Peter Guralnick Talks About His Obsession With the Blues, the Real Meaning of Country Music, and Selling His Record Collection

Peter Guralnick’s new book Looking to Get Lost: Adventures in Music and Life is a slow read — slow because it’s impossible not to keep stopping and listening to music. As good a writer as Guralnick is, he would be the first to argue that there is no substitute for listening. After reading his essay on Skip James, I lost a solid two hours on Spotify. Many of the blues and country artists he covers in this collection— Robert Johnson, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Howlin’ Wolf, Tammy Wynette, Chuck Berry — are huge figures, but because Guralnick is such a fine-grained storyteller and so driven by a deep passion for the music, even familiar characters emerge in a revealing new light.

That includes Elvis Presley, about whom Guralnick wrote a masterful two-volume biography, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love. If you haven’t read those, you might need to start there, and then work your way back to Looking to Get Lost. It will be a rewarding journey, trust me. Guralnick is 76 years old and, like many of the artists he loves, his powers are undiminished by age. “When I write, I always try to live up to what Sam Philips [the founder of Sun Records] told me,” he says, “’If you don’t tell the goddamn truth, you ain’t the motherfucker I thought you were.’”

GQ: The first thing I want to say is thank you for opening my ears to Skip James. I’ve heard Skip’s name plenty of times, but until I read your essay on him, I never sat down and properly listened. He blew my mind.

Peter Guralnick: It's pretty amazing, isn't it? I saw him at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964. He was an old guy, they had just found him in a hospital in Mississippi and put him on the road, after being away from music for years. His only recordings were from 1931, four sides of which had been reissued in the early sixties. They were very scratchy and remote, but people loved those recordings and were always speculating, ‘How did he get this sound?’ And then there he was on stage at Newport with a borrowed guitar and the exact same sound! I think it was the tuning, among other things, but it was also just completely unique at that time.

You were a teenager in the late 1950s when you "just fell into the blues." What does falling into the blues look like?

It really came about in a very simple and not very exotic way. I was very friendly with this guy, Bob Smith, and Bob’s brother went into the Newport Folk Festival and came back with a whole bunch of records. I had some familiarity with what's been called, I don't know, colloquial music. But among the records that Bob's brother brought back were records by Big Bill Broonzy, and Leadbelly, and Lightnin' Hopkins. And they just spoke to me in a way that nothing else had spoken to me before, and I began hunting record shops—Briggs & Briggs in Harvard Square, which had a listening booth. There were so few blues albums out at that time. I was looking for these sounds and I was just totally knocked out.

And your interest in Elvis developed alongside that?

I had never really listened to Elvis in a serious way. His records permeated the culture, so I knew all the hits and stuff, but during that period, '59 and '60, Elvis was in the army and his manager, Colonel Parker, had embargoed any further recording sessions. So RCA was putting out his old records and there were two albums that came out, A Date with Elvis and For LP Fans Only, which included maybe eight of his Sun sides, which I'd never heard before and which were mostly blues. I just said, "Oh my God, Elvis was a blues singer. He's a great blues singer. He's not a greater blues singer than these other blues singers, but he's in the same position."

Was there a social aspect to your blues obsession, a scene that you became part of?

It was really the two of us, me and Bob. We encountered others who were drawn to the music, but they weren't people that I knew. You'd go to a Skip James show at Club 47, there would only be 20 to 30 people in the room. It wasn't a question of trying to convert anybody else, or joining a club that already existed. I didn't know if anything like that existed. That was why it was so surprising, in a sense, when the Rolling Stones and John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers and Eric Clapton came along. All these people, discovering virtually the same music at almost the exact same time.

Did you ever try to play?

No, not really. As a kid I took piano lessons, but that wasn't really what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I read the Ernest Hemingway interview in the Paris Review when I was about 15. It was like my world was suddenly exploding and reforming.

What did Hemingway say that inspired you?

