Roots Punk
Roots Punk
A Visual and Oral History
Punk rock evokes dissent and disruption, abrasive and anarchic musicality, and a host of countercultural aesthetics. Featuring original interviews and over one hundred images, Roots Punk: A Visual and Oral History by longtime music journalist and author David A. Ensminger focuses on how punk merged with roots music to create a rich style that incorporated honky-tonk, rockabilly, doo-wop, reggae, ska, jazz, folk, blues, and labor ballads. This engagement transformed the notion of punk to include a wide array of vintage source material that seems more aligned with bolo ties and Stetsons than Doc Martens and safety pins.
Ensminger explores the music’s aesthetics, traits, and themes. He contextualizes, clarifies, maps, and probes roots punk’s hybrid nature as well as its diverse, queer-inclusive, and multicultural strains. By painting a broad, nuanced, and well-documented picture of the genre from its earliest incarnation, he forms a kind of people’s history of the movement. Roots Punk features original interviews with members of Minutemen, MDC, the Dicks, the Plimsouls, Tex and the Horseheads, Dils/Rank and File, X, the Flesh Eaters, Beatnigs, Alejandro Escovedo, Robert “El Vez” Lopez, Blasters, and more.
Whether covering sarcastic novelty forms or sincere embraces, Ensminger reveals and revels in a punk tradition lined with blues records, acoustic ballads, country, and hillbilly romp. In a time of growing conformity, replication, and commercialization, roots punk (sometimes dubbed cow-punk) offers a tantalizing revitalization and reimagination of the American songbook.
Ensminger’s deft new book looks beneath the surface of punk rock as a fashion statement. . . . A compelling examination of punk rock and the history of modern music.
With thorough, enticing interviews and incisive commentary, Roots Punk offers an important counternarrative to standard histories of punk.
Roots Punk takes readers into new areas of punk’s rich history, showing how rockabilly, raw rock ’n’ roll, and R&B inspired some of the most important punk bands in the US and abroad.
David A. Ensminger is a college instructor of English, humanities, and folklore in Texas; a drummer with decades behind the kit; and an author of several books covering both American roots music and punk rock history, including Visual Vitriol: The Street Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generation, published by University Press of Mississippi. He is also an ongoing contributor to magazines in America and Europe, such as Razorcake, Maximum Rocknroll, Trust, and Zap. And, he has been interviewed by The Economist and the Boston Globe.
