Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell
By Michael Gray
3/5
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Currently unavailable
About this ebook
By the time he died in 1959, Blind Willie McTell was almost forgotten. He had never had a hit record, and his days of playing on street corners for spare change were long gone. But this masterful guitarist and exquisite singer has since become one of the most loved musicians of the prewar period, spurring Bob Dylan to write, “Nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.” Now this richly evocative and wide-ranging biography illuminates for the first time the world of this elusive and fascinating figure, a blind man who made light of his disability and a performer who exploded every stereotype about blues musicians.
Traveling the back roads of Georgia, interviewing relatives and acquaintances, and digging up fascinating archival material, author Michael Gray weaves together his discoveries to reveal an articulate and resourceful musician with a modest career but a mile-wide independent streak. Whether selling high-quality homemade bootleg whisky out of a suitcase, bragging about crowds of women chasing him, or suffering a stroke while eating barbecue under a tree, McTell emerges from this book a cheerful, outgoing, engaging individualist with seemingly limitless self-confidence.
This moving odyssey into a lost world of black music and white power is also an unprecedented portrait of the culture, language, and landscape of the deep South--the violence, the leisurely pace of life--and of the blues preservationists who ventured into its heart. A long, thoughtful stare into the world of Blind Willie McTell, Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes is sure to find a place among the classics of American music history.
To learn moreabout the book, visitwww.handmemytravelinshoes.blogspot.com
Michael Gray
Always favoured science fiction. Passionate about aviation, science and technolgy. Also interested in watercolour painting, photography, Earth sciences, property renovation, building/flying radio controlled model helicopters and now Archery. In fact anything else that's interesting, even politics!
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Reviews for Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes
5 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The search would have been shorter and easier to read without all the digressive comments on fast food restaurants, southern architecture or lack thereof, the Civil War experiences of Willie McTell's white great-grandfather, and more. Maybe it's because he's British and writing primarily for British readers, but I don't feel that I began to learn anything about Willie McTell until about page 200 although I learned a lot about Michael Gray's taste, experiences, etc. He clearly did a lot of research, but I could have done without the accounts of the unfruitful interviews as well as the comments on strip malls and all that. In some places, he doesn't get it at all, as when he castigates a black preacher associated with Booker T Washington for exhorting black students to behave well.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A detailed, scholarly and easily accessable work. Recommended to all blues fans and those with an interest in popular and/or blues music.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Explores McTell and the area. More experience than biography.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5More about Blind Willie than the music. Which is possibly no bad thing. Even now after 30 years acquaintance with the early recordings, it sounds remarkably "modern". And no, I don't really know what I mean by that...