The dramatic and erotic folk-musical style known as flamenco arose among the stigmatized outgroups of Andalusia - fugitive Jews, Moors, gitanos, blind beggars, harlots, and others - but was quickly embraced and canonized as a fine art by Spanish aristocrats. This lively, highly readable book by Timothy Mitchell is the first full-length investigation of flamenco as well as an absorbing introduction to the cultural psychology of Spain itself.

With an arsenal of critical theories honed to a sharp polemical edge, the author targets racialist and politicized mystifications of flamenco and deflates the still-influential primitivism of de Falla and Lorca.

He demonstrates that flamenco is a densely historical phenomenon, whose "moods and musical techniques alike are inseparable from alcohol abuse." The denizens of saloons, bordellos, and prisons poured out their woes in guttural deep song, and their haunting cries and brash guitars were quickly taken up by the playboy-philanthropists who frequented the dives.

Performers of deep song explored every painful aspect of tragic love; male singers told of having their hearts trampled by some dark-skinned dancer, females of having been abandoned or battered by their men. Guitarists were often expected to double as pimps. Flamenco artistry as we know it today makes sublime psychodrama out of alcoholism, fatalism, masochism, and ethnic rivalry.

Mitchell's scholarship sparkles with irony and anecdotes drawn from two centuries of untranslated works. Ultimately he confronts the crucial question: Why does flamenco deep song appeal to people who never shared the traumas that precipitated its birth?