The Best Music You've Never Heard 1 (Rough Guide Reference) - Softcover

Author Nigel Williamson is a regular contributor to the magazines Uncut and Songlines, and is the author of The Rough Guide To Bob Dylan.

In its chapter on Nick Drake the ethereal British folk singer who died at age 26 in 1974 without his three albums making any commercial impact whatsoever Nigel Williamson's "The Best Music You've Never Heard" pinpoints why there's such a growing market for knowledge about the overlooked "hidden gems" in recorded music's history.
Advocates for someone anyone who has ever recorded to little avail now have an instant global soapbox to champion a perceived injustice. "In the age of the Internet, long-forgotten classics are being rediscovered, reappraised and reissued on an almost weekly basis," writes Williamson, the primary author (with contributors) to this music book from Rough Guides. "But it was Drake, who unknowingly created the template."
In 1986, Drake's work was posthumously released as a four-CD box, prompting a renewed interest that has now made him one of the most respected British singer-songwriters ever. "Nick Drake is in a sense the patron saint of this book," Williamson writes. "The first of rock music's Van Gogh figures, his talent was almost totally ignored in his lifetime and his greatness only recognized long after his death."
This book makes a case for other musicians who history has forgotten, overlooked or chronically undervalued. There is a moderate British orientation Williamson was a former news editor for The Times of London as well as an experienced music writer but there is plenty of room for Americans like the Brecht-Weill-influenced singer-songwriter David Ackles and psychedelic folkies Holy Modal Rounders.
The back stories can be fascinating, revealing just how interconnected this global village of a world can be. The book touts the "Ethiopiques" series of hip, rockin' contemporary Ethiopian music that a French devotee named Francis Falceto has been assembling and releasing. --Denver Post