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BLUES ALL DAY LONG

Name: BLUES ALL DAY LONG
Author: Wayne Everett Goins
ISBN: 978-0-252-08017-3

THE JIMMY ROGERS STORY

by Wayne Everett Goins ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2014

For blues aficionados, Goins provides a wealth of information on one of the underacknowledged masters of the Chicago sound.

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Biography of blues guitarist Jimmy Rogers (1924-1997), who “created a truly enduring sound that has made a direct impact on every generation that followed.”

Without his association with Muddy Waters, Rogers might be just a musical footnote, an artist whose one hit, “Walking by Myself,” enjoyed minimal commercial success. However, as Goins (Director of Jazz/Kansas State Univ.; Emotional Response to Music: Pat Metheny’s Secret Story, 2001) reiterates throughout, Muddy Waters might not have been Muddy Waters without Rogers, whose guitar was integral to perhaps the finest band in the history of Chicago blues. As much as mercurial harmonica master Little Walter or, later, piano stylist Otis Spann, Rogers was integral to the development and popularity of Muddy’s music, complementing the raw Southern sound of the frontman’s vocals and slide guitar. Of the sound that the two guitarists developed together, the author writes, their “relationship…was somewhere between two ballet dancers and two heavyweight boxers. They could sling each other around the room and never lose faith in one’s ability to catch the other. They could throw hard jabs at each other yet never catch a blow to the body.” Goins never lapses into academic impenetrability, and he demonstrates an impressive passion and ear for the music. Particularly lively are his illumination of the bustling Maxwell Street scene and his analysis of the 1970s blues revival in Austin, Texas, and along the coasts, which brought Rogers out of early musical retirement to attain a popularity beyond anything he’d experienced before—as well as financial success, including royalties from the likes of Eric Clapton recording his songs. However, the book could use some judicious cutting and editing, since it seems to include everything that anyone ever said in print about Rogers, as well as the name of every musician, club owner and tour promoter with whom he worked.

For blues aficionados, Goins provides a wealth of information on one of the underacknowledged masters of the Chicago sound.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-252-08017-3

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Univ. of Illinois

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)