Mister Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir
ISBN: 9780816670567
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Minnesota Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Gussow Adam; Blues musicians -- United States -- Biography; Mister Satan 1936–;

A white harmonica player drops out of grad school at Columbia University and busks his way across New York and Europe. Despite the rising racial tension in 1980s New York, he joins forces with Mr. Satan, a journeyman blues guitarist and gray-bearded street prophet in Harlem; the duo record three albums and tour Europe with Bo Diddley before gradually disbanding. Therein hangs the meat of Gussow's remarkable but highly uneven memoir. The story is riddled with subplots, from Gussow's musical coming of age as an Ivy League misfit to the endless romantic travails that fueled his devotion to the blues and his apprenticeship to a flamboyantly cagey local harp player named Nat Riddles, who taught him the licks and vibrato that helped him gain entr‚e into an African American culture he'd long since come to identify with. The book's centerpiece is an account of Gussow's work in the orchestra of a traveling musical production of The Adventures of Huckleberry FinnÄa humorous foil to his freewheeling life on the street and the racial prejudices he observes. But the heart of the book is the luminous portrait of Mr. Satan, n‚ Sterling Magee, whose Technicolor medallions, doomsday proclamations and furious guitar style mask a storied past, including stints with James Brown, Etta James and the Supremes. Gussow's prose style is by turns lyrical and purplishly Kerouac-esque ("America was raw, fragrant, sprawling, jagged, electrical"). And one wishes the story were better distilled: instead, it resembles an endless, meandering busking session, punctuated both by moments of surpassing intensity and stretches of pointless noodling. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved


hidden image for function call