This collection of over 50 years of writing about the South and its music by Stanley Booth, one of the undisputedly great chroniclers of the subject, is a classic, essential read. Booth’s close contacts with many of the musicians he writes about provide a gateway to truly understanding the music and culture of Memphis and other blues strongholds in the South. Subjects include Elvis Presley, Otis Redding, William Eggleston, Ma Rainey, Blind Willie McTell, Graceland, Beale Street and much more.

“You couldn’t ask for a better guide to American music than Stanley Booth, who drank deep from the source, experienced the past sixty years of Memphis and knows the century before that, and writes as flowingly and seductively as anyone alive.” —Luc Sante, author of Low Life and The Other Paris
 

“The heroic Stanley Booth is one of the great progenitors of the language and culture surrounding American popular music, one of the great enshriners of various forms of potentially lost knowledge, and one of the great survivors of the era and the scene.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Feral Detective
 

“[Stanley Booth] has produced some of the most gracefully written, thoughtful, and thought-stirring musings on the characters—the famous and the forgotten, the infamous and the unknown—who command the kingdom or drift through the shadowland of the South’s rich-chorded patrimony.” —Nick Tosches, author of Dino and Hellfire
 

“Stanley does not know how to construct an inelegant sentence, nor to miss a point.” —David Sandison, author of Che Guevara and Neal Cassady
 

“Stanley is the Magus of the Southland. Elected by ancestral right, esoteric knowledge, and apostolic succession, he knows things that cannot be learned.” —David Dalton, author of Who Is That Man? and James Dean
 

"The combination of Stanley's great warmth, subtle crusading, saucy humor, dazzling intellect, dizzying breadth of interests, and energy casts him as a truly unique literary giant....Stanley has romanced the abyss, enduring a harrowing high-wire act between life and death, light and dark. His profiles are voiced with unmistakable insight, desire, empathy, and awe." —Kandia Crazy Horse, editor of Rip It Up: The Black Experience in Rock n' Roll

“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.” --Kirkus Reviews

“Booth is as well informed on Memphis as just about anyone and his insights into the city and its culture are valuable for understanding the evolution of American music.”  --Shepherd Express

Stanley Booth is the author of The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, Keith: Till I Roll Over Dead and Rythm Oil: A Journey Through the Music of the American South. He has written for Rolling Stone, Esquire and Playboy. Before that, he wrote the first serious articles about Elvis Presley and Otis Redding in 1967, and won a major award for his 1970 piece on Furry Lewis. He has continued writing astonishing articles ever since. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.