Rythm Oil – A journey through the music of the American South
Inbunden bok. Pantheon Books New York. 1991. 254 sidor.
Nyskick. Skyddsomslag i nyskick.
PRESENTSKICK. På engelska.
RYTHM OIL is the name of a potion sold on Beale Street, and its magic is the spirit of this remarkable book: a mesmerizing tour de force – a fusion of fact and fantasy – about the roots of blues and soul music, and about encounters with its legendary figures.
Beginning deep in the Mississippi Delta with a terryfying reconstruction of Robert Johnsons initiation with the Devil, Stanley Booth, author of ”The Adventures of the Rolling Stones”!, travels to the funeral of master bluesman John. Hurt in the company of the aging virtuoso of the slide guitar Furrry Lewis, a man steeped in the history of the Deep South. Here is Memphis, a small cotton town still living through the trauma of the Civil War and a plague of yellow fever, inspiring memories of riverboats and medicine shows, of wild women and murder. Here too are Elvis Presley and Sam Phillips, electrifying B. B. King, Otis Redding recording ”Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” the week before he died, the sinous funk of the Bar-Kays, the Godfather James Brown in his prison cell, ZZ Top and a guitar fashioned from the timbers of Muddy Waters shack, and more.
Full of style, provocative, and incisive, RYTHM OIL triumphantly captures the exxence, the tragedy and transcendence, of the musical culture of the American South.
