Word: guralnick
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...Guralnick takes the reader many places: in Chicago, to Muddy Waters' house, to the moribund offices of Chess and to the hospital for a visit with Howling Wolf; to Newport, 1964, for the dramatic recovery of Skip James; to backwoods Louisiana, for "a real country supper" with Robert Pete Williams; and to Memphis, for visits with Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich. Wherever possible, he lets the artist tell his own story. He wastes little time attempting to describe a musician's style, instead concentrating on tracing the man's influences. One begins to sense the intimacy of the circles...
Feel Like Going Home is suffused with a sad nostalgia which occasionally turns into bitterness. Understandably, Guralnick deplores the neglect suffered by many artists; he is dismayed, too, by the tendency of the American public to devour its most gifted children. In any case, things will never be the same. Whether Chess Records is dead--or indeed, whether the blues are dead--can be debated; but unquestionably, an era has ended...
...discovery by white youth of black music. It was an awkward, embarrassed rendezvous--a blind date, really. In discussing a blues festival, Guralnick writes, "(There were) many of the same problems which have plagued every blues 'concert' I have attended since I first saw Lightnin' Hopkins at Harvard twelve years ago: a stiff, unnatural atmosphere, an unbridgeable gulf between performer and audience, and a tendency to treat the blues as a kind of museum piece, to be pored over by scholars, to be admired perhaps but to be stifled at the same time by the press of formal attention...
These problems were the price to be paid for the very cultural isolation which spawned the blues. Guralnick is aware of the paradox of his sentiments; consider this sentence about Robert Pete Williams: "It may perhaps be necessary, then, to look on the prison blues as the product of a unique combination of genius and circumstances which, one would certainly hope, is not about to be repeated." Who wants to pay that kind of dues? The beauty of the blues is certainly born of suffering; but as B.B. King points out, everybody suffers in this life. The blues...
However, faith in the future in no way invalidates Guralnick's devotion to one chapter in history. We are indebted to him and the other members of the Boston Blues Society for their efforts to bring us surviving members of a dying breed of bluesmen. They brought Johnny Shines to the Harvard Freshman Union recently, and on Sunday, December 12, they're bringing Hound Dog Taylor to the Winthrop House Dining Room. If you are a blues lover, you will be there. If you are merely flirting with the blues, but a little shy, Feel Like Going Home will point...