Stormy Monday - by Helen Oakley Dance (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The most significant factor in the career of Aaron "T-Bone" Walker was his ability to bridge the worlds of blues and jazz. The guitar artistry of this early exponent of urban blues was not only admired by blues musicians like B.B. King, Gatemouth Brown, Albert King, and Albert Collins, and rock guitarists such as Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Duane Allman, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, but by such jazz greats as Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, and many others with whom he recorded.

Stormy Monday is the first biography of T-Bone Walker to be published. Using dozens of interviews with Walker, as well as with members of his family, close friends, fellow musicians, and business associates, the book offers a remarkable frank insider's account of the life of a blues musician and compulsive gambler, from the wild living and hard drinking on the road to a solid and contented family life at home.

"In a very real sense the modern blues is largely his creation." blues authority Pete Welding has written about T-Bone Walker. "The blues was different before he came on the scene, and it hasn't been the same since, and few men can lay claim to that kind of distinction. No one has contributed as much, as long, or as variously to the blues."

Review Quotes

When he died in 1975, Aaron "T-Bone'' Walker was widely regarded as the father of modern guitar blues, whose sound influenced much of today's popular music. A proficient pianist and guitarist, a talented singer of great personal magnetism, a composer of blues and shuffles, Walker was also at home with jazz and proud of his association with Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and other major jazz musicians. In a book that well may become a basic cultural document, Dance, who produces concerts and records and has written for jazz magazines, has organized interviews with Walker, his family, friends and associates into a smooth-flowing narrative account of this important musical innovator, who also happened to be a wild-living, hard-drinking, compulsive gambler-- "Publishers Weekly"

A remarkably illuminating exploration of a largely uncharted blues way of life, love, and loss. Helen Dance lets the lives and the music breathe naturally.--Nat Hentoff

Helen Oakley Dance's close professional and very intimate and relaxed personal contact with the special world of blues musicians over the years has served her well. Stormy Monday is a lively and showbiz-wise profile that may well be the standard book on T-Bone Walker for some time to come.--Albert Murray

T-Bone Walker's induction into the Rock and Roll hall of Fame came as no surprise, for his influence, and his guitar expertise, had a lasting effect on the blues and the bluesmen who succeeded him.--George Benson

About the Author

Helen Oakley Dance has been involved with jazz and blues since the mid-1930s, having staged concerts by Benny Goodman, produced recordings by Duke Ellington, and participated in presentations by the Count Basie Orchestra. She has contributed to down beat, Saturday Review, Music Journal, and to several books published by her husband, the jazz historians and critic Stanley Dance.