about Indian music’s influence on the Beatles: non-tempered Indian scales, containing notes a tempered piano cannot produce, shaped George Harrison‘s slide guitar playing far more than the more obvious sitar borrowings.
See also
- Joe Boyd — the author