He spoke of his dedication to his craft and the fact that he wrote every day. No matter what else is going on, he wrote every day and he would record the number of words he wrote each day. He wrote standing up. I was never tempted to do that, but—

Hemingway wrote standing up?

Yeah, it may have been because of all the airplane crashes or something. His back bothered him. But I thought at that time, ‘I don't know that I can ever achieve what Hemingway achieved or what Faulkner achieved, but I can do that, I can write every day.’ And I started that when I was 15 and I have pretty much continued to this day.

A theme that runs through the book is the difficulty that many creative people seem to have after they taste real commercial success. You have a great quote from Merle Haggard, saying, ‘I wish I hadn't had as much success as I have. It ruins your incentive.’ Can you elaborate on that?

The struggle that any creative person has is how to keep going, how to keep reinventing yourself, how to remain engaged in what you do. Merle's way of remaining engaged was to constantly worry about it, but he continued to be creative right up until the time he died. The last thing he wrote, ‘Kern River Blues,’ is one of his best. A beautiful evocation of Jimmie Rodgers, just absolutely beautiful.

Doc Pomus — who wrote hits for Elvis, the Drifters, Dusty Springfield, Janice Joplin, just about everybody — is another one from your book who kept going strong deep into his career.

Absolutely. He refined his art and at the end of his life was writing better songs than he had ever written before. A true artist like Pomus has an advantage over somebody who's dependent upon popular success because time is going to pass them by. It's going to pass everybody. You have Johnny Cash, who's talking about his heroes from another era not getting their due. Which of course is going to happen to him. It was happening even as we spoke. And so the people who are dependent upon popular recognition, their influence is either waning or they're just gone, and your audience moves on.

There is a quote in the book from Doc Pomus that I love. He says, "I'll tell you, Peter, there has been such an element of luck surviving. Half the time, I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I don't even know if you can know what you're doing." Is that an idea you identify with as a writer?

Well yeah, totally. Though in this case, I think he was talking about the unique circumstances that he had been thrown into. He had polio as a kid and was forever dependent on lifts to get into his van and clubs that had handicap access, which was practically none of them. For so many years, he had tried to get around on crutches and he would fall down and hurt himself. So to some extent, maybe that's what he's talking about. He never lost the connection, the drive, the courage to express himself. In his last 10 or 20 years, he pared down his technique and created songs that are so much more spare and yet at the same time, I think, convey an even deeper emotional impact.

One of the best pieces in the book is about country singer Dick Curless, who I must admit I never heard of. You met him in 1994, near the end of his life, when your son Jake was producing what would be his final record.

Traveling Through is just one of the most beautiful albums I've ever heard. And Dick was so equable and so quietly in command, enthusiastic and inspiring to every single person there. And then afterwards I went up to see him and he told me the story of his life and he didn't hold anything back. I ended up writing something that made me feel guilty in a sense. Not that I was revealing secrets, because this was what he felt. This was the higher truth. He described the lowest of the lows, his alcohol abuse, the way he had mistreated the people closest to him, what it was like coming back from the Korean War, suffering from what we’d now call post-traumatic stress. Back then they didn’t even know how to describe what was wrong with him, much less what to do about it.

Curless was from Maine and you describe him as a major figure in the New England country music scene, which struck me as an oxymoron.

There was actually a huge New England country scene. Maine country music went back to before the formation of the Grand Ole Opry. When Dick got sick, I went to the Maine Country Music Pioneer Show in Augusta, a big concert they held every year. This thing must have gone on for six or seven hours, celebrating Maine country music, and they had musicians who went back to the 1920s there. Accordions, fiddles, triangles. They hadn’t been imitating Nashville, because Nashville didn't exist that far back, not as the capital of country music, anyway.

Country music is country music. It's the music of people who grew up in isolated surroundings, making music in their homes, with their own traditions. It could be California, where Merle Haggard's from. It could be Maine. Dick Curless was born near the Canadian border, the world of Acadians who never made the trip down to Louisiana. These stories have been obscured by commercial trends that have distorted the history of the music and its sense of inclusiveness.

What do you mean by inclusiveness?

There’s a democratic impulse behind country music, just as there is with the blues, and a real artist can recognize it and tap into it. Someone like Bobby 'Blue' Bland talked about how much he loved country music and would quote a country album late in his career. Howlin' Wolf, too — you couldn't have a more unreconstructed African-American blues singer and yet his idol was Jimmie Rodgers, known as the father of country music. Wolf describes meeting Jimmie Rodgers when he was a kid of about 13 or 14, and how Jimmie took him aside and showed them how to yodel, which became Wolf's howl.

If you could transport yourself to a particular era or music scene, what would it be?

Well, I’ve experienced plenty of scenes. But as I've often said, I would give up all of my albums just for a chance to see Howlin' Wolf in person one more time. That’s what I think about more than anything else, those moments where you lose yourself, in an intimate setting where there’s nothing between you and what the performer is putting out there. You know, I was at the Bruce Springsteen show in 1974 that John Landau wrote about, the one where he wrote afterwards, ‘I've seen the future of rock and roll.’ I didn’t see the future myself, but I did see kids who knew the words to every single song and it was powerful. This was a tiny club on Harvard Square, but it wasn't a Harvard Square crowd, it was working class kids from Cambridge and Somerville.

In your essay about Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Stoller explains why they were able to keep writing hits while most songwriters generally had such short careers. "None of them had the ability to withstand pain like we do," he said.

The secret of a lot of creative work is plain old persistence. There are lots of talented people, but most of them fall by the wayside, not because they're not sufficiently talented, but because they don't stick with it. That’s what every artist I’ve written about has in common. To call it a work ethic is not sufficient. It’s putting everything they have into their work. Even a wild person like Jerry Lee Lewis is a consummate perfectionist — he gives himself over to the moment. He went all out to reach that point of no return.

So, okay, Jerry Lee Lewis — his career was famously derailed when it came out that he had married his 13-year-old cousin. Other artists in your book, including Chuck Berry, have been abusive towards women and had other well-documented behavioral problems. How does this affect the way you write about them or enjoy their music?

I think that you try to portray people as they are and don’t try to whitewash the bad sides. You don't want to be either their judge or their defender. We're all faced with this in life, with friends, maybe even ourselves. None of the people I've written about have been saints, but what draws me to them is the dimensions of their art. I think of somebody like Merle Haggard—in the two or three times I've written about him, there are things that he's done that I don't think anybody would be thrilled about, but you can't just want to tell the story with the white picket fence and the roses growing on it. These are living and learning stories. I don't see the point of creating a prosecutorial mandate or something.

By this point in your career, you must have a crazy record collection. I assume you’re a vinyl guy?

You know, I’ve never been a collector. I’ve owned records, of course, but it was never about chasing after particular things. That was never my interest. And, actually, I just sold all but a hundred of my records.

You unloaded your records?! Why?

At a certain point, you no longer want to accumulate. You want to deaccession, like a library. I didn't want my possessions to overwhelm me. Selling them was actually kind of a wonderful experience. These two guys came down from the Record Exchange in Salem and we spent four or five days going through everything. It was 5,000 records.

Damn. How did you decide which 100 to keep? Are they the crème de la crème?

No. It was almost random. Several albums by Bobby Bland, Those Prison Blues by Robert Pete Williams. But it's not like they're collector items. They just had significance to me. Mississippi John Hurt's first album is another, I remember where I bought it. This little folk shop that sold guitars and records on Auburn Street in Harvard Square, across from a typewriter repair place, remember those? If you want to start rating records, which I don’t, it may not be the best, but it was such a thrill to find it. That’s a feeling I won’t forget.

Originally Appeared on GQ