1927. With the coming of recorded sound, the United States is ushering in a new age of popular music. The Catchers are the men – and in Xan Brooks’ fine new novel, The Catchers are all men – tasked with travelling the country on behalf of their record companies in order to discover new songs and recording artists who will go on to sell a million discs. It’s a new gold rush, but for The Catchers the music isn’t just more precious than gold: it also has a potency unmatched by anything else: “A book can break your heart but it takes 200 fucking pages to do it. A motion picture works faster – maybe twenty minutes or so. But a song, holy shit, it can do it in a second, in the space of the first fucking bar. There’s nothing else like it.” To that end The Catchers swarm the Appalachian Mountains and the Deep South with their bulky recording machines, on the look out for “hill music” (think: early country) or “race music” (think: early blues). John Coughlin is a rookie in the biz but when he hears amazing things about a Black teenage guitarist/singer/songwriter named Moss Evans he’s determined to track him down. ‘The Catchers’ is a finely wrought romp, a picaresque odyssey replete with shady characters galore and all manner of high-jinx, but the book doesn’t shy away from flagging up the business model that the record companies rely on to make their riches. It’s a tale about capitalism, red in tooth and claw, with those holding the means of production and distribution all singing from the same sheet. Their song? Exploitation. RM

Published by Salt