"Emmett Dewey Miller was born in Macon on Friday, February 2, 1900," writes Nick Tosches about a quarter of the way into his enthralling new book. "This may not be the equivalent, perhaps, of a precise dating of the Magdalen Papyrus; but hey, pallie, after twenty years’ searching, it is no matter of mean potatoes, either."

All right — so who the hell was Emmett Miller?

He was a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in burnt-cork blackface. He was a singer from minstrelsy’s decline, moderately famous for about three years, and then all but erased from history. He was the possessor of a "trick-voice." And he was, for more than 20 years, Nick Tosches’s white whale, pursued doggedly through the dusty libraries and cemeteries and recording studios of the South. Tosches sees Miller as a pivotal figure, a "Rosetta Stone to the understanding of the mixed and mongrel bloodlines of country and blues, of jazz and pop, of all that we know as American music."

Dead Voices is a biography. It’s history. It’s music criticism. And it’s a whodunit. Since first learning of Miller while researching his 1976 book Country, Tosches has been a detective, obsessed with uncovering the minutiae of Miller’s life, thereby revealing the influence of this shadowy figure from a lost America.

Predicting the reader’s revulsion for the discarded racist entertainment of minstrelsy, Tosches seeks to disarm early on. "Not all minstrels were white. Many of those who blackened their face in burlesque were black," he asserts, adding that "minstrelsy was born in the anti-slavery climate of the emancipatory North, in the most sophisticated and cosmopolitan city of America" (New York). Realizing perhaps that these facts are not in themselves exculpatory, he concludes that "if minstrelsy is to be understood, it must be seen neither with myopic simplicity, as a ‘racist relic’ . . . , nor as a textbook manifestation of ideology or psychology."

Tosches describes Miller’s voice (which can be heard on the Sony/Legacy collection That Minstrel Man from Georgia) as "altogether otherworldly . . . a bizarre malarkey of the soul that seemed a death-cry and a birth-cry, too: the last mutant mongrel emanation of old and dead and dying styles, the first mutant mongrel emanation of a style far more reckless and free than the cool of scat. The slurred arabesques, the yodel-like falsetto melismas . . . "

That yodel is central to Miller’s importance. "It was Emmett Miller who employed the yodel as more than a novelty," Tosches writes. "It was Miller who cultivated it as something plaintive and disarming . . . " It was Miller who pioneered the technique that would come to be a hallmark of seminal country crooners, Hank Williams not least among them.

Tosches is adept at evoking this forgotten era, a primal farrago of performers and styles from which Miller emerges as a phenomenon unto himself, completely without antecedent but with crucial significance: "Miller was the most singular emanation of that bizarre twilight fusion of black-face minstrelsy, Tin Pan Alley, and jazz — an emanation through which the forces of country music and blues swirled as well."

The reportage in Dead Voices is numbingly thorough — we’re told that on one day in 1928 "the weather was indeed fair . . . with a cool low of sixty-two degrees and a balmy high of eighty-four." Sometimes Tosches gets mired in list-like spates of obscure artists, song titles, and session dates.

More often, though, his prose is sublime. Take this tidy yet sweeping encapsulation of the history of race and music in America: "the black stealing from the black, the white from the white, and the one from the other . . . Tin Pan Alley songs culled from the air and taken into the pines and the fields, gone feral and misperceived as primitive folk expressions of ancient breezes from those pines and those fields drifting endlessly anew through the rhythms of generations."

At the end, standing in an overgrown Macon cemetery in front of Miller’s weathered tombstone after more than two decades of sleuthing, Tosches comes to a conclusion — of sorts. "Yes, now at last, no more. I shall be free. I shall again know love, or at least masturbation. And I take this opportunity to warn you, and to beseech you to warn yours in turn: bang that babania, drink that booze, shovel down those pills; but stay away from that spook called Emmett. It is going on twenty-three years now as I write this. Others have raised families. I . . . have raised an obelisk to the back-alley gods and wind-blown garbage of meaninglessness."