Manni Coe, Judge, Bridport Memoir Prize, and author of Brother. Do. You. Love. Me.
The vision for Hustling Vinyl is clear from its opening sentence: to awaken the author's memory of her father with vivid prose and settle the anomalies of his life and work. She succeeds in both and we were honoured to enjoy her talent. With just the right amount of dialogue set within sophisticated writing, the author's childhood unfolds in a fluid timeline. She moves effortlessly between age zones to keep the narrative punchy and the reader engaged. And everywhere, there is music.
“We need music. And once we've been found by a tune, that track becomes ours, the music we need,” she tells us at the beginning of chapter six, by which stage we are heavily invested in this saga of family love, a love that is desperate to find expression in real life. As a reader, I was willing the emotion to lift off the vinyl into a more tangible form. There, within that tension of what is and what could be is where the author truly excels.
We all agreed that the narrator of Hustling Vinyl held our intrigue throughout. Rich and lyrical writing transported us into the world of Gil Bateman, the record man. Certain songs act as clever narrative scaffolding that lend an original structure to this 30,000-word extract. By the end, we wanted more and found ourselves urging the author to keep the pace, maintain the tension and continue to enthral us with her beautiful use of imagery and metaphor.
PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History
A personal examination of the music industry as it transitions from physical to digital formats, Dayna Bateman’s Hustling Vinyl: A Hidden History of the Record Business transcends a mere management chronicle by weaving together grief, cultural memory, and broader questions about exploitation in creative circles. From shame over her father’s career to recognition of its importance, the author’s project exposes the invisible labor that sustains artistic production while also reconciling her family legacy. With archival documentation and access to a group of industry experts, many of whom launched rockstar careers, Bateman brings an analytical framework to what could otherwise be merely nostalgic. This book will fill a genuine gap in music industry literature by centering the experiences of those who made the record business function yet rarely received recognition or fair compensation for the joy they brought to millions.