Lost Highway
by Peter Guralnick | 
Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta
by Robert Palmer | 
Schubert's Winter Journey
by Ian Bostridge | 
Music Quickens Time
by Daniel Barenboim | 
Escaping the Delta
by Elijah Wald | 
The Land Where the Blues Began
by Alan Lomax | 
Delta Blues
by Ted Gioia | 
The History Of The Blues
by Francis Davis | 
The Joy of Music
by Leonard Bernstein |
Stranded
by Greil Marcus | 
The Death of Rhythm and Blues
by Nelson George |
This is Uncool
by Garry Mulholland |
Where Did Our Love Go?
by Nelson George | 
Where Dead Voices Gather
by Nick Tosches | 
Pass Thru Fire
by Lou Reed |
Here are Stanley Booth's acclaimed writings about the South and the music that emanates from it. Rythm Oil--you don't have to know how to spell "rhythm" to have it in your body and soul--is a potion sold on Beale Street in Memphis. The home of Sun Records, B. B. King, Elvis Presley, Howlin' Wolf, and Jerry Lee Lewis, Memphis is also the home of fantastic stories and broke-down dreams. As Booth makes his way from Memphis to the Mississippi Delta to the depths of the Georgia woods exploring the sounds, the music, and the culture of the American South, "he has produced some of the most gracefully written, thoughtful, and thought-stirring musings on the characters--the famous and the forgotten, the infamous and the unknown--who command the kingdom or drift through the shadowland of the South's rich-chorded patrimony" (Nick Tosches, Los Angeles Times).