He sought entrée into a cloistered and mysterious world, and he found himself invited in. They say write what you know, or at least what you’re coming to know, so Guralnick found himself applying his daily writing discipline to stories he was reporting alongside the stories he was making up. Boston-born Guralnick was able to see Lightnin’ Hopkins, Muddy Waters, Mississippi John Hurt, as well as the rootsiest of rock and rollers, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley among them. This youthful epiphany came around 1960, when it was hard to find recordings of or read about first-generation Delta and Piedmont blues artists, but on the other hand, many of them were alive and cycling around the folk revival circuit. And then he devotes hundreds of pages to what becomes a pretty good discourse on why indeed. “I lived it, breathed it, absorbed it by osmosis, fantasized it – don’t ask me why,” he writes in opening chapter of his new book. When he was more or less 15 years old, about the time he determined to be a writer of novels and stories, Peter Guralnick fell entirely in love with the blues.
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