Backbeat: Earl Palmer's Story is the biography

Biography

A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...

 of pioneer rock and roll

Rock and roll

Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from a combination of African American blues, country, jazz, and gospel music...

 drummer

Drummer

A drummer is a musician who is capable of playing drums, which includes but is not limited to a drum kit and accessory based hardware which includes an assortment of pedals and standing support mechanisms, marching percussion and/or any musical instrument that is struck within the context of a...

 Earl Palmer

Earl Palmer

Earl Cyril Palmer was an American rock & roll and rhythm and blues drummer, and member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame....

. The book is by music journalist Tony Scherman

Tony Scherman

Tony Scherman is a leading Canadian painter. Scherman was born in Toronto, Canada and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1974. Scherman has had solo shows in galleries and regional museums throughout Canada and the United States. His expressive work often depicts historical figures and is...

 with a foreword by Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Learson Marsalis is a trumpeter, composer, bandleader, music educator, and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Marsalis has promoted the appreciation of classical and jazz music often to young audiences...

. More than half the text is directly quoted from Palmer, making the book as much an autobiography

Autobiography

An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...

 as it is a biography.

The story begins with Palmer as a four-year-old vaudeville

Vaudeville

Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

 tap dancer and continues with the story of New Orleans music and the emergence of a strong rock and roll

Rock and roll

Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from a combination of African American blues, country, jazz, and gospel music...

 drumming style featuring the back beat

Beat (music)

The beat is the basic unit of time in music, the pulse of the mensural level . In popular use, the beat can refer to a variety of related concepts including: tempo, meter, rhythm and groove...

. After his triumphs in the city, Palmer moved to Los Angeles

Los Ángeles

Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...

, where he became one of the top session musician

Session musician

Session musicians are instrumental and vocal performers, musicians, who are available to work with others at live performances or recording sessions. Usually such musicians are not permanent members of a musical ensemble and often do not achieve fame in their own right as soloists or bandleaders...

s and arrangers of the 1950s through the 1970s, playing on hundreds of hits, from "La Bamba

La Bamba (song)

"La Bamba" is a Mexican folk song, originally from the state of Veracruz, best known from a 1958 adaptation by Ritchie Valens, a top 40 hit in the U.S. charts and one of early rock and roll's best-known songs...

" to Percy Faith

Percy Faith

Percy Faith was a Canadian-born American bandleader, orchestrator, composer and conductor, known for his lush arrangements of pop and Christmas standards. He is often credited with creating the "easy listening" or "mood music" format which became staples of American popular music in the 1950s and...

 and Frank Sinatra

Frank Sinatra

Francis Albert "Frank" Sinatra was an American singer and actor.Beginning his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra became an unprecedentedly successful solo artist in the early to mid-1940s, after being signed to Columbia Records in 1943. Being the idol of the...

.

The sections quoting Palmer are colorful, frank, and direct, giving the full flavor of his life as a musician. For example, speaking of playing on Little Richard

Little Richard

Richard Wayne Penniman , known by the stage name Little Richard, is an American singer, songwriter, musician, recording artist, and actor, considered key in the transition from rhythm and blues to rock and roll in the 1950s. He was also the first artist to put the funk in the rock and roll beat and...

's records:

"Richard's music was exciting as a sumbitch. I'm not talking about the quality of it. It wasn't quality music. It wasn't no chords. It was just blues. "Slippin' and Slidin'" sounded like "Good Golly Miss Molly" and they both sounded like "Lucille". It was exciting because he was exciting. Richard is one of the few people I've ever recorded with that was just as exciting to watch in the studio as he was in performance."

The book includes an extensive discography

Discography

Discography is the study and listing of the details concerning sound recordings, often by specified artists or within identified musical genres...

and notes.