Throughout his career as a critic and journalist for the New York Times
, Rolling Stone
and other publications (as well as books like Deep Blues
), Palmer (1945–1997) strove for a unifying perspective that could cover all strains of American music, “a set of procedures that will allow us to evaluate Charles Ives and James Brown” as he wrote in a seminal 1979 essay. The breadth of his journalism is outstanding: he was one of the first writers to interview Sam Phillips, the head of Elvis Presley's first music label; soon after, he was alerting Times
readers to the developing “world music” movement, and the year after that he was hanging out in the recording studio with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He could write reviews of comprehensive box sets or write the liner notes for them, and either way the result would be an engaging, insightful essay crammed with historical details. One key test of any retrospective anthology of this sort is whether the reviews and essays are as relevant today as when they were first published, and on that front, Palmer scores an absolute success—his work, like that of Greil Marcus and Peter Guralnick, sets a standard for a critical appreciation of American culture. (Nov.)
