Where Dead Voices Gather by Nick Tosches

The delicious contempt Nick Tosches feels for modern American music is matched only by his scholarly fascination with its unacknowledged history. He comes across less as a cultural commentator than an Old Testament prophet, bringing a righteous wrath to the commercial whores of mediocrity, while pursuing mavericks and unsung heroes of rock with an evangelical zeal.

This sermon revolves around Emmett Miller, a turn-of-the-century minstrel whose career bridged, and was lost among, the transitions from blackface yodelling to jazz, from the vaudeville singer to the crooner. The details of his life are vague: born around 1900 in Georgia, he worked the predominantly Southern circuit of coon-shows and field minstrels, cut a handful of records and died in 1962, pickled in booze.

If you are after straight biography, this certainly isn't it. If, on the other hand, you want a full-scale row about racial stereotyping, cultural theft, musical legacies, social history and American identity, Tosches is more than happy to oblige.

He starts with a stubborn and seductive defence of minstelry itself. His contention seems to be that any accusations of "appropriation" or "mockery" imply that there is an authentic core to the "black experience". He offers instead a vision of American popular culture whose foundations are theft, fluidity, mimickry and role-play – "Nothing in this country is real, everyone an actor" – and asks: "Does Spike Lee differ from turn-of-the-century coon-show hustlers, except that he pretends to substance and importance?"

The notion of a crooks' paradise may prove less convincing to the African-American who is three times more likely to go to prison than college and may not survive to enjoy this glorious simulacrum of ethnic pantomime. Tosches not only sidesteps such objections, but his examples can bewilder.

Elvis Presley is the "mediocrator who made of the fine crude bread of real rock'n'roll a sterile and insipid Wonder Bread for the masses". Bing Crosby, however, was "the first singer to work the microphone as if it were a woman... the most revolutionary move in popular singing." Hmm.

That said, much of the pleasure of this book is in his provocative rhetoric. Tosches has always been the most conflicted of writers. In the ghost of Emmett Miller, he may have found a figure as elusive and contrary as himself.