Uncommon Sound, written by John Engel, is a stylish two-volume, 920-page, limited-edition book set covering all of popular music on five continents since the 1920s, seen through the lives, works and words of left-handed guitar players.
Uncommon Sound gives us a true big picture of what popular music is and how it is being made, through quotes culled from hundreds of exclusive interviews with the artists and industry insiders, as well as the author’s probing commentary and more than 2,500 photographs.
These massive tomes reveal vital facets of popular music’s colorful history, such as the birth and splintering of rock, the advent and development of the guitar in jazz, the ebb and flow of soul music, and many more. The musician’s life is chronicled amid its triumphs and creative thrills but also the harsh and topsy-turvy realities of the record industry (Otis Rush, Rusty Burns, Bryan Harvey, …), poverty and racial inequity (DeFord Bailey, Bobby Womack, Jonathan Butler, …), political beliefs and contexts (Atahualpa Yupanqui, Bill Svanoe, Lili Boniche, John Schumann, …), and personal tragedy and adversity (Wesley Tuttle, CeDell Davis, Bill Jennings, …).
Left-handed guitar players are Uncommon Sound’s window onto the world of popular music. The choice is audacious, but compelling.
To begin with, no need for subjective selections of one artist over another. This gallery of lefty guitarists offers the full gamut of musical artistry, from the pop icons, such as Jimi Hendirx and Paul McCartney, to pioneers such as Elizabeth Cotten or DeFord Bailey, to the relatively obscure yet essential session players.
But more importantly: given the guitar’s role as popular music’s most iconic instrument for the past 80 years, who better to represent its maverick beacon, its creative rebel, than those distinctive, self-taught lefty players? Some of them play upside down, some use totally idiosyncratic tunings, some are right-handers who chose the “opposite” of conventional logic… All of them are unique artists, trailblazers in their own right, and, as such, they embody the creative spirit that inhabits everyone of us.
It is hard to find any substantial reading material that mixes musicians’ personal journeys with the big picture -- the history, the record industry, the shared paths, the day-to-day realities of the musical experience. That mix is precisely what Uncommon Sound is about. It explores the lives, views and oeuvres of 150 artists and brings to light numerous connections and insights. The successive portraits convey a global tapestry of achievements that underlies humanity’s one common bond: our individual uniqueness.