Experience music history with this memoir by one of the last of the genuine old school Blues and R&B legends, the Grammy-winning dynamic showman Bobby Rush.This memoir charts the extraordinary rise to fame of living blues legend, Bobby Rush. Born Emmett Ellis, Jr. in Homer, Louisiana, he adopted the stage name Bobby Rush out of respect for his father, a pastor. As a teenager, Rush acquired his first real guitar and started playing in juke joints in Little Rock, Ark...

Experience music history with this memoir by one of the last of the genuine old school Blues and R&B legends, the Grammy-winning dynamic showman Bobby Rush.This memoir charts the extraordinary rise to fame of living blues legend, Bobby Rush. Born Emmett Ellis, Jr. in Homer, Louisiana, he adopted the stage name Bobby Rush out of respect for his father, a pastor. As a teenager, Rush acquired his first real guitar and started playing in juke joints in Little Rock, Ark...

Willie Nelson shares his life story in this captivating bestselling memoir of true love, wild times, best friends, and barrooms."Unvarnished. Funny. Leaving no stone unturned." ... So say the publishers about this book I've written. What I say is that this is the story of my life, told as clear as a Texas sky and in the same rhythm that I lived it.It's a story of restlessness and the purity of the moment and living right. Of my childhood in Abbott, Texas, t...

The national bestseller celebrated as "the ultimate Johnny Cash biography . . . Rock writer great Robert Hilburn goes deep." -- Rolling StoneIn this, the definitive biography of an American legend, Robert Hilburn conveys the unvarnished truth about a musical superstar. Johnny Cash's extraordinary career stretched from his days at Sun Records with Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis to the remarkable creative last hurrah, at age 69, that resulted in the brave...

"A colorful account of [Guy's] 50-year-long tenure as perhaps the most influential guitar slinger in Chicago blues." — Los Angeles TimesAccording to Eric Clapton, John Mayer, and the late Stevie Ray Vaughn, Buddy Guy is the greatest blues guitarist of all time. An enormous influence on these musicians as well as Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and Jeff Beck, he is the living embodiment of Chicago blues.Guy's epic story stands at the abso...

"Refreshing . . . candid . . . poignant. . . . One of the best of country's tell-alls, as warm, peculiar, and individualistic as Jennings's music itself." — Entertainment WeeklyEqual parts outlaw, renegade, and legend, Waylon Jennings enjoyed a stellar music career for four decades and this no-holds-barred autobiography reveals the story of a man who infused country music traditions with the energy of rock and roll to rewrite the rules of ...

If you had to give America a voice, it’s been said more than once, that voice would be Willie Nelson’s. For more than fifty years, he’s taken the stuff of his life-the good and the bad-and made from it a body of work that has become a permanent part of our musical heritage and kept us company through the good and the bad of our own lives. Long before he became famous as a performer, Willie Nelson was known as a songwriter, keeping his young family afloat by writing songs-like “Crazy”-that ...

The greatest Southern storyteller of our time tracks down the greatest rock and roller of all time—and gets his own story, from the source, for the very first time.The New York Times BestsellerOne of Rolling Stone's 10 Best Music Books of the YearA monumental figure on the American landscape, Jerry Lee Lewis spent his childhood raising hell in Ferriday, Louisiana, and Natchez, Mississippi; galvanized ...

Talking Music is a collection of nineteen of Holger Petersens in-depth radio interviews with artiststhe pioneering men and women who created the blues and roots sounds that have influenced the course of popular culture and music in North America. Many of his interview subjects are no longer with ustheir stories need to be told. The book is divided into four collections of interviews: British Blues Revival, Delta and Memphis Blues, Artists Who Helped Build Stony Plain, and Bonus Tracks. Eac...

“You won’t leave this hypnotic book without feeling that James Brown is still out there, howling.”—The Boston GlobeFrom the New York Times bestselling author of The Good Lord Bird, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, Deacon King Kong, and Five-Carat SoulKill ’Em and Leave is more than a book about James Brown. Brown embodied the contradictions of American life: He was an ...

In the vein of the classic Johnny Cash: The Life, this groundbreaking work explores the wild life and extraordinary musical career of "the definitive country singer of the last half century" ( New York Times), who influenced, among others, Bob Dylan, Buck Owens, Emmylou Harris, John Fogerty, George Strait, Alan Jackson, and Garth Brooks.In a masterful biography laden with new revelations, veteran country music journalist/historian Rich Kienzle offers a definitive,...

The multi-Grammy Award-winning pioneering soul musician tells the story of his childhood, career, and legacy—in this own words.Ray Charles (1930-2004) led one of the most extraordinary lives of any popular musician. In Brother Ray, he tells his story in an inimitable and unsparing voice, from the chronicle of his musical development to his heroin addiction to his tangled romantic life.Overcoming poverty, blindness, the loss of his parents, and the ...