Some insist that the crown of rock and roll belongs to a swivel-hipped truck driver from Tupelo, yet the only piece of the genre currently hurtling through interstellar space was written by a middle-class beautician from St. Louis who spent his seventeenth year in a reformatory. This is the central dissonance of Chuck Berry: a man who established the foundation of modern rebellion while being more interested in the smooth vocal clarity of his idol, Nat King Cole, than the rough edges of the blue...

The gritty, industrial soul of Detroit rarely exports its secrets to the southern tip of Africa, but Sixto Rodriguez was the exception that proved the rule. Born in 1942 as the sixth child of Mexican immigrants, his early life was defined by the clatter of Motor City factories and the crushing alienation often faced by the inner-city poor. He was a man who lived at the intersection of creative hope and physical demolition, literally. After his mother died when he was only three, Rodriguez spent ...