This took me a while to read, since I started it ages ago and then ditched it and then started back up where I left off. It was okay. It was a collection of essays that were quite old. I think they were from the seventies. It was interesting enough to give it three stars, but I cant really recommend it to anyone but the biggest blues (there is a section on Jerry Lee Lewis and Sun Records also) music nerds. There is a discography at the end that probably could have bumped this up a half of star, if there were 1/2 stars on here. I haven't gone in depth into the discography, but plan on doing so soon. So, pretty hit or miss, but all in all worth reading as there are some, for better or worse, intimate views of some of the legends.

Guralnick is one of my favourite music writers as he is so clearly a fan first and critic second. This 1971 masterpiece is a fascinating first hand perspective on many blues stars that history has now considers iconic. The intervening years have in some ways forgotten that they were real people; skip James, howlin wolf and Muddy Waters are 'The Blues' but their individual personalities, stories, ambitions and failures have been forgotten. They all shared many of the challenges that any human does even now. So it is riveting to read these interviews which, in part, made me reevaluate how blues was regarded and appreciated especially in these BLM times. In some ways not much has changed but in others it is a world that seems so long ago and yet the same human spirit is evident in today's world too.