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After the Ball: Pop Music from Rag to Rock
An irreverent and engaging chronicle of popular music dating from the 1880s, when Tin Pan Alley was founded, to the present by a British-born songwriter and onetime pop star.
“Brash, learned, funny, and perspicacious.”
– The New Yorker
“Brash, learned, funny, and perspicacious.”
– The New Yorker
- GenresMusic
330 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 9, 2012
It’s not easy to explain why this book is so wonderful. If I say it’s a history of pop music, many of you will groan. And I’d understand. Most books about pop music are rubbish. If I add that this was published in 1972, you’ll probably also think it’s useless, outdated. But After the Ball is no nerdy encyclopaedia of bands and hits, dependent for its value on being current. This is a personal essay, and one so charming, so idiosyncratic, so simply well-written that it’s irresistible. I discovered the book in the public library when I was perhaps twelve or thirteen. It didn’t matter that I’d never heard (and, back then, had no chance of hearing) most of music Whitcomb was talking about. I fell in love with the book and have loved it ever since.
A few explanations. ‘Pop music’ in this connection doesn’t mean just the usual rock’n’roll roster (Bill Haley, Elvis, the Beatles). We’re talking about commercial popular music, going back to the time the industry first assumed a recognisably modern shape. The title After the Ball derives from Chas. K. Harris’s sentimental ballad of 1892, the first million-selling song (which, in those days, meant a million copies of sheet music).
The author, Ian Whitcomb, was a minor sixties pop star, briefly famed for his bizarre falsetto hit ‘You Turn Me On’ (1965). The book begins and ends autobiographically. On tour in the USA, Whitcomb the pop star (not incidentally, a history graduate from Trinity College, Dublin) suddenly wonders what on earth this whole pop thing is all about. Where did it come from? What does it mean? He decides to find out, plumbing through the eras of ragtime, jazz, swing, and rock, veering frequently between America and Britain, with many an acute observation on the way, before returning, finally, to his young pop star self and the inevitable end of his career.
What makes the book is the way that Whitcomb writes. His is a relaxed, wry idiom, perfectly suited to a subject matter he at once regards with passion but never quite takes seriously. Nothing could be further from the dull sociological treatises to which pop music has been subjected in recent years. There are passages that are laugh-out-loud funny. There are moments of sheer poetry. Fiction and fantasy mingle with fact. If there were an award for the best book about pop music ever written, my vote would go to After the Ball.
Whitcomb’s later book about sixties pop music, Rock Odyssey (1983) is also wonderful, as is his memoir of his life as an Englishman in California, Resident Alien (1990). He’s a tremendous writer, wonderfully readable, wonderfully entertaining. His online radio shows, in which he plays and talks about the retro music featured in his books, are well worth checking out.
A few explanations. ‘Pop music’ in this connection doesn’t mean just the usual rock’n’roll roster (Bill Haley, Elvis, the Beatles). We’re talking about commercial popular music, going back to the time the industry first assumed a recognisably modern shape. The title After the Ball derives from Chas. K. Harris’s sentimental ballad of 1892, the first million-selling song (which, in those days, meant a million copies of sheet music).
The author, Ian Whitcomb, was a minor sixties pop star, briefly famed for his bizarre falsetto hit ‘You Turn Me On’ (1965). The book begins and ends autobiographically. On tour in the USA, Whitcomb the pop star (not incidentally, a history graduate from Trinity College, Dublin) suddenly wonders what on earth this whole pop thing is all about. Where did it come from? What does it mean? He decides to find out, plumbing through the eras of ragtime, jazz, swing, and rock, veering frequently between America and Britain, with many an acute observation on the way, before returning, finally, to his young pop star self and the inevitable end of his career.
What makes the book is the way that Whitcomb writes. His is a relaxed, wry idiom, perfectly suited to a subject matter he at once regards with passion but never quite takes seriously. Nothing could be further from the dull sociological treatises to which pop music has been subjected in recent years. There are passages that are laugh-out-loud funny. There are moments of sheer poetry. Fiction and fantasy mingle with fact. If there were an award for the best book about pop music ever written, my vote would go to After the Ball.
Whitcomb’s later book about sixties pop music, Rock Odyssey (1983) is also wonderful, as is his memoir of his life as an Englishman in California, Resident Alien (1990). He’s a tremendous writer, wonderfully readable, wonderfully entertaining. His online radio shows, in which he plays and talks about the retro music featured in his books, are well worth checking out.
December 31, 2018
A broad history of pop music, written warmly and filled with anecdotes about a tremendous number of singers and songs. When Whitcomb writes about his passions - ragtime, music hall, novelty songs of the interwar years - the book is fantastic, and his writing style is often entertaining, a very British, performative 'university wit who's mad about low culture' voice. But some of the book is what he calls "garnished autobiography with many dream touches" (297) which felt preciously self-amused, and he uses just a hair too many racial epithets, some justifiable (archaic terms for style or genre - coon shouter, darky song), some frankly inexcusable (his use of n*, as both noun and adjective, when he discusses rhythm and blues). It's not malicious, but it's awfully casual - a white man convinced that he's free to use these words because he really, really loves the blues - and I hope the editors of more recent editions (I read the 1974 Penguin paperback) helped out Whitcomb and his readers by making some judicious changes.
May 6, 2021
Honestly, this took me almost a year to finish; most engaging was the section on Tin Pan Alley, least engaging was the everything else (especially the personal one-hit-wonder story concluding the journey from rag to rock). Well researched.
March 14, 2016
I loved reading After the Ball: Pop Music from Rag to Rock, however I wish Ian Whitcomb had included more about the current music scene (from the writing time of this book which was the late 60s early 70s). He goes into great depth about ragtime and the music following, but drops the ball a bit when coming to the music that was popular at the time of the book's writing. A lot was going on back then as we all know in hindsight.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews