Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians [Paperback]

Peter Guralnick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1999

This masterful exploration of American roots music--country, rockabilly, and the blues--spotlights the artists who created a distinctly American sound, including Ernest Tubb, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Elvis Presley, Merle Haggard, and Sleepy LaBeef. In incisive portraits based on searching interviews with these legendary performers, Peter Guralnick captures the boundless passion that drove these men to music-making and that kept them determinedly, and sometimes almost desperately, on the road.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A companion to the author's 1971 entrée to book publishing, Feel Like Going Home, Lost Highway reveals Peter Guralnick's growth as a chronicler of American roots music. Originally published eight years after Going Home, Lost Highway tills the same rich soil--the likes of Sun Records chief Sam Phillips, bluesman Howlin' Wolf, and dispirited countrypolitan star Charlie Rich resurface. But here Guralnick also explores the psyches and works of kindred spirits both celebrated (Elvis Presley and Merle Haggard) and obscure (rockabilly journeyman Sleepy LaBeef and the "world's oldest teenager," Rufus Thomas). Guralnick reveals a unifying hook: for each musician, touring has become "journey, arrival, process, definition, virtually replacing in almost every instance the very impetus that set them out on the road in the first place." The author has a knack for finding the insecurities entangled with the talents of his peripatetic idols--perhaps they feel more comfortable opening up to him, sensing he only seeks to understand how their anxiety affects their art. Regardless, you can't read Lost Highway without gaining a greater appreciation of the music that prompted its writing. --Steven Stolder

From Library Journal

Published in 1971 and 1979, respectively, these titles continue Guralnick's analysis of American music. Feel Like Going Home concentrates primarily on blues artists, with some borderline rockers thrown in, while Lost Highway covers a wide array of artists from several genres, including everyone from Hank Snow to Elvis to Merle Haggard. Both volumes were hits with critics and have a place in popular music collections.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books (July 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316332747
• ISBN-13: 978-0316332743
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #457,957 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

"Peter Guralnick is widely regarded as the nation's preeminent writer on twentieth-century American popular music. His books include Feel Like Going Home, Lost Highway, Sweet Soul Music, Searching for Robert Johnson, the novel Nighthawk Blues, and a highly acclaimed two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This aint no MTV, September 7, 2000

By A Customer

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This review is from: Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians (Paperback)

In Lost Highway, Peter Guralnick shows us some of the most unique, and largely unrecognized, figures in American music. His chapters on Charlie Feathers, who was there with Elvis, Carl, and Johnny in Sun Studios in the 50's, and Sleepy LaBeef, whose relentless touring machine, upon request, would serve up any hit ever recorded by anybody, are compassionate portraits of real people that never got the hits, the recognition, or the payday of their famous contemporaries. What you come away with after reading this book is a realization that Guralnick's subjects live and breathe 'the life'. It's what they do. As I read this book, I found myself wondering if Guralnick had selected his subjects to cover some broad spectrum of the American musical landscape, or if he just wanted to get face to face with his musical heroes, and writing a book about them was a cool way to make that happen. Whatever the reason, Guralnick's enthusiasm for American music and his abiding respect for its practitioners come through every page. His attention to the small things, whether flattering to his subjects or not, brings us in close, where frustrations, hopes, missed opportunities, and dreams are all there for us to see. This isn't MTV. It's not the Grammy's. It's blue collar, working stiff people, making their living playing the music they love. And because they are so much like us, their stories are wonderfully compelling.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An achingly beautiful book about life as a musician., January 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians (Paperback)

Peter Guralnick makes you realize how much it takes to be a musician. His portraits of the lives of country, blues, and rock musicians are so beautiful and yet so tragic. You finish the chapter on Bobby Bland filled with admiration for his conviction, yet saddened that what defines him as a human being can become such a grind. And you finish the chapters on artists you didn't know or care about--Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, Charlie Rich--filled with admiration, realizing that they loved and commited themselves to something that was as dear to them as it was to their fans, even when, as with Charlie Rich, it fell beneath their expectations. An almost indescribably beautiful book.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid Overview Of Roots Music, May 9, 2004

By 

Bill Slocum (Norwalk, CT USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians (Paperback)

From the Grand Ole Opry aristocracy to the smoky dives of Chicago, Peter Guralnick is our guide through this 1979 examination of what diverse streams have fed American popular music. In parts a celebration, in parts a eulogy, it makes for some fascinating reading.

Those who read and liked Guralnick's earlier, shorter "Feel Like Going Home" will enjoy this second trip to the well. There's calls paid on Rufus Thomas, "the world's oldest teenager" whose blues-centered dances led to some early-'60s chart success; on DeFord Bailey, a harmonica whiz who was the Opry's first major star until folks figured out he was black; Hank Williams Jr., who lives up to his Daddy's tall legacy with the help of artificial stimulants and his own sense of the blues; and Charlie Rich, who was last visited in "Feel Like Going Home" as something of a straggler but grew into one of the biggest country singers of the 1970s, not that we find him here feeling too happy about it.

The best writing in this collection comprises several chapters on Elvis Presley, who was still just barely alive when Guralnick wrote his first essay here in 1976 and just dead when he wrote his next right after. Elvis was the one guy Guralnick didn't talk to, but you feel his presence in interviews with his old guitarist Scotty Moore and former mentor Sam Phillips.

"He hit like a Pan-American flash, and the reverberations still linger from the shock of his arrival," Guralnick writes.

There's a lot of characters, and some seem more interesting for their uniqueness (Jack Clement, Charlie Feathers) while others seem like misses altogether (who was James Talley anyway, and why should we care?) But there's some arresting profiles of those who made it and those who didn't, plus a sense of what got them there.

"It has to be the only thing for you - the one thing in your life," says cowboy legend Ernest Tubb. Guralnick makes it all seem worth it, for a few hundred pages at least.