The Literature File -
Peter Guralnick - Lost Highway
Along with "Feel Like Going Home" and, in particular, "Sweet Soul Music", Lost Highway illustrates Guralnick's incredible ability to document post war American popular music with compassion, enthusiasm and critical insight.
Subtitled "Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians", this is ostensibly a book of profiles of some of the great and the good in popular music but, as with all fine portraitists, what we get is a statement about the times in which these artists lived and the associated wider musical culture. It combines interviews and straight reportage to document around twenty wonderful performers.
The book has a wider brief than the blues and R&B; artists that Guralnick holds in such affection, so we also get excellent insights into the life and times of such artists as Hank Snow, Charlie Feathers and Waylon Jennings. Primer favourites are heavily represented however and there are excellent portraits of the great Bobby Bland, Rufus Thomas, Howlin' Wolf and Otis Spann.
One critic commented that this was a wonderful and beautiful book about defeat and there are indeed sad and heartfelt stories to be found here. But Guralnick can see (and of course hear) the very special qualities of the artists he has chosen to profile and the book is a superb source of information about the core of American popular music......the heart and art of music writing is to be found here.
It's only when you get to read a work of this quality that you realise that so much of what passes for music journalism is so uninspired. Essential!
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