So a black yuppie, KRS-1, a Black American Princess and a bohemian Fort Greene intellectual walk into a bar... A collection of George’s Village Voice column, collating the varied characters and concerns of 90s black American culture, along a personal 20-year timeline that winds from the Muhammad-Frazier fight to the debut of Urkel, “the first hip black nerd in history”.

Once voted by America's Billboard as the greatest club in the world, the Wigan Casino was the home of northern soul, as well as arguably the UK's first superclub. Its story is told here by local news reporter David Nowell and founder and resident jock Russ Winstanley. It's a fairly lightweight book but it still manages to capture one of the great eras in British club history.

As producer of the Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention and many others, Boyd was right in the thick of activity in the 1960s, yet in White Bicycles remains a brilliantly detached observer of what he saw. Like a hippy Zelig, Boyd seems to have been in the right place each time a momentous event takes place, from Dylan going electric to Syd going bonkers. A classic book.

Not for nothing did they call country and western the ‘white man’s blues’. Hoskyns digs into the history of southern soul and its many countrified leanings, evident in the songwriting skills of Dan Penn and the yearning of James Carr (anyone whose heart remains intact after hearing Dark End of the Street is probably a Vulcan).

The perfect companion piece to Gerri Hirshey's Nowhere To Run, Guralnick focuses on the southern soul sound of James Brown, Muscle Shoals, Stax, Atlantic and Aretha and examines them in forensic and loving detail. An amazing story of prejudice, adversity and incredible music.

Exotica, as Toop sees it, is music that delights in strange and foreign sounds, from Hawaiian guitars via Sun Ra to the leopard-print loungecore worlds of Martin Denny and Les Baxter and the Way Beyond. It's a cultural travelogue – more Cloud Atlas than Michael Palin – and one which is about mourning and escape as much as it is about music.

If you are as fascinated by the dark underbelly of New York as we are - and if you've spent longer than half an hour on DJhistory, we strongly suspect you are - then Julian Fleisher's fun book is an ideal companion on your excursions. Featuring the stars of the scene, including RuPaul, Lady Bunny and Hedda Lettuce, there's also a potted history of the scene. Discover your inner Femme Realness.

It reads more like an adventure story – Knoedelseder's rollicking tale of how the Mafia got the inside track on MCA's cutout business is full of intrigue, stupidity and greed. Naturally, since it involves the Mob and the music industry there are walk-on parts for Morris Levy and Sugarhill's Joe Robinson (who Levy described as 'My nigger' long before that was a friendly thing to say). Essential.

This affectionate biography of Sylvester is an unexpected delight. Gamson, a lecturer at the University of San Francisco, is a brilliant prose stylist (a rare gift in academia) bringing Sylvester and the West Coast of the 1960s and ’70s to vivid life. Quite comfortably the best book on that vilified genre hi-NRG.