Peter Guralnick - Looking to Get Lost

Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock n Roll

Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke

Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley

Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley

Searching for Robert Johnson

Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom

Nighthawk Blues

Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians

Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock n Roll

S IMPLY PUT, THIS IS A BOOK about creativity. Like so many other things in my life, this is a realization I have come to only after the fact. When I first started writing profiles (see Falling into Place and Whose Skip James Is This?), it was with the idea of putting what gifts I had at the service of a greater cause. But gradually over the years I have come to recognize that what has always fascinated me, apart from the very idiosyncratic nature of each and every person that Ive ever written about, was the imaginative impulse that drove them all, not the material dreams (even in the case of a fabulist like Colonel Tom Parker, I would argue that this was by no means his primary motivation) but what it was in their makeup that led them to express themselves in so particular and individuated a manner.

And so in a way this is what all my profiles from first (Skip) to last (Dick Curless) have been about, however different the particulars of the lives may be. In some cases, as with the unique collaboration between Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint, the artist may be exceedingly self-awarebut then, so, too, in his own way, was Howlin Wolf, who saw his music as an expression not just of personal freedom but of personal difference. It is that almost inextinguishable drive to self-expression that, to paraphrase John Lee Hooker, was, simply, in them and had to come out. Im reminded sometimes of what Stoney Edwards, a singular black country singer who could neither read nor write, said to me on the subject of other peoples attempts to educate him. Im glad I cant read, he said. It scares the shit out of me sometimes how close I came to being an educated man. What Im saying is, when I think about how many things thats written about thats copiedwell, I cant copy anybody else. What I write about comes from a natural feeling inside myself. What I write has to be true.

Well, maybe so. Though that is not, of course, the only way. And yet it is one way to discover that state of abandon which all artists, whether knowingly or not, are searching for, that momentary sense of lostness that leads an author like Henry Green to forgo grammatical niceties, and sometimes even linear sense, for the same kind of lyrical rapture (in Greens case it might best be described as verbal drunkenness) that permits a musician like Jerry Lee Lewis or Ray Charles to discover places he might never otherwise have sought to go.

I toyed with the idea of calling this book Creativity: An Autobiography, because in one sense that is what it is. But then I figured no one would really get the joke (is it a jokeand if it is, how certain am I that I get it?)and besides, it might take away from the seriousness of my point. Which is that there is no one in this book, or any other that I have written, who was not lifted up in some way on the wings of imagination.

You wont find anyone more dedicated to their writing, or more ambitious about the precision of its expression, than Merle Haggard or Chuck Berry. To Lee Smith, I guess my favorite thing is before you even start writing, when youre sitting down every day just thinking about [it], and its all completely fluid in your head and therere all these people running around, and theres infinite possibilities of what they might or might not do. Everything is all intensely alive, and its just total possibility. Doc Pomus, who experienced a late-in-life renaissance that freed him from the more self-conscious restrictions of genre and craft, describes writing one of his early songs in an almost trance-like state (I definitely remember writing the song in a car. I was still living on and off with my family, and I was riding somewhere. It has a kind of quasi-heartbeat, its almost like subliminal writing), but in the end he had no interest in explaining the song, because its like with Edward Hopper, when they asked him, Who are those paintings about, all those late-night diners?, he said, Theyre all me. Henry Green was so inflamed by his fears for the demise not just of himself but of everything that he knew and loved as the Battle of Britain began (he was driven, he said, to put down what comes to mind before one is killed, and surely it would be asking much to pretend one had a chance to live) that he wrote what could arguably be considered his three greatest masterpieces in the course of little more than two years. Bill Monroe, widely hailed as the Father of Bluegrass, saw a long lifetime as an opportunity to refine the ever-developing arc of the revolutionary new music that he had pioneered in his mid-thirties. And if you listen to the dialogue between Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint, you will overhear a conversation that returns again and again to the work ethic of the artist (simply put, this might be summarized by writers and musicians from Ernest Hemingway to Robert Johnson as, Youd better be there just in case inspiration arrives, because if youre not, it may never choose to show its face again)a conversation leavened and uplifted, in a manner that Lee Smith and Bill Monroe would certainly approve, by visionary arrivals like the Archangel Gabriel in the midst of an otherwise wholly secular (and, up to that point, almost frivolous) song.