Peter Guralnick: C/D?

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.