Customer Reviews

Sam Myers: The Blues Is My Story (American Made Music)

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This volume is a labor of love by Jeff Horton, who met the subject in the late `90s. It is an "as told to" book which entailed many hours of tape recorded interviews with Sweet Sam Myers, a beloved musical émigré to Dallas from Mississippi and a great man, blues singer and harmonica player.

I am a Dallas musician who spent nearly 20 years visiting with Sam and playing blues with him in Dallas nightclub jam sessions. Based on this experience with him, I can give these perspectives on this much anticipated book:

It is a well-written compendium of Sam's stories about his life and associations. That being said, Sammy could ramble, he could both embellish and sound-bite his stories, and he told many of them until they were well-worn coins, the stories becoming things in themselves and perhaps evolving in this way and that from the events they described. With a more thorough vetting of the manuscript, certain details of Sam's verbal accounts might have been sharpened and corrected beyond the ability of Mr. Horton to do so.

But in any "as told to" biography, you give up some things and you get some things, and with The Blues Is My Story what you get is a narrative that is faithful to Sam's own voice. (Rest assured this involved much more than mere transcription of taped interviews by Horton, as Sam could and usually would "take the long way `round" in getting to his point, which surely required Horton to spend many hours cleaning up sentence structure and eliminating verbal side trips. But in the end, if you knew Sam Myers, you will agree the book is reminiscent of Sam's way of speaking and thinking.)

The stories of Myers' childhood are beautiful and revealing, and the reader gets a good sense of the man's determined character and how it coped with his blindness when he was a kid, and continued to do so throughout his life.

Some of the accounts of Sam's Chicago period are a little general and lacking in detail, while other details, such as the names of nightclubs and city streets are remembered as if they were visited yesterday. His recollections of his most legendary employer Elmore James are personal and give useful glimpses into Mr. "Dust My Broom", yet other books have conveyed more on the life and amazingly diverse interests and skills of James.

A chapter is devoted to Sam Myers' attempt to answer the unanswerable question "What is the blues?", and Sam can't quite answer it either, but his thoughtful beating of the underbrush gives the reader one more layer of insight, this one coming from a man who lived the blues as fully as any man has.

The book is enhanced by humble, warm and wonderful chapters from Dallas friends Hash Brown and Anson Funderburgh, the first of whom gave Myers an off-duty blues home in Dallas where he would always be loved and respected, and the latter of whom gave Sam Myers' career a new life in the band Anson Funderburgh and the Rockets Featuring Sam Myers. Without the association with Anson, Sam was in danger of fading away into obscurity by the 1980s; with it he found himself a beloved figure to blues audiences around the country and the world, and he was able to finish his life with the pride and satisfaction that come with a considerable celebrity and a long list of honors and awards.

Every man's life is a mystery full of unanswered questions, and Sam Myers came wrapped in his own secrets, many of which remain safely obscured in Jeff Horton's book. But what remain in this spoken autobiography are the things that Sam deemed suitable to stand the light of day, and by lovingly studying these, you can read between the lines, or, if you spent enough time sitting in bars and restaurants and loafing in parking lots with the gentleman, you can supplement Jeff Horton's well-written account with your own memories of the man's intelligence, humor, wisdom, irreverence and steady faith in himself, and of his contentment at being a real deal, old school blues man.

Sam Myers died of a cancer surgery related complication in Dallas a short time before the publication of this book. His passing brought forth a tremendous flood of affection, appreciation and grief from the hundreds of northeast Texans whose lives he touched with his seasoned and affectionate soul. His body was then taken home to Mississippi for burial, where the outpouring was repeated. This new book adds yet another worthy tribute to a departed friend.

Sam Myers was more than just a great harmonica player, singer/songwriter and drummer. Sam was the consummate Blues performer. Once the drummer behind Elmore James, Sam went on to have quite a successful career as frontman for Anson Funderburgh and the Rockets and more. The Blues Is My Story is one of those books that is easy to read, entertaining, informative and downright delightful. Sleep well old friend. This book belongs on the bookshelf of every Blues Fan.

Fans of blues music may recognize the name of Sam Myers, who grew up blind in the Jim Crow South and became a blues musician in Chicago, joining Elmore James's band as a drummer and eventually fostering bands and recordings of his own - but it's unlikely the general public will recognize it. Therefore, The Blues Is My Story is a specific and recommended pick for collections strong in blues music history, offering a history to accompany Myers' memoir of his experiences and providing such audiences with plenty of blues history and music insights in the process.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch