LOST HIGHWAY: Journeys & Arrivals of American Musicians

by Peter Guralnick ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 27, 1979

Magazine-styled interview-profiles of country/blues/rock performers--mostly famous, a few not--by a relatively low-key and self-effacing writer (Feel Like Going Home, 1971) whose efforts range from pedestrian to engaging to (not often) corny-mawkish. Guralnick is best in this collection while hanging around with ""Honky Tonk Heroes"" Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, Rufus Thomas, and Deford Bailey (""I never growed up, I goes to sleep with that harmonica there on the floor beside me"")--white and black old-timers, road-weary troupers who forged hybrids out of hillbilly yodels and blues. And he's fine at dusting off underground greats like Charlie Feathers or ""New England's number one name in rockabilly and country music"": Sleepy LaBeef, whose curiously shabby/starry career New Englander Guralnick has obviously kept affectionately close tabs on. In general, however, there's not enough evocation of the music itself here (especially in the case of semi-stars like James Talley and Stoney Edwards); and, with biggies like Charlie Rich or the new ""outlaws"" (Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Hank Williams, Jr.), Guralnick sometimes slips into blandly sentimental personality portraits and awestruck hyperbole. Still, though too many of these pieces follow a drearily predictable pattern--present-tense closeup, then flashback to a thumbnail bio--there are telling quotes along the way (not, thankfully, the heaps of tape-recorded chat so rife in pop-music reporting), spots of genuine critical acumen, and a few intriguing surprise details (like Charlie Rich's veneration of chanteuse Mabel Mercer). And it's only in his elegies on Elvis that Guralnick descends to romanticized gush. Literate but unfocused music journalism, then, that isn't especially appealing in book form: Guralnick's limitations are on full display here, and the scattershot contents (there's also an out-of-place update on pure bluesmen) don't really add up to a coordinated look at the evolution of today's country-blues-rock.

Pub Date: Nov. 27, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Godine

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1979

Categories: NONFICTION