I continue to be gratified that my book, MUSIC TITANS – 250 GREATEST RECORDING ARTISTS OF THE PAST 100 YEARS, continues to attract new readers. Below, you’ll find the opening passage of the book, which sets out how I came to write it —

There are not a lot of universals in this fractured world. Certainly we are divided by politics, religion, class, and, all too often still, by race. One universal bonding element, however, is music. Music is found in all cultures, and even the most hardened or stoic individual can be moved by a song, a melody, a chord, a lyric, a beat.

            Not that we all love the same songs or the same styles of music. As a child, all too often, I heard my father hollering to “turn that noise down,” while I often looked to flee the room to avoid having to hear his melancholy tunes. Still, I think it is safe to say that virtually all human beings can be stirred, at times, by some form of music.

            This book is an attempt to honor that universal grace that we call music. I am not a professor of music and I don’t purport to know much about Indian or Chinese or Middle Eastern music. I may speak a little Spanish, but I am not qualified to write about Mexican ranchera or mariachi styles. What I have been doing, ever since I was a little boy in the mid-’50s, is listening to music—religiously, fanatically, constantly. In countless ways, music has colored, even defined and given meaning to my life. I bought my first 45s at age seven, made weekly lists of my favorite songs when I was 11 or 12, sang in choirs and choruses and informal doo-wop gatherings with friends as I grew into adolescence. As I said, I didn’t listen to mariachi or Indian music because it wasn’t readily available, but I consumed everything within my grasp. When I bought my first $8 guitar from Woolworth’s, I learned to play (badly) and in no time I was singing and strumming in a teenage band, then later in parks, on beaches, and street corners, caring not for the coins or occasional bills that came my way but only for the love of singing and sharing song. Never parlaying the occasional coffee house, recording session, or church gig into a career, I grew instead into a teacher but never left the world of music behind.

            This book, then, is a labor of love. Whenever I watch or read about the latest Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees, or check out Rolling Stone’slists of the greatest this or that, or listen to a trendy artist picking up a handful of Grammys, I am always intrigued and sometimes ready to differ. That’s what this book is about—it seeks to answer the question, just who are the greatest recording artists of the past century?

MUSIC TITANS remains available at Amazon or wherever books are sold online. Thank you!