Stanley Booth is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 music journalist. Booth has written extensively about important music figures, including Keith Richards

Keith Richards

Keith Richards is an English musician, songwriter, and founding member of the Rolling Stones. Rolling Stone magazine said Richards had created "rock's greatest single body of riffs", and placed him as the "10th greatest guitarist of all time." Fourteen songs written by Richards and songwriting...

, Otis Redding

Otis Redding

Otis Ray Redding, Jr. was an American soul singer-songwriter, record producer, arranger and talent scout. He is considered one of the major figures in soul and R&B...

, Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin

Janis Lyn Joplin was an American singer, songwriter, painter, dancer and music arranger. She rose to prominence in the late 1960s as the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company and later as a solo artist with her backing groups, The Kozmic Blues Band and The Full Tilt Boogie Band...

, James Brown, Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley

Elvis Aaron Presley was one of the most popular American singers of the 20th century. A cultural icon, he is widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King"....

, Gram Parsons

Gram Parsons

Gram Parsons was an American singer, songwriter, guitarist and pianist. Parsons is best known for his work within the country genre; he also mixed blues, folk, and rock to create what he called "Cosmic American Music"...

, B.B. King, and Al Green. He chronicled his travels with the Rolling Stones in several of his works.

After going to college at what was then Memphis State University (now University of Memphis

University of Memphis

The University of Memphis is an American public research university located in the Normal Station neighborhood of Memphis, Tennessee and is the flagship public research university of the Tennessee Board of Regents system....

) in the early 1960s, Booth began his music journalism career with articles on Memphis

Memphis, Tennessee

Memphis is a city in the southwestern corner of the U.S. state of Tennessee, and the county seat of Shelby County. The city is located on the 4th Chickasaw Bluff, south of the confluence of the Wolf and Mississippi rivers....

 musicians like Furry Lewis

Furry Lewis

Furry Lewis was an American country blues guitarist and songwriter from Memphis, Tennessee. Lewis was one of the first of the old-time blues musicians of the 1920s to be brought out of retirement, and given a new lease of recording life, by the folk blues revival of the 1960s.-Life and...

 and Otis Redding, the latter of whom Stanley witnessed writing the famous song "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" with Steve Cropper

Steve Cropper

Steve Cropper , also known as Steve "The Colonel" Cropper, is an American guitarist, songwriter and record producer. He is best known as the guitarist of the Stax Records house band, Booker T...

 at Stax

Stax

Stax can refer to:* StAX, Streaming API for XML. An API for reading and writing XML in Java.* Stax Earspeakers, a Japanese brand of electrostatic earspeakers* Stax Records, an American record company...

 studios on the Friday before Redding's death. He was present for and wrote about the infamous 1969 Rolling Stones concert in Altamont

Altamont Music Festival

The Altamont Speedway Free Festival was an infamous rock concert held on Saturday, December 6, 1969, at the Altamont Speedway in northern California, between Tracy and Livermore...

, California, at which a concertgoer was murdered by a member of the Hells' Angels motorcycle gang. In addition to writing books, Booth has also published music articles in Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...

, Esquire

Esquire (magazine)

Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...

, GQ

GQ (magazine)

GQ is a monthly men's magazine focusing on fashion, style, and culture for men, through articles on food, movies, fitness, sex, music, travel, sports, technology, and books...

, and Playboy

Playboy

Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...

 and appeared in many
documentaries, not only on Southern music and the Rolling Stones, but
Tom Thurman

Tom Thurman

Tom Thurman is an American filmmaker. Thurman has produced and directed numerous independent documentaries on film, music, and literary figures, including Nick Nolte, Warren Oates, Harry Crews, John Ford, and Sam Peckinpah.-Early career:Thurman received a bachelor's degree in 1984 from Centre...

's Movies of Color and Peckinpah. Booth now lives south of Savannah with his wife, the poet Diann Blakely

Diann Blakely

Diann Blakely is an American poet, essayist, and reviewer. Graduating with a B.A. in art history from the University of the South in 1979, she subsequently received an M.A. in literature from Vanderbilt University in 1980 and an M.F.A. from Vermont College in 1989...

, and is finishing the successor to Rhythm Oil, currently entitled Blues Dues, as well as working on a memoir, Tree Full of Owls.

Selected works

• Furry's Blues, 1970
• Dance with the Devil: The Rolling Stones and Their Times, 1984
• The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (note: Dance with the Devil, reprinted with minor revisions), 2000
• Rythm Oil: A Journey Through the Music of the American South, 1991
• Keith: Till I Roll Over Dead, 1994
• Keith, 1995
• Keith: Standing in the Shadows, 1996

Articles and Essays

• "Blues Dues," by Stanley Booth (Blues For Peace)
• "Sharps and Flats: Various Artists - Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: Music From and Inspired by the Motion Picture." Salon. November 21, 1997.
• "Memphis and the Beale Street Blues". Gadfly. May 1998.
• "Bobby Rush: A Blues Access Interview". Blues Access. Summer 1998.
• "Crying in the Wilderness". Gadfly. December 1998.
• "Unanointed, Unannealed". Chapter 16. January 20, 2011.
• "Bea Shall Overcome: The Unexpurgated Version". Option. May 18, 2011.

Interviews

• Interview with Booth at The Gram Parsons Project
• Interview with Booth at Perfect Sound Forever Presents Gram Parsons
• "Unpublished Interview with Writer Stanley Booth (December 2000)" at High Frequencies

External links

• Furry's Blues.- Playboy 17 #4 (1970), p. 100-02, 104, 114, 193-94 (pdf 4,5 MB)
• James Calernine on Booth
• Dwight Garner/Robert Stone, "Save These Books!"/The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. Salon. December 4, 1997.
• Diann Blakely, "Getting Respectable." Nashville Scene. March 29, 2001.
• Dave Bry, "Very Recent History: A Dispiriting End To An Earlier Decade." The Awl. December 4, 2009.
• Michael Murray, "'(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction,' 45 Years Later." ABC News. May 6, 2010.
• Reed Johnson, "An Appreciation: Dennis Hopper was a man of his times." Los Angeles Times. June 6, 2010.
• Ethan Russell, "Music, Words & Photography: 'Exiles' in Paris -- Whole Lotta Rolling Stones." Huffington Post. September 24, 2010.
• David L. Ulin, "Book Review: 'Life by Keith Richards." Los Angeles Times. October 28, 2010.
• Zoe Heller, "Mick Without Moss." The New York Times. December 3, 2010.
• Dan Chiasson, "High on the Stones." The New York Review of Books. March 10, 2011.
• Greil Marcus, "Heart of Stone." Los Angeles Review of Books. May 5, 2011.
• "Second Read: Ted Conover on Stanley Booth's The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones". Columbia University Press blog. November 4, 2011.
• Gimme Shelter (1970) - The Criterion Collection
• Biography: The Rolling Stones
• wordIQ.com: The Rolling Stones - Definition