Lost Highway: Journeys & Arrivals of American Musicians
- Oct 5, 2019
- 2 min read
★★★★☆
I can’t recall how I got turned on to Lost Highway: Journeys & Arrivals of American Musicians, and it wasn’t until I read Peter Guralnick’s introduction that I realized this was actually his second collection about American roots music (Feel Like Going Home was his first). Had I known that I might have started there, but the blues has never been my music, whereas rockabilly, country—real country, not today’s “twang pop”—and honky-tonk have long been loves of mine. In that way, it made sense that this book should be my introduction to Guralnick and his work.
Written over the course of the 1970s and published in 1979 (a fact I had to continue to remind myself of), Lost Highway chronicles the lives of many of American music’s progenitors—from honky-tonk heroes Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, DeFord Bailey, Rufus Thomas, and Bobby Bland to hillbilly boogie pioneers Scotty Moore, Charlie Feathers, Elvis Presley, Charlie Rich, Sleepy LaBeef, Mickey Gilley, and Jack Clement to “country outlaws” Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams Jr., Merle Haggard, James Talley, and Stoney Edwards. The depth and breadth is both dizzying and electrifying, and Guralnick’s love for these musicians, combined with the vividness of his prose and his unwillingness to pull punches about their lives (even if he does tend to romanticize them), has resulted in a series of gritty, poignant, and too often sad portraits of men who have, for better or worse, dedicated their lives to making a living from music.
Like a freight train barreling across the plains, things continue apace through the first three sections—five stars all the way—but the book seemed to lose some steam in its final section entitled “The Blues Roll On.” Here, Guralnick checks in with Howlin’ Wolf (just weeks before his death it turned out), Otis Spann, and Big Joe Turner, and profiles the Chicago juke joint scene circa 1977. At the time, these pieces felt different from the rest of the book. I couldn’t put my finger on it then, and reflecting on them now, a week later, I still can’t. The best I can come up with is that the first three sections felt like a proper album, while the last one felt like a bonus EP or a collection of B-sides. Good material, but perhaps not quite the same caliber or with a vibe that didn’t quite mesh with the rest.
Or maybe, just maybe, I’d reached my saturation point—profile overload—and the issue wasn’t with the writer, the writing, or the material, but with the reader. I can cop to that. The way I see it, this book belongs on my shelf, and when I pull it down to reread that last section, it’ll come together for me the way Guralnick intended: not as an outlier but as a coda—both to this book and to his previous one. And how can I not now read it, too?
Comments