Biographer Peter Guralnick gets lost in American music
Peter Guralnick used to tell his writing students to “prize the digression.” No worthwhile instructor would advocate a process he didn’t practice himself. Guralnick’s work over more than 50 years has been full of digressions both grand and nuanced.
So he has to his name the definitive account of the life of Elvis Presley, a two-volume, 1,300-page biography with enough digressions investigating a large and short life. Guralnick also wrote “Sweet Soul Music” and “Lost Highway,” books about Southern American music traditions that included artists categorized as legends and innovators while also offering biography and analysis about artists who didn’t find their way into the canon.
Over the past 30 years, Guralnick’s list of credits includes, in addition to the two Elvis books, definitive biographies of Sam Cooke, Sam Phillips and Robert Johnson. In his new “Looking to Get Lost: Adventures in Music and Writing,” Guralnick draws from his long, storied career to write a modular collection of essays about musicians well known (Ray Charles, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash) and less well known (Dick Curless).
Even the book’s title ties back to that phrase he repeated to his students.
“I don’t always exemplify it,” Guralnick says, laughing. “And it’s not necessarily a popular bromide among creative-writing teachers. But I do believe in wide variety. Reading ‘Tristram Shandy’ opened my eyes years ago. Or reading somebody like William Trevor or Alice Munro. Trevor’s stories are particularly well organized. But their stories go places you don’t expect. They’re difficult to diagram. So during those years I taught, I tried to get the students to prize the digression.”
“Looking to Get Lost” is an interesting entry in Guralnick’s body of work, yielded not from dense research on a single subject but rather from older interactions with artists that he reflects upon anew.
“Simply put,” Guralnick writes in the book’s introduction, “this is a book about creativity.”
He points out, “It’s definitely not about myself. But there is a personal thread that runs through it. There’s a personal frame to some of the chapters. And I think it was written in a, I don’t know, maybe a more freewheeling fashion.”
Along the way, he tells stories involving Haggard and Bill Monroe, Lonnie Mack and Delbert McClinton, Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon. The great songwriter Doc Pomus provides a wonderful hub for how an unlikely writer can pen songs that defy needless categorization. Sometimes the threads come together logically: Chapters on Johnson and Eric Clapton naturally tell a story of a musical progression that moves both forward and backward from 1965.
Guralnick’s journey began in earnest that year. The son of a noted Massachusetts oral surgeon, he seemed an unlikely documentarian of American roots music. But in the mid’60s, Guralnick began corresponding with a pair of English blues periodicals. His interest led him to approach blues great Skip James at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
“I wanted to tell the world something of the inimitable nature of Skip James’ music,” he writes in the book, while also describing a labored and awkward process of learning a trade while doing it.
An array of dynamic personalities emerges from the pages. Guralnick found a crafty but contemplative subject in Col. Tom Parker, Presley’s successful and notorious manager. In Charles, he found an artist disinclined to overthink and discuss his process. Guralnick talked to Charles — “one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met” — in 1982 for a profile. In going back to that conversation, he found a more interesting thread he decided to pull, yielding a probing chapter on Charles’ discovery of his voice, a signature sound with “I Got a Woman” that launched his career.
“I wanted to try to tell that story from the inside out,” Guralnick says. “The significance of Ray finding his voice and the unimaginable impact it had on the course of American music.”
A certain melancholy emerges from the pages of “Looking to Get Lost” as most of Guralnick’s once flesh-andblood subjects appear today as ghosts, lending the work a contemplative tone regarding time.
Joe Tex, a fiery performer who spent formative years in Baytown, burned bright and fast. He died in 1982 at age 47 after spending his final years in Navasota. “That one felt so strange because I’d done a profile and he seemed fine, and less than a year later he totally went off the rails,” Guralnick says. “The guy I met at this time soul music was being rediscovered was unrecognizable from the person I saw a year later.”
Solomon Burke, the great King of Rock & Soul, enjoyed renewed attention in his last years, but he also provides something of a sad postscript to “Looking to Get Lost.” As much as digressions can yield in information and lore, they can also cut trails that take longer to traverse than expected.
Guralnick enjoyed a close relationship with Burke that dated to the 1980s, and his chapter on Burke is a marvel of construction, braiding history and insight and personal reflections to offer the closest thing out there to a portrait of a grandiose character in our popular culture whose life, career and energy defy easy description. Guralnick refers to the “illimitable dimensions of his world.”
“When are we going to do the
Book?” Guralnick wrote that Burke asked him.
Burke died in 2010. And Guralnick is 76. So a proper biography isn’t coming. But between the Burke chapter in “Looking to Get Lost” and one in “Sweet Soul Music,” Guralnick has captured some of the odd and boundless magic emitted by one of his favorite artists.
Though the book has the outside look of an anthology, it doesn’t read like a journey through the past. Guralnick certainly doesn’t view it as a final word. His father continued to work until he was nearly 101.
“People ask about retirement,” he says. “People worry about engagement. Well, I continue to be engaged.”