If you're familiar with the 33 1/3 series of books, you're aware of the literary side of the music world, where stories are inspired by seminal albums and musicians. Mitch Myers' The Boy Who Cried Freebird is a collection of short stories and essays about the imagination, intrigue, and yes, scholarship that music inspires in us.

At times a scintillating read, at others more than just a little askew and occasionally boring, the book is a bumpy ride through the music world, one where Black Sabbath's Paranoid is used to expose aliens among us, where jazz masters are criminally under-appreciated, Aretha Franklin plays the Fillmore, and (speaking of the Fillmore) time travel makes it possible to catch the Dead in the early days. There is even a great profile on rock journalism, of particular interest to this writer, and a relaying of the discovery of some old reel-to-reels thought to hold lost tracks recorded by the mysterious Gram Parsons. Fans of mix-tapes and crime capers will die for "The Mix-Tape Murder Mystery".

Myers is a frequent contributor to NPR's All Things Considered, where many of the stories and essays contained in the book found their beginning. Several of the stories and fables clock in, on paper, at a whopping one or two pages. These brief pieces would have been much better left to the radio than committed to pulp. But it is the extended-play tales such as "Hellhound on My Trail", inspired by Robert Johnson's song of the same name, and long-player "The Ballad of John Henry and The Wheels of Steel" which are as entertaining as they are telling of the way history mixes with legend in the world of music.

The Boy Who Cried Freebird was released in paperback at the beginning of April.

Lovers of lore will be sated as you have seen, as will hipsters of history, as fact-based reporting takes over in the Zappa essay "What Can You Do That's Fantastic?" and the fascinating "Spirits, Ghosts, Witches and Devils". The latter is the captivating story of Albert Ayler, contemporary of Coltrane and Coleman.

Like the artists the book finds its muse from and the writers it subtly honors, The Boy Who Cried Freebird takes a lot of chances as it mixes the chimerical with the precise and the verbose with the succinct, making its mistakes along the way. But that's not such a bad thing. We all can think of at least one album our musical heroes could have left on the cutting room floor, can't we?

Tags: Albert Ayler, Aretha Franklin, Black Sabbath, Book Reviews, Frank Zappa, Gram Parsons, Grateful Dead, Jazz, John Coltrane, Mitch Myers, Ornette Coleman, Robert Johnson