11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Engaging Portraits Of Music Pioneers, April 12, 2004
This review is from: Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock 'n' Roll (Paperback)
As someone who doesn't know a lot about blues music except to run and hide when someone begins to comment on "the cadential modalities of Muddy Waters's early Chess period" over cocktails, I approached this book with trepidation, unnecessarily. It's a very enveloping and informative look at some of the compelling personalities who helped shape two key forms of American popular music, the blues and rock 'n' roll.
It's not a comprehensive history; Guralnick instead offers some individual, detailed portraits. You can understand him choosing Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Jerry Lee Lewis, because they were all giant figures in the creation of these genres. But other choices are more idiosyncratic, like Johnny Shines, described as "a run-of-the-mill blues singer" by the co-founder of landmark label Chess Records; and Robert Pete Williams, who seems to merge blues with free associative verse and would never be more than a footnote character in most histories. And what's with including Charlie Rich, who had a brief association with rock's founding via Sun Records but never really established himself as either a blues or rock performer?
Guralnick never does tie any of this in; his pieces, however intended to cohere, feel like collected articles written for music magazines. I don't know that they have to be read in order and one after the other, like chapters of a book.
But individually they are good, in most cases very good. Guralnick is an unusual departure from rock writers. He writes with singular care; with craft, honesty, and an engaging sense of humility that draws the reader in. He doesn't make broad claims for anyone's greatness, or dismiss others out of hand. He takes himself out of the picture, and makes it feel like you are the one in the room listening to Shines talking about traveling moonlit country roads with Robert Johnson, looking for a barrelhouse or gin joint to make a few bucks in.
Or Williams, sitting in his country home alongside a dirt road, portraits of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King over his head, drinking away the afternoon and wondering if his inability to pick out a tune at times is because maybe "blues is evil."
"God is warning me, I've got to get myself straight," Williams tells Guralnick. "And yet still and all I don't know, something hits me and I feel peculiar, I might be riding along, say now you get in your car and ride, well the ideas just come to me out of the air. Why is that? What made me think of that?"
Traditional blues music was in trouble by the time of this book's publication, in 1971. Guralnick visits Chess Records and finds a record company about to collapse. It's perhaps symbolic that when Guralnick introduces us to Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, both men are laid up sick in bed. Perhaps an earlier look would have offers a more vibrant take. But Guralnick gets the most out of what he finds.
The best essays are on Wolf, who relishes comments about his "gargantuan" onstage theatricality but exposes a thin skin on other fronts; and Rich, who seems so out-of-water here except for the engaging candor from him and his wife. Rich's drinking problems and lonely sadness are the main focus of his essay, yet Rich not only cooperated with the author, he ended up inspired enough by it to write a song using the book's title. It's the best essay in that you feel for the guy; then again, they're all like that.
I don't know that much more about Skip James or Muddy Waters from reading this book, but I know enough now not to duck off in the other direction when I hear their names spoken of. Good music, like all things in life, knows no boundaries.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A beautiful book by one of popular music's best critics., January 18, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock 'n' Roll (Paperback)
Peter Guralnick writes so beautifully about blues, treating it with the seriousness it deserves without making it carry more than it can bear. His writing is so understated and his insights so subtle that you find yourself thinking about his profiles of these artists as you listen to them later. He brings enough scholarly bearing to them to make you realize that what makes blues so special are the things it has in common with all great art--beauty and depth of feeling.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful Portraits of Musical Giants, February 15, 2000
This review is from: Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock 'n' Roll (Paperback)
Peter Guralnick begins this book with a tribute to early rock and roll and his adoration of it and then has chapters on mainly blues performers and then Sun Records and finally the final days of Chess Records. Guralnick gives us personal insights on artists, some famous (Jerry Lee Lewis), some more obscure (Robert Pete Williams). Even if you have read every item of information on Howlin Wolf or Charlie Rich this still displays a perspective on them from a different angle. Overall a wonderful glimpse into the world of the performers from a human level.
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