Customer Reviews

Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock 'n' Roll

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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.

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.

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.

Peter Guralnick comes over as a fan to the houses of the men he is going to interview. Sometimes an apartment, sometimes a house in Louisiana, but usually in their own homes. They watch tv, some books are on the shelves, a color tv, some records, a wife that also wants to add something.

In this manner you read the chapters about some great bluesmen. And they still remain legends and heroes, but legends and heroes that we can touch, that we can talk to, what we can see as normal men. And isn't that what blues is about? a music-style about and for normal men, who have trouble enough getting on in life?

This was Guralnicks first real book from 1971. The people he talks about were then mostly still alive and still performing. Also a good way to see them as they once were.

Don't expect a comprehensive history, it's more a portrait. Another great Guralnick read.

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.

Guralnick's classic book has great persuasive power, particularly among young or less knowledgeable readers, for Guralnick writes from the heart and pulls the reader along with sheer enthusiasm for the subject matter. The book is most valuable for its chapters on some characters who aren't often written about in depth - Johnny Shines, Skip James, Robert Pete Williams. Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf also get their own chapters, but they're already popular and Guralnick probably isn't going to introduce too many readers to these monoliths. It's fun to read about music and performers we like - that is the key to this book's success, I think.

Where it falls short is in the area of hard fact and objective analysis. There are no footnotes, and Guralnick's prejudices result in some bizarre and some blatantly wrong statements. For example, Guralnick asserts that, as of 1971, the Rolling Stones were the one major rock and roll band who always played rock and roll music, while the Beatles never really did that (p. 35) -- a statement ripe with Stones media hype of the Sticky Fingers era. Granted, the Beatles were more influenced by "rockabilly" and less Chicago-blues-based than the Stones, but they easily fall within the parameters of Guralnick's what-is-rock-and-roll thesis. In fact, Guralnick is eager to show how contemporary rock music -- even the bulk of the Beatles' music -- owes much of its content and structure to The Blues, whether the musicians know it or not. Guralnick also insists that the Beatles never paid tribute to, or publicized, their musical influences, while the Stones recorded songs by their favorite bluesmen and appeared onstage with them. Again, Guralnick overlooks Beatles for Sale (half cover versions) and Please Please Me and With the Beatles... and the fact that the Beatles were prolific songwriters, while the early Stones recorded cover versions for lack of good original material.

The crux of the issue, unstated by Guralnick but implicit in his comparisons, is that the Beatles did not try to sound Black, and thus failed to meet his subjective standard of what "rock and roll" should be. This prejudice hampers Guralnick's central argument -- that nearly all pop music derives from The Blues -- by suggesting that blues-based music is more rare and less popular than we think. The book's thesis would be improved if Guralnick were to broaden his survey to include jazz music & its blues origins, then the influence of jazz on popular music (e.g., Frank Sinatra) and so on. Then we'd see how Mel Torme and the Beatles and Ella Fitzgerald can all fit together in that big bed we call "the blues."

The book doesn't pretend to be a scholarly study of blues & rock and roll, however. It's more like a series of magazine pieces, to be read on planes, trains and busses. It's a fine introduction to the 50s roots of modern "rock" music.