Feel Like Going Home - by Peter Guralnick (Paperback)

About the Book

FEEL LIKE GOING HOME celebrates the building blocks of blues and early rock 'n' roll, including Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Chess record label. "Brings it back alive better than any book of its kind ever published".--Charles Shaar Murray, NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS. 80 photos.

Book Synopsis

This vivid celebration of blues and early rock 'n' roll includes some of the first and most illuminating profiles of such blues masters as Muddy Waters, Skip James, and Howlin' Wolf; excursions into the blues-based Memphis rock 'n' roll of Jerry Lee Lewis, Charlie Rich, and the Sun record label; and a brilliant depiction of the bustling Chicago blues scene and the legendary Chess record label in its final days. With unique insight and unparalleled access, Peter Guralnick brings to life the people, the songs, and the performance that forever changed not only the American music scene but America itself.

Review Quotes

"A fine introduction to the blues....Guralnick's portraits shine with their own special aura of warmth and care."--Library Journal

"A powerful, personal book about blues, rock 'n' roll, and the musicians who play it.... It brought me closer to every figure it sought to illuminate.... Guralnick's capacity to draw out his subjects is one of his most admirable qualities as a chronicler. In all the articles that I have ever read about Muddy Waters, I have never seen anything so moving as the statement he made at the end of his interview with Guralnick."--Jon Landau, Rolling Stone

"A thorough immersion in the musicians' lives and art, combined with a novelist's eye for the revealing gesture."--Ben Gerson, Boston After Dark

"Absolutely unique in its simultaneous attempts to show the place where blues and country met to make rock & roll.... Among the legions of people who write about American roots music, there is nobody like Peter Guralnick."--Ed Ward, Music & Sound Output

"Guralnick has a lover's passion, a novelist's sensitivity to nuances of character and event, a musician's ear, a historian's insatiable appetite for detail and fact: all these attributes wedded to a fan's devotion to the music which moves him, and a critic's questing instinct for the how and why of the music's emotional impact.... Feel Like Going Home brings it back alive better than any book of its kind ever published."--Charles Shaar Murray, New Musical Express

"Guralnick makes an art out of the interview.... Chapters on Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich simultaneously establish the greatness of each man and explain why neither managed to get as far as [many] with substantially less native ability."--Charlie Gillett, Cream

"Guralnick's graceful and moving survey is also a last backward look at rock music as an extension of the blues--a gently elegiac farewell-to-all-that and a kind of 'going home' to a departed hour of musical greatness.....His portraits are rich in insights into the changing music scene as well as vividly evocative of the lives he writes about."--Publishers Weekly

"Its potency lies in the author's ability to combine intellectual analysis with emotional resonance.... [Feel Like Going Home] would warrant an appearance on our rock 'n' roll Booker shortlist of the time."--Nigel Williamson, Uncut (London)

"Nobody digs deeper into what makes [these musicians] tick, and nobody conveys their achievement with more grace, details, and empathy."--John Morthland, Music & Sound Output

"One of the essential works in music writing.... It forms part of a trilogy exploring the roots of American music which examines, celebrates and contextualizes blues, soul and country. What distinguishes them, apart from Guralnick's exhaustive knowledge and scholarly attention to detail, is the sheer love he exudes towards his subject. It is a passion that is both infectious and persuasive.... Here, it gloriously deepens our understanding of blues (and by extension rock 'n' roll). Through his touching accounts of the characters who shaped it, he makes tangible a past that lives on through music and books like this."--Ross Fortune, Time Out (London)

"One of the most insightful books written on popular music."--Walter Dawson, Memphis Commercial Appeal

"Peter Guralnick writes movingly...in every single one of the portraits (of Muddy Waters, Charlie Rich, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others) in this terrific book."--Nick Hornby, Time Literary Supplement (London)

"The author cuts so close to the bone you almost want to turn away for fear of learning what you don't want to know. Essential reading."--David McGee, Record World

"The most emotionally and intellectually satisfying rock book yet to appear."--Robert Christgau, Village Voice

"The most loving book I have ever read about American popular music."--Greil Marcus, Rolling Stone

"We feel the passion of Guralnick's love for the music and also the real personalities of the bluesmen he interviews."--Nelson George, Billboard

About the Author

Peter Guralnick has been called "a national resource" by Nat Hentoff for work that has argued passionately and persuasively for the vitality of this country's intertwined black and white musical traditions. His books include the prize-winning two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis andCareless Love. Of the first Bob Dylan wrote, "Elvis steps from the pages. You can feel him breathe. This book cancels out all others." Of the biography as a whole, the New York Times Book Review declared in a lead review, "It must be ranked among the most ambitious and crucial biographical undertakings yet devoted to a major American figure of the second half of the twentieth century." Other books include an acclaimed trilogy on American roots music, Sweet Soul Music, Lost Highway, and Feel Like Going Home; the biographical inquiry Searching for Robert Johnson; and the novel, Nighthawk Blues. His latest book, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, has been hailed by the San Fransisco Chronicle as "monumental, panoramic...an epic tale told against a backdrop of brilliant, shimmering music, intense personal melodrama, and vast social changes." He is currently at work on a biography of Sam Phillips.