Inspired by Jack Kerouac and Huck Finn, Garth Cartwright’s latest musical travelogue began as a search for vernacular music, the sounds that built America. Like his previous Princes Amongst Men (2005), in which he explored a Balkans scoured by civil war for the spirit of a people captured in song, when Cartwright starts to wander, he takes neither the comfortable nor the conventional route. Instead, he spends long hours on Greyhound buses crawling with homicidal meth-heads, or weaving a tiny hire car between thundering juggernauts down the Lost Highway.

When he gets to his destinations, he often passes out at the wheel, or in flophouse motels reminiscent of slasher flicks. He takes
in the tourist hotspots – Beale Street, Graceland, The Grand Ole Opry – but then quickly departs for those places that are way off the map: the Navajo reservation in the shadow of Monument Valley, the Watts Towers of South Central Los Angeles, the East Side of Chicago, still unreconstructed after the riots of 1968.

Sometimes, the things he sees there make you wonder if you are reading about America at all – it seems more like some desperate
Third World failed state, ravaged by an insane despot. George W Bush was still in power when Garth made his trip, and the legacy of 30 years of "free economics" has left a blight of poverty, crystal meth addiction and devastating gang culture across the "Land of the Free".

Yet the people themselves remain tough, funny and brilliant. People like reformed gangbanger-turned-author Luis Rodriguez; former beauty queen-turned-gangster’s moll-turned Native American singer Radmilla Cody; chicken-coop-dwelling, cowpunching poet Kell Robertson; country boys Dale Watson and Billy Joe Shaver, soul legends Mable John and Deanie Parker, and in Cartwright’s most treasured coup, the last ever interview with Mexican legend Lydia Mendoza, who died in 2007 aged 91.

He has a moment of transcendence floating down the Mississippi with an old blues singer, just like his hero Huck, and hears firsthand a litany of stories that would make a Great American Novel in themselves. And that, really, is the point of this wonderful book. The late, great American oral historian and music lover Studs Terkel has, in this restless New Zealander, a worthy heir.
Cathi Unsworth