Mugge tributes his great-grandfather, a prominent developer of the fledgling city of Tampa, Florida.

In 1870, 17-year-old Wilhelm August Robert Mugge, apprentice jeweler and watchmaker, fled Germany immediately after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. He made his way to Henderson, Kentucky, where his cousin Augusta lived. Two years later he moved to the larger city of Terre Haute, Indiana. Here he met and later married his first wife, Alice Janthe McCullough. In October of 1876, with 17-year-old Alice expecting the couple’s first child in November, Robert agreed to join Alice’s parents in their move to Tampa, Florida, a small hamlet with a population of only a few hundred (“Tampa was little more than a settlement”). Alice gave birth to their first baby, Louis, in November, but the infant lived for only 10 days—it was the first of several personal tragedies to strike the young couple. They were an industrious team: Robert set up a jewelry/watch repair business, and Alice opened a millenary and dressmaking concern out of their home. Restless and ambitious, Robert became involved in a variety of business ventures—he built a bottling plant for his soda business, later converted into a beer distributorship, leading to his position as the saloon kingpin in Tampa. Mugge intertwines Robert’s biography with an extensively detailed history of Tampa’s development. The story describes a complex dance consisting of a man and the historical events of which he was a part, each impacting the other. The author’s granular focus on specific (and changing) street addresses and individual building constructions—all sourced with maps, newspaper articles, his grandfather’s memoir, and other historical volumes—becomes wearying, but the narrative is rich in material that should be of interest to aspiring historians. And Mugge introduces a wide variety of unique individuals, the most humorous and captivating being a Russian nihilist, Dr. Frederick Nicholas Weightnovel, who was said to have escaped from a Siberian prison camp by swimming to safety.

An intriguing, challenging read, packed with historical and familial minutia.

A documentarian revisits the funkiest musical byways in this scintillating memoir.

Mugge, a documentary filmmaker, offers production narratives of 25 of his nonfiction movie depictions of musicians and their performances, shot from 1976 through 2015. His subjects include headliners like saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who broke his foot after jumping from the stage but kept playing while lying on his back; soul singer–turned-minister Al Green, who gave a riveting performance of gospel tunes at his Sunday church service and regaled Mugge with the story of being scalded with hot grits by a lover who then shot herself with his gun; and Sun Ra, leader of the celebrated jazz group “Sun Ra Arkestra” and an Afrofuturist who claimed to be immortal and to hail from the planet Saturn. “Slowly, quietly, like a hurt child, he asked me how he could work with someone who did not believe the things he said,” Mugge recalls of a conversation during which he asserted that Sun Ra would die someday. Equally fascinating are Mugge’s accounts of less-known performers, including a musical battle between Beau Jocque and Boozoo Chavis for the title of King of Zydeco and the journey of blues band Scissormen through white-bread Indiana, where frontman Ted Drozdowski “dropped his guitar onto a young woman’s outstretched arms and momentarily played it there, only to have her male companion…pour beer on the bridge of [his] guitar.” Mugge’s vivid prose mixes piquant sketches of musicians with atmospheric evocations of the music. (“What the three played was…elemental but with a droning, modal quality, and a drive that set the crowded and increasingly inebriated locals to dancing or gyrating in place, with a glow on their faces and electricity crackling through the room,” he writes of a set by Mississippi bluesman Junior Kimbrough and his band.) The book is also a master class on the director’s craft. Music fans and indie film aficionados will find here a beguiling homage to both art forms.

A vibrant, entertaining panorama of music-making and the picaresque struggle to capture it on film.