Peter Guralnick: C/D?

xp i just finished wald's dylan/seeger/newport book and it was good. think he's a pretty thoughtful writer.

Might have to give him another chance but still can't quite shake the impression that he is a bit of a scold.

I've been meaning to read that Wald book for a few years now. His Robert Johnson book, Escaping the Delta, is great, and so is Narcocorrido.

Guralnick's bios of Elvis are great. Taking a major step down here though in terms of the subject in my opinion.

― calstars, Friday, November 13, 2015 4:07 PM (6 hours ago)

really? sam phillips is a major, major guy imo, and there's never been a really in-depth biography of him. i didn't know about this book till just now, but this is awesome news.

Guralnick was on Fresh Air on NPR yesterday. Link includes the whole audio, plus some transcribed excerpts. Below is one of the themes of the Sam Phillips book

http://www.npr.org/2015/11/23/457083328/the-man-and-the-mistakes-that-invented-rock-n-roll

From the very beginning, from before he had opened up his studio in January of 1950, [Phillips] believed that the greatness of his music that so moved him, this African-American music, couldn't help but win over the general public, the mainstream audience. [But] the charts were totally segregated, like every other aspect of American life at that time.

When Sam started Sun Records in 1953, he had one hit after another. They were big hits by R&B standards. One of them was The Prisonaires' "Just Walkin' In The Rain." He had a couple of hits with Little Junior Parker. He had a big hit with Rufus Thomas with Bear Cat. A big hit in R&B meant that it sold 35,000, maybe 50,000. That was the ceiling. Sam Phillips was on the verge of going out of business. When Elvis came into his studio in July of '54 and he made "That's Alright," Sam was on the edge of bankruptcy, but he was determined to present the music in a way that was absolutely true to itself, not to present imitation music, not to present music that tried to ape the sound or the feeling of the great blues singers, the great R&B singers. And in Elvis he found that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-man-who-brought-down-racial-barriers-through-music/2015/11/20/b34aa078-870c-11e5-be8b-1ae2e4f50f76_story.html

Charles Hughes offers some criticism here:

Guralnick is so invested in presenting Phillips as a figure of racial change that he occasionally overstates his case. He exoticizes Phillips’s relationship with African Americans, especially his childhood inspiration Silas Payne and early client Howlin’ Wolf, and gives Phillips too much credit for developing supposedly untrained black artists. He overestimates the degree to which Phillips was a pioneer in recording black artists and pursuing musical crossover, both of which were occurring earlier and elsewhere. Most significant, perhaps, he is too quick to dismiss the criticisms of numerous black musicians at Sun who accused Phillips of abandoning black artists in the wake of Presley’s success. Guralnick skillfully engages with racial ambivalence throughout the book, but he is too focused on Phillips’s image of himself as a racially progressive hero to fully explore its implications.

As I read elsewhere, Guralnick does not really give credit here to African-american songwriter/producer Henry Glover who worked with r'n'b and country artists at King Records, prior to Phillips with Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Glover

Missed him on Fresh Air, but gonna go see him tonight

Cool.

Critic Geoffrey Himes interviewed him. Guralnick kept going off topic, but I still found it interesting. Somehow Solomon Burke got mentioned, and Guralnick went off on several tangents re him. He wanted to write a Solomon Burke bio in the voice of Solomon Burke, and they talked about doing a book (after Guralnick sent Sol his Cooke one) but it never happened. He said Solomon had many amazing stories including one about doing a gig where it turned out the audience was KKK members.

Afterwards I asked Guralnick about Henry Glover and King Records (whom are not mentioned in the book). Guralnick acknowledged that they were doing great work with r'b'b and country, that Sam Phillips was of course aware of King Records, but Guralnick didn't think Phillips knew songwriter/producer Glover.

I wanted to ask Guralnick more about Ike Turner's unhappy comments to Phillips, but didn't get a chance.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/peter-guralnick-adventures-in-music-and-writing-tickets-487888336147

Tonight 7 pm eastern time US online from NYC library

I missed all but the last 5 minutes. Oh well.