David W. Samuels's Putting a song on top of it is at once an explication of current Western Apache practices and a study of how Western Apaches imagine and evoke “history” through music. Samuels's purpose is to describe and at times explain the multifaceted ways Western Apaches index continuity through music and talk about music. Samuels is interested in the “ambiguities” and “creative” uses of indexicality (p. 10). Crucial to his project is understanding the “feelingful iconicity” of discourses of and about expressive forms (11). This “feelingful iconicity” is based on the “emotional attachment to aesthetic forms” (11).

Chap. 1 concerns the ways Western Apaches on the San Carlos Reservation imagine, discuss, and evoke the past. In particular, this chapter discusses how songs can evoke the past and how songs can be placed in the past. Samuels writes: “One twelve-year-old girl told me her sense that if Indian people back then had heard certain songs by Bob Marley, Guns'n'Roses, and Mariah Carey, ‘they wouldn't have lost faith’” (55). Samuels is at pains to point out that the distinction some ethnomusicologists and lay people make between “traditional” and “nontraditional” is relatively meaningless when one attempts to understand song as “feelingful iconicity.” As Samuels writes, “Watching Big Bell's joyous possession of and by ‘Mathilda,’ I was forced to wonder: Who was I to say that this was somebody else's music” (134). It is this sense, the sense of music inhabiting, co-occupying, the present – and implicitly the past – that resonates throughout Samuels's work.

Chap. 2 develops the idea of the past not merely as a repository of knowledge and song, but as a place that is actively engaged. Here Samuels builds on the work of Keith Basso and the use of quotation as a way to evoke the past. It has long been known that in Southern Athabaskan languages indirect reported speech is uncommon, if not nonexistent (70–71). Samuels attempts to unpack the pragmatic functions of the Western Apache phrase tah nnii. As Samuels notes, many Apaches told him the phrase was “untranslatable” (81). Samuels shows that the form is used to key a joking frame, as when it accompanies “catch phrases of mass media” (82). Samuels's point is that the use of this form illustrates the “additive” nature of language, implicating a stretch of discourse within a wider horizon of meaning and implicature.

Samuels reminds us that language and song, aside from their referential properties, also function as evocations of mood and emotion, of “feelingful iconicity.” In discussing “Geronimo's Song,” which may or may not have been composed by Geronimo (and really, that is beside the point), and the performance of the song by a young Apache girl, Samuels argues:

Chap. 3 provides historical contextualization concerning the “band era” on the San Carlos Reservation from the 1950s through the 1970s. This was a time when a great many bands played and performed on the reservation and at border towns. When Samuels did fieldwork in the mid-1990s, however, there was only one band playing, the Pacers. One of the more interesting points that Samuels makes in this chapter concerns how songs are remembered. According to Samuels, songs are not remembered in reference to the original artist so much as to the Apache band that played the song. Thus the music has become localized.

The rest of the book shifts to Samuels's fieldwork and his participation in the Western Apache band, the Pacers. Of particular interest is chap. 5, concerning Boe Titla, an Apache who “composes and performs country songs, with lyrics in English, about places and events in and around the San Carlos Apache Reservation” (149). By all accounts, Titla is an “idiosyncratic” person whose songs resonate with many Western Apaches because they invoke places and moods important to many. One of the qualities of Titla's songs is his use of place and place names. Contra Keith Basso's Wisdom sits in places (1996), place names in the songs of Titla sometimes evoke unknown stories (see 157). However, as with much of this work there is also the evocation of the past, the feelingful iconicity. Concerning the song “Chiricahua Mountain,” Samuels states: “The feelingful connection is not just to place, but more meaningfully to history because the assumption is that what you feel about the place now is the same as what people felt about the place then” (166).

Chap. 7 delves into the “battle of the bands” in which the Pacers participated while Samuels was doing fieldwork. In many respects it was the beginning of the end for the Pacers. It is to Samuels's credit that he acknowledges the tensions that his presence created within the band. For example, as Samuels notes, the presence of an Anglo musician often gave the band an air of reliability that allowed them to play border town bars. On the other hand, Samuels's presence also created friction with the lead guitarist, Pat, who did not participate in the “battle of the bands.” Indeed, Samuels worries that his presence in the band may hurt their chances at the intertribal “battle of the bands.” Such reflexivity is appreciated. Too often anthropologists disappear within the pages of their ethnographies, or conversely they overwhelm the narrative. Samuels does an excellent job of balancing that tension.

Samuels is also acutely aware of how micro-level linguistic choices can index identity in the context of music. For example, Steve Earle's version of his song “Copperhead Road” is sung with a “‘redneck’ twang” that allows Viet Nam to rhyme with plan (227). This rhyme simply does not work for Marshall, one of the Western Apache singers Samuels worked with, because the “twang” indexed an identity Marshall was not comfortable with. Here and elsewhere, Samuels shows a keen ear for linguistic detail.

On the whole, this book is a remarkable accomplishment. It is well written and well researched. Samuels moves seamlessly from social theory to ethnomusicology to linguistics and back again, and in the process he brings various disciplines together on the central issue that his book aims to address: What is “Apache culture?” There are no simple answers. As Samuels states,

Such shared senses are circulated through discourse that takes a multiplicity of forms. It is to Samuels's credit that he has attended so carefully, so thoughtfully to that multiplicity of discourses, of voices.