Best Seller
Searching for Robert Johnson
Paperback
$24.00
Published on Aug 01, 1998 | 96 Pages
Music critic, author, and screenwriter Peter Guarlnick illuminates the life and legend of blues guitarist Robert Johnson in this extended essay.
He was probably the most influential of all bluesman. And yet Robert Johnson remained virtually unknown to a wider audience until the release of his complete recordings in 1990, fifty-two years after his death.
Unquestionably the main influence on Muddy Waters and an entire generation of rock ‘n’ roll and blues musicians including Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, Johnson is known for the ferocity and originality of his work, and for the tormented sensibility that lay behind it. Poisoned by a jealous husband at the age of twenty-seven, widely believed to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his musical gifts, Robert Johnson has long enjoyed a myth that has at times overshadowed his music.
This brilliant ode to the “King of the Delta Blues” evokes the place and time that gave birth to the man and the myth and gracefully mirrors the world and artistry of Robert Johnson himself.
“I finished the book feeling that, if only for a brief moment, Robert Johnson had stepped out of the mists.”—New York Times Book Review
He was probably the most influential of all bluesman. And yet Robert Johnson remained virtually unknown to a wider audience until the release of his complete recordings in 1990, fifty-two years after his death.
Unquestionably the main influence on Muddy Waters and an entire generation of rock ‘n’ roll and blues musicians including Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, Johnson is known for the ferocity and originality of his work, and for the tormented sensibility that lay behind it. Poisoned by a jealous husband at the age of twenty-seven, widely believed to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his musical gifts, Robert Johnson has long enjoyed a myth that has at times overshadowed his music.
This brilliant ode to the “King of the Delta Blues” evokes the place and time that gave birth to the man and the myth and gracefully mirrors the world and artistry of Robert Johnson himself.
“I finished the book feeling that, if only for a brief moment, Robert Johnson had stepped out of the mists.”—New York Times Book Review
Author
Peter Guralnick
A leading authority on Elvis Presley, Peter Guralnick has written extensively about American music and musicians. His books include the two-volume, prize-winning Elvis Presley biography, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love; an acclaimed trilogy on American roots music, Sweet Soul Music, Lost Highway, and Feel Like Going Home; the biographical inquiry Searching for Robert Johnson; and the novel Nighthawk Blues.Producer and catalog expert Ernst Jorgensen has been instrumental in the revival of Elvis Presley’s body of recordings for nearly a decade; the box sets he coproduced for RCA, including The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, From Nashville to Memphis, Walk a Mile in My Shoes, and Platinum: A Life in Music, have been nominated for the Grammy Award and have sold well over a million copies. He is also author of the definitive account of Elvis’ recording sessions, Elvis Presley: A Life in Music.
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