Thomas Dresser

Music on Martha's Vineyard is both an immensely valuable book and a deeply frustrating one. The fact that it is (at this writing) the only book on its subject simultaneously multiplies the value and deepens the frustration. This is a long review of a brief book precisely because of that odd tension.

The book's value lies, partly, in the sheer breadth of its coverage. It gives due attention to Carly Simon, James Taylor, and their various siblings and offspring--collectively the "first family" of Vineyard music--but treats them (rightly) as merely the most visible members of a breathtakingly large and diverse musical community. In well under 200 pages, the book ranges from the legends and legends-to-be who have played the Vineyard, to the musical celebrities who have become seasonal residents, to a dizzying array of homegrown singers, players, and songwriters. Readers who love music and have spent time on the Vineyard will encounter dozens of familiar names--Maynard Silva, Johnny Hoy, and Jemima James; the Flying Elbows and the high school's Minnesingers choral ensemble--but dozens more unfamiliar ones. Legendary venues like the Moon Cusser and Wintertide coffeehouses and the Seaview Hotel barroom get their due, but so do ones whose very existence may be news to longtime residents.

The coverage of musical genres is equally broad: Instrumental and choral; classical and popular; string band and brass band, acoustic and electric; rock, folk, funk, punk, jazz, blues, soul, spirituals, and sea chanteys. Dresser and Muskin seem to have talked to everyone on the Vineyard who plays, sings, or writes music for public performance, and their choice of anecdotes is frequently inspired. "Johnny Hoy," one section begins, "came to the Vineyard on a boat that sank." Who wouldn't want to know more about a musical career that began like that? Hollywood song-and-dance legend James Cagney's complicated feeling about the Vineyard in his early years as a summer resident are summed up in a self-composed poem describing the island as "that queen of insular sluts." David Crohan recalls a middle-aged couple who, having picked him up while hitchhiking on the island in the mid-1960s and knowing that he was the piano player at the Island House in Oak Bluffs, confided their anxieties about their young son's all-consuming interest in music. Not to worry, Crohan told them: Whether or not he makes it in the business, music will enrich his life. Mr. & Mrs. Taylor needn't have worried. Their son James did, indeed, make it in the music business.

Music on Martha's Vineyard brims over with stories like that--perhaps "improved" by the passage of time and countless retellings, but still fascinating--which will amuse and enlighten music fans and lovers of Martha's Vineyard alike. As a catalog of Vineyard musicians and venues (mostly, but not exclusively, from 1960 onward) and a collection of anecdotes about them, the book succeeds admirably.

It largely fails, however, to be the history of music on Martha's Vineyard that its subtitle and back cover blurb represent it as. The stories that make up the book are stacked like bricks at a building supply yard, not mortared together--according to a clearly defined set of plans--into an interlocking whole. The arrangement of material within the book is sometimes chronological, sometimes thematic, and sometimes both at once. Some individuals and groups have their stories told in a single section; others, for no apparent reason, have their stories spread over multiple chapters. Many of the events described in the text are not clearly tied to a particular date or even a particular year, making it difficult for readers to assemble the scattered bits of a given story on their own. The frustratingly inadequate 2-page index makes it impossible to even locate all the references to a given individual, band, or venue. In fairness, however, its almost-comic brevity may be a product of the publisher's insistence, not the authors' choice.

A book that covers a broad and complex subject in less than 200 pages must, by definition, leave out more than is left in. That Music on Martha's Vineyard reduces the decades-long careers of individuals or histories of institutions to a handful of anecdotes is understandable. What is frustrating, however, is that the broad sweep of those careers or histories (the scope, and boundaries, of what has been left out) is rarely touched on, even in a single sentence. We have the stories, but seldom the context, and the effect is like eating a fruitcake that is all fruit and nuts, with no cake to bind them.

The text also suffers from choppiness at the sentence and paragraph level. Chapters begin with poetic but un-descriptive titles (which is fine) but then begin without any indication of what they're about (which is not). Other chapter titles mislead: "Maynard Played the Blues" seems to promise an in-depth profile of Maynard Silva, but midway through the focus shifts to Johnny Hoy and then shifts again to another musician. Individuals and bands frequently go un-glossed until the second or third time they are referred to, and some are never glossed (e.g. "a jazz cellist who had moved to the Island in 1957") at all. Venues and other Vineyard institutions are rarely glossed at all, leaving readers to wonder where they are (or were), when they closed, or whether they are still operating. If you don't already know that "The Ritz" is an endearingly scruffy bar, not a posh hotel, the book will not enlighten you.

No book of less than 200 pages, can cover the entire history of so broad a subject in depth; no reviewer, and no reader, should expect it to try. Music on Martha's Vineyard is, at its best, an "anecdotal history," and its anecdotes are endlessly fascinating. While we wait for the comprehensive history that the subject deserves, we can be glad that we have this one.… (meer)