The Buffalo News / Sunday, Feb 25, 1996

Say Chuck Mancuso's book was a movie in mid-hype. They'd have known how to do it in the '50s — with corny, inyour-face screaming and bedeviling exclamation points. Sparing the exclamation points (which always look like bewildered ants on a page), they'd say: l6 years in the making. Thirty thousand dollars out of pocket. A cast of thousands.

And none of it would be hype. It's all true.

Mancuso has been trying to get his book written and published for that long, has spent every bit of that assembling its mind-blowing archive of vintage photographs and artifacts, and includes in his massive text that many musicians who make up "the foundations of jazz, blues, country and rock, 1900 to 1950."

Mancuso's extraordinary book, Popular Music and the Underground (Kendall/Hunt. 626 pages. $55 paper), is one of the epic and great local stories in many years — a sort of academic "Rocky" in which the Buffalo State College associate professor ascends to a kind of heavy-weight championship. (Lest that seem too pop and vulgar, those are the realms Mancuso has spent a lifetime exploring and defending.)

He has, quite literally, done some-thing unique. Chuck Mancuso has seen American non-classical music of the 20th century whole — not just jazz and blues and popular music, but country music and cabaret and urban folk music, too. He has, in riotous abundance, what George Bush once called the vision thing," and his hour of triumph is at hand.

The first celebration — a book signing with music by Al Tinney, David Kane and the Caballeros — will he held from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Friday in the Burchfield-Penney Art Center.

A huge community of Mancuso supporters and well-wishers stands he-hind this work — people who have contributed an enormous amount of help, advice, ideas and services. The truth is that even those of us who have merely been hearing progress re-ports on the phone or during chance encounters at supermarkets, banks and musical events can feel enormous pride in what Mancuso has done when we look at his encyclopedic bedazzlement.

This isn't just a book to look up Bing Crosby. Frank Sinatra, Ethel Waters, Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker and Eddy Arnold. This is a book to discover that the great Western swing of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys began on radio as the Aladdin Laddies and the Burrus Light-Crust Doughboys; or to encounter the case for the Ravens as "the greatest vocal quartet in the history of rhythm and blues"; or to delve into the utterly amazing story of bandleader Ben Selvin, who may well be "the most prolific recording artist of all time" (more than 9,000 titles under such pseudonyms as the Frisco Syncopators, the Cleveland Society Orchestra, the Broadway Nitelites, Chester Leighton and His Sophomores, the Cloverdale Country Club Orchestra and the Broadway Bandits. Nothing of this American musical subcontinent survives on current disc).

As Mancuso sits in his West Side living room amid his records, photos of 52nd Street and neon signs reading "Jazz: he says: "Anybody can write a funky book. I wanted to write the book." That's what he told publishers who wanted to include the usual decorous cache of vintage photographs in the middle. That's what separates the ordinary American music historians from the Mancusos of this world.