Wedding the American oral storytelling tradition with progressive music journalism, Mitch Myers' The Boy Who Cried Freebird is a treatise on the popular music culture of the twentieth century. Trenchant, insightful, and wonderfully strange, this literary mix-tape is authentic music history . . . except when it isn't. Myers outrageously blends short fiction, straight journalism, comic interludes, memoirs, serious artist profiles, satire, and related fan-boy hokum--including the classic stories he first narrated on NPR's All Things Considered.

Focusing on iconic...