Bringing Worlds to Life
Elvis biographer captures context for the singer—and the songs
by Pablo Tanguay
Appearing at the Vanderbilt Visiting Writer Series Spring Symposium, 8 p.m. March 29-30, Flynn Auditorium, Law School Bldg.
Peter Guralnick, whose two-volume biography of Elvis Presley is considered the definitive text in studies on The King, never set out to be a biographer. In 1967, still in his early 20s, he had already published two volumes of short stories, completed a novel and was teaching in the classics department at Boston University. But his primary love was music, and he moonlighted as a profiler of American musicians for underground English blues magazines. By 1967, when America's own underground music press began to flourish, he started publishing his profiles in fledgling magazines like Crawdaddy, Rolling Stone and The Village Voice.
"I couldn't not do it, not tell people about this music I thought was so great," says the Boston resident, who's spending this semester at Vanderbilt as a visiting writer. "Just to put the name Howlin' Wolf down on paper was a total thrill. And I realized, early on, the way I had to put across my love of the music was through the people. Since I'm not a musician, I couldn't write a logical musical analysis, so I went to profiles."
Unlike many cultural critics of the time, however, Guralnick never made himself the subject of his stories. At the height of the supreme subjectivism called New Journalism, the movement spearheaded by writers like Tom Wolfe and Lester Bangs, Guralnick's portraits remain objectively fixed on their subjects. Which is not to say he doesn't paint himself into his portraits at all, just that the real subjects of his pieces are the musicians themselves. In many of his profiles, Guralnick seems to be the proverbial fly on the wall, albeit a fly with keen perceptions and a knack for getting people to talk.
"There are very few people who don't want to tell their own story," he says. "The question is, what is the story they told you?"
Every few years, Guralnick would compile a number of his profiles into book form. The results were Feel Like Going Home (Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1971), Lost Highway (Godine, 1979) and Sweet Soul Music (Harper, 1986). This trilogy is remarkable not only for the diversity of artists and genres covered—the famous and not-so-famous from the worlds of blues, country, soul and rock 'n' roll—but for the generosity of spirit evident in Guralnick's writing. Neither sycophant nor standoffish know-it-all, Guralnick continually achieves the most important element in any portrait, what he calls "the gift of empathetic transference, the ability to see multiple points of view." The important thing, he says, is "to sublimate your own natural instinct to show off. You want to put your subject front and center and to have a broad definition of that subject."
Whether writing about Muddy Waters or Jerry Lee Lewis, James Brown or Hank Williams Jr., Guralnick as writer refuses to judge, allowing readers to reach their own conclusions. About the business end of things, however, especially when he feels artists are being exploited or subjected to grossly unfair treatment, he can be less deferential. In an essay on Chess Records—written after founder Leonard Chess died and the company, under the direction of Leonard's business school-trained son, has became corporatized—it's possible to hear Guralnick's anger even as he retains his stylistic objectivity: "On the day that I arrive, a pouty-looking Koko Taylor is waiting in the lobby, too. She wears a fancy wig and a spangled dress, and she waits all day for someone to see her. She is a fine singer, one of the few female blues artists around, but it is said that she is here on her day off from work. She works as a maid."
After the trilogy, Guralnick finally got around to writing in depth about the most enigmatic and influential of all Delta bluesmen: Searching for Robert Johnson: The Life and Legend of the "King of the Delta Blues Singers" (Dutton, 1989). Rumored to have sold his soul to the devil, Johnson died in 1938 at the age of at 27, apparently poisoned by a jealous husband. Because there is scarcely any historical record of Johnson's abbreviated life, Guralnick turns his story into an extended meditation on the power of Johnson's music while setting that music into the historical context of Depression-era Mississippi. A short and moving read, Searching for Robert Johnson is the last nonfiction Guralnick would write before taking on that weightiest of musical subjects, The King himself.
Guralnick had been writing pieces on Presley since the late '60s and in the late '70s had written the Elvis parts for The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll. But none of that would compare to the massive undertaking of writing a full-blown, scholarly but eminently readable biography of the Memphis musician. Guralnick, in fact, was not even much of an Elvis fan, having dismissed most of Presley's post-'50s work as fluff. After 11 years of researching and writing Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Little, Brown and Co., 1994) and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (1999), however, Guralnick came to appreciate his subject and even became a fan of a lot of his later music, especially the ballads.
Fandom, of course, does not make for great biography, certainly not biographical work regarded by both music and literary scholars alike as the definitive chronicle of one of America's icons. In a good biography, says Guralnick, "you get a portrait of a society, of a whole culture. If you structure it as, 'this happened and then that'...and you focus exclusively on the minutiae of the individual who is the subject, you fail to offer a perspective. A true biography is trying to reach out and find the universal qualities in the specific portraiture. I would hope, say, the biography I wrote of Elvis Presley would be of interest to someone even if Elvis were never mentioned. The intention is to bring his world to life."
Guralnick has spent a career bringing worlds to life. "I've never written about anything that I haven't loved," he says. "I consider it a matter of great good fortune." Guralnick is currently putting the final touches on a biography of Sam Cooke.
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