Roots and Rhythm: A Life in Music
Ebook
Overview
A beautifully crafted memoir unveiling the ancestral, musical, and spiritual roots of Grammy Award-winning music producer Charlie Peacock.
In this artful memoir, Grammy Award–winning music producer Charlie Peacock flexes his literary chops and gives readers the gritty backstage stories they crave: biographical anecdotes, geeky trivia, and how the hits were written and recorded (from jazz to rock and pop). Threaded throughout is Peacock’s unique ancestral and spiritual story—the roots. Like Coltrane, Dylan, and Bono before him, Peacock reveals a Christ-affection while refusing genres too small for his music.
Peacock, the great-grandson of a Louisiana fiddler, is an American musical polymath. He’s been the young jazz musician sitting at the feet of trumpeter Eddie Henderson and pianist Herbie Hancock; the singer-songwriter plucked from the Northern California punk/pop underground by legendary impresarios Bill Graham and Chris Blackwell; a pioneering, innovative contributor to the nascent rise of gospel rock in the 1980s; and the genre-busting producer behind such diverse artists as Al Green, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Chris Cornell, Audio Adrenaline, The Civil Wars, Switchfoot, Turtle Island Quartet, and John Patitucci.
Roots and Rhythm includes Peacock’s seminal NorCal days, the story of indie labels Exit and re:think, his first decade as a Nashville producer (1989–1999), and his essential role in the 21st-century folk/Americana boom (The Civil Wars, Holly Williams, The Lone Bellow). While his exploits and achievements grace the book (including the story of Amy Grant’s “Every Heartbeat” and the evergreen “In the Light”), Peacock is hardly the only character. Instead, he writes as a Joan Didion-style essayist, weaving together a quintessential American story. Beat poet Gary Snyder, evangelist Billy Graham, producer T Bone Burnett, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and writers Wendell Berry and Isabel Wilkerson all appear in this sweeping tale where ancestry, migration, teenage love, Jesus, and Miles Davis collide.
The book is an invitation to all, including aspiring musicians: embrace the roots and rhythm of our own lives, letting the music and God’s insistent love lead us to gratitude and wonder.
Charlie Peacock, a music artist of high order and deep experience, takes an unblinking, truthful, and, most of all, kind look at a long life in music.
——T Bone Burnett, Oscar and Grammy Award–winning music producer, recording artist, and composer
Look up the definition of variety. Charlie Peacock IS the definition of variety—in both his life and career. Roots & Rhythm is a book that begins to explain why he continues to defy genres and labels. I am forever inspired by him and this book is the embodiment of that inspiration.
——Mike Elizondo, Grammy Award–winning producer, songwriter, and musician (Eminem, Switchfoot, Lauren Daigle, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Twenty One Pilots)
From center stage to the cocoon of the studio, Charlie takes us into his world of creating music and curating a meaningful life as a whole. His invisible fingerprints as a gifted producer are made visible in this book, and his heart shines through.
——Joy Williams, Grammy Award–winning recording artist (formerly of The Civil Wars), host of the Apple podcast Southern Craft Radio
We musical improvisers have the power to break and enter into your soul. There’s no sense in resisting. And since we never, ever take, the question is: What will we deposit into your soul? With Roots & Rhythm, my fellow improviser Charlie Peacock is at it again—this time, depositing profoundly thoughtful, impactful words of beauty and insight into God’s big heart for music and justice. By all means read this book.
——Kirk Whalum, Grammy Award–winning jazz saxophonist and composer
Roots and Rhythm is the play of youth with the wisdom of age merging into a beautiful fireworks show. We all desperately need the sorts of honest, sage stories Charlie tells about the artful life—to see, in ourselves, the merging of the girl in the woman, the boy in the man, simultaneously growing more playful, imaginative, and wise.
——Sara Groves, recording artist and cofounder of Art House North, St. Paul, Minnesota
Throughout our over 40-year relationship as friends and musical soulmates, Charlie Peacock has been a mentor and a role model, an advisor both temporal and godly, a source of inspiration as well as income, a shoulder to laugh and to cry on, and a constantly creative and intellectually curious man for all seasons. Roots & Rhythm is Exhibit A of a life well and fully lived.
——Brent Bourgeois, Bourgeois Tagg (“I Don’t Mind at All”), keyboardist/vocalist (Todd Rundgren), solo artist, and A&R Director for Meta, Inc.
Charlie rearranged all our lives musically when his Planet of Cyborgs vessel descended on ole Music City back in ’89. I was one of the lucky humans impacted by this landing. He is that rare class of musician who becomes the obsession of other musicians. And I’m not just referencing the novices; I’m speaking of musicians who are amongst the most skilled and decorated practitioners of the art, on this planet or any other.
——Tommy Sims, Grammy Award–winning songwriter, musician and producer; cowriter of “Change the World” by Eric Clapton and bassist for Bruce Springsteen, Sheryl Crow, and Michael McDonald
An historic trailblazer who truly cared and created for our culture, Charlie Peacock has encouraged me to persevere and seek the highest realms of my art, and still (somehow) dare to love Jesus and his Broken body—the church. I am grateful for Roots & Rhythm to reintroduce his work to the next generation, and to the music communities at large.
——Makoto Fujimura, artist and author of Art and Faith: A Theology of Making
I wish I could communicate all the admiration and respect I have for Charlie with a fraction of the artistry he possesses. He is an amazing, soulful storyteller at all times—as an author with Roots & Rhythm, as a musician, improviser, producer, songwriter—and a man of faith, family, integrity and more. I am so very grateful to know him!
——John Patitucci, Grammy Award–winning bassist, solo artist, educator, and multi-decade collaborator with jazz legends Chick Corea and Wayne Shorter
- Title: Roots and Rhythm: A Life in Music
- Author: Charlie Peacock
- Publisher: Eerdmans
- Print Publication Date: 2025
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 389
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781467468619, 9780802884374, 0802884377, 1467468614
- Resource ID: LLS:9781467468619
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-07-04T01:57:44Z
Charlie Peacock is a Billboard chart-topping musical creator, a six-time Grammy Award-winning music producer (Folk, Country, Rock Gospel), and three-time recipient of the Gospel Music Association’s Producer of the Year award (his recordings and productions exceed 25 million albums). Named by Billboard’s Encyclopedia of Record Producers as one of the 500 most important producers in popular music history, Charlie has produced music for film and television and held executive and A&R positions at EMI/Universal and Sony/ATV. Charlie is the founder of the Universal Music Group imprint re:think; founder and director emeritus of the Commercial Music Program at Lipscomb University; and a longtime advocate for social justice, working directly with International Justice Mission, and the ONE Campaign beginning in 2002 when Charlie and wife Andi hosted co-founder Bono in their home, putting the rock-star activist in front of Nashville’s artist community. Charlie is the creator/host of the Apple Top 100 music podcast Music & Meaning, and continues to create his own jazz/improvisational and singer-songwriter recordings, including Every Kind of Uh-Oh, a full-length vocal album produced by Charlie and his son, Grammy and Oscar-nominated songwriter and producer Sam Ashworth (H.E.R., Andy Grammer, Leslie Odom Jr.).