Welcome to the first volume in an exciting new annual series that celebrates the year's best American writing about music and its culture, as selected by one of the genre's preeminent practitioners. Covering the gamut of contemporary styles--rock, pop, rap, jazz, blues, country--Guralnick has chosen the kind of pieces that send you right to the record store, by both established writers and bright new talents. With thirty selections drawn from more than a hundred sources, including mainstream magazines like theNew Yorker, music journals like Spin, and tiny 'zines and websites...

An acclaimed biographer presents a revealing portrait of Sam Cooke--a black performer who appealed to white audiences, wrote his own songs, and controlled his own business destiny. 55 photos.

FEEL LIKE GOING HOME celebrates the building blocks of blues and early rock 'n' roll, including Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Chess record label. "Brings it back alive better than any book of its kind ever published".--Charles Shaar Murray, NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS. 80 photos.

Careless Love is the full, true, and mesmerizing story of Elvis Presley's last two decades, in the long-awaited second volume of Peter Guralnick's masterful two-part biography.
Last Train to Memphis, the first part of Guralnick's two-volume life of Elvis Presley, was acclaimed by the New York Times as "a triumph of biographical art." This concluding volume recounts the second half of Elvis' life in rich and previously unimagined detail, and confirms Guralnick's status as one of the great biographers of our time.
Beginning with Presley's army service in Germany...

- The Year of the Blues reaches fever pitch in fall 2003 with the theatrical release (and airing on PBS) of seven documentary films, each by a noted feature director (Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Charles Burnett, Mike Figgis, and Clint Eastwood among them) and the release on CD of several major new blues compilations.- Peter Guralnick, celebrated for his bestselling two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love, is a master of narrative who knows the world of American roots music better than any other writer.- NIGHTHAWK BLUES was first published in hardcover...

Robert Johnson, while probably the most influential of all blues guitarists, is also one of the most obscure. Recognized as an influence on musicians like Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, Johnson was poisoned by a jealous husband in 1938--at the age of twenty-seven. This untimely death, his supposed bargain with the devil that enabled him to play guitar, and the ferocity and tormented originality of his work have given rise to a legend that has inspired a Hollywood movie and numerous stories. Peter Guralnick?s extended essay about the life of the man and the...

The author of the critically acclaimed Elvis Presley biography Last Train to Memphis brings us the life of Sam Phillips, the visionary genius who singlehandedly steered the revolutionary path of Sun Records. The music that he shaped in his tiny Memphis studio with artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Ike Turner, Howlin' Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, introduced a sound that had never been heard before. He brought forth a singular mix of black and white voices passionately proclaiming the vitality of the American vernacular tradition while at the same time...