Peter Guralnick's new book, Looking To Get Lost, is an anthology of essays about the creative process, but mostly includes several fine examples of Guralnick's main forte, insightful profiles of American popular music makers, here from Robert Johnson to Eric Clapton, with many engaging stops in between: Skip James, Ray Charles, Merle Haggard, Bill Monroe, Lonnie Mack, Delbert McClinton, Joe Tex, Dick Curless, Johnny Cash, Tammy Wynette, Doc Pomus, and many more, as well as authors Lee Smith and Henry Green.
If you don't know Peter Guralnick, it's about time you did, because he's arguable the most articulate, serious chronicler of modern American music in the past 50 years: with a two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, as well as book-length bios of Sam Cooke and Sam Phillips, not to mention three other collections of profiles of many famous and not-so-famous blues, country, and early rock musicians.
I've never met Guralnick, even though I lived for awhile in Newburyport, MA, only a few miles from his home in West Newbury, and share a mutual friend in blues record producer Dick Shurman. But I did quote extensively from his profile of Bobby Bland from his Lost Highways: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians, in my book-length biography of "the world's greatest blues singer": Soul of the Man: Bobby "Blue" Bland. Check it out.
If you don't know Peter Guralnick, it's about time you did, because he's arguable the most articulate, serious chronicler of modern American music in the past 50 years: with a two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, as well as book-length bios of Sam Cooke and Sam Phillips, not to mention three other collections of profiles of many famous and not-so-famous blues, country, and early rock musicians.
I've never met Guralnick, even though I lived for awhile in Newburyport, MA, only a few miles from his home in West Newbury, and share a mutual friend in blues record producer Dick Shurman. But I did quote extensively from his profile of Bobby Bland from his Lost Highways: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians, in my book-length biography of "the world's greatest blues singer": Soul of the Man: Bobby "Blue" Bland. Check it out.
RSS Feed
