Red Hot and Blue

March 15, 2019
Five decades of writing from one of the foremost chroniclers of the blues and other Southern music.Memphis-based music journalist Booth (Keith: Standing in the Shadows, 1996, etc.) has been immersed in jazz, blues, rock, and other genres since he was a child. The blues, in particular, reverberate throughout Booth's writing, underscoring the inseparability of his life and body of work. "I never intended to have anything to do with the blues," he writes. "They came into my life through my bedroom window when I was a child. It wasn't a matter of choice. What I learned I paid for in experience at the school where they arrest you first and tell you why later." In this new anthology, the author offers a slew of highly personal dispatches that reflect much of the best of his writing. Plunging in with a humorous--somewhat salty--indictment of contemporary music journalism, so-called authorities on American musical traditions, and the slick treatment of the blues by modern media, Booth stakes his ground, imparting the value of essence over image in music writing. Including recent essays on Ma Rainey and Blind Willie McTell and winding through reprints of his now-iconic pieces "Furry's Blues" and "Situation Report: Elvis in Memphis, 1967," the volume features 29 articles of varying lengths in no stated order, spanning his career. Rather than the customary date and associated publication notes, Booth offers a brief contextual paragraph with personal asides for each piece. For instance, in a screenplay excerpt titled "Mr. Crump Don't Like It: If Beale Street Could Talk," he notes that he "stole" the idea for writing a three-arc plot from William S. Burroughs' The Last Words of Dutch Schultz. Other topics include Graceland, Memphis soul, Mose Allison, and James Brown.Further entertaining testimony from a music journalist whose writing pulsates with the same blues rhythms as the soil and streets in which they were born.

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May 1, 2019

The best way to understand the blues would be to travel a century back in time and listen as it laid the foundation for everything important that's happened to American music since. Another way--accompanied by an exhaustive discography--would be to read Booth's (The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones) writing on the subject. Not that this work is a primer. It's more a series of snapshots in which Memphis itself figures as strongly as the blues, the two orbiting each other like a binary star. Booth writes with a deceptively simple clarity; singers such as Ma Rainey, Furry Lewis, Bobby Rush, and, yes, Elvis Presley are drawn in vivid lines. Here, too, is Booth's consternation at his city's inability to recognize its own history; his coverage of the 1969 Memphis Country Blues Festival is a stirring indictment of Memphis's then-disregard for the foundational blues players who were the wellspring of its musical fame. There are oddities as well, such as Booth's script for a television production on the history of Memphis music. VERDICT This ain't Blues 101, nor should it be. A treasure for blues fans.--Genevieve Williams, Pacific Lutheran Univ. Lib., Tacoma

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2019
For many years, Booth has been writing, boldly, intimately, and sometimes brilliantly (Rhythm Oil, 1992), about music and its surroundings. This compilation includes work from the past several years on blues, jazz, the Memphis sound, and the city of Memphis itself, where the aroma of magnolias is tinged with the bitter smoke of violence. The essays cover a diverse assortment of musicians, from Ma Rainey to Phineas Newborn, Jr., from Elvis Presley to the hugely underrated Jim Dickinson; there is also a touching piece about the funerals of Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays, who died in the same airplane crash in 1967. The inspiration for the book is bluesman Furry Lewis, and the profile of Lewis in which Booth follows as Lewis goes about his day job as a street sweeper is as good as this kind of personal reporting gets. Pair this collection with another recent book on Memphis music, Robert Gordon's Memphis Rent Party (2018); together they vividly capture a unique musical environment.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)