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Rythm Oil: A Journey Through the Music of the American South
Examines the roots of blues and soul music in a tour of the Old South, exploring the musical culture that produced Otis Redding, Elvis, Sam Phillips, B.B. King, and others
254 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1991
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197 people want to read
About the author
Stanley Booth
12 books33 followersStanley Booth was an American music journalist based in Memphis, Tennessee. Characterized by Richie Unterberger as a "fine, if not extremely prolific, writer who generally speaking specializes in portraits of roots musicians, most of whom did their best work in the '60s and '50s," Booth has written extensively about Keith Richards, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, James Brown, Elvis Presley, Gram Parsons, B.B. King, and Al Green. He chronicled his travels with the Rolling Stones in several of his works.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
October 13, 2013
Stanley Booth has a way with words. Here’s his take on Janice Joplin’s under-rehearsed Memphis debut at a Stax/Volt Christmas show in 1968:
Stanley Booth’s heart is in the right place. Here’s his take (or one of his takes) on the Rolling Stones:
Stanley Booth knows the south. Here’s the opening of his script-form take on Robert Johnson’s deal with the devil:
Stanley Booth has credentials. He’s in the studio with Otis, Steve Cropper and the boys during the writing and recording of ‘Dock of the Bay’. He’s at the Bar-Kays’ funeral after Otis’s plane crashes. He can make himself at home in seemingly any situation, and during his time at Stax he has the sense to talk shop with songwriters Dave Porter and Isaac Hayes way before Hayes is a star, and to suggest that the next Otis could be walking down a Memphis street in his Converse All-Stars as he speaks. His ‘Blues for the Red Man’ – an extended elegy for Charlie Freeman, one of those transcendent but barely-acknowledged musicians you’ve heard plenty of without knowing it (he played with Jerry Lee Lewis, Slim Harpo, Aretha Franklin), and who died young from drugs and alcohol – is a manifesto of sorts, opening with an epigraph from A Profile of Primitive Culture:
Later, after Freeman’s wake, having taken ‘some medicinal substances for my mind and body,’ he listens to ‘a record by Freeman’s original favorites, Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers’:
I mean, I dunno. It’s beautiful, but it’s kinda confused, ain’t it? The outlaw imagery is rife: he throws in the Alamo as well, just for good measure. It’s an elegy not just for Charlie Freeman but for the whole tribe of ‘Contraries’, I’d guess, for a way of life, which increasingly can’t coexist with the commercial concerns of the music ‘industry’. And it does move me, but I guess it’s just ever so slightly (and I don’t use this word often) dated. Dated in that, holy shit, am I sick of listening to Booth’s generation eulogising addicts and alcoholics! I grew up with it! I’ve done it myself – to a limited degree, granted, but enough to know that, after a certain point in the trajectory, it’s all diminishing returns. What I’m saying: drugs take you closer, ever closer, but never quite to illumination. And Booth’s book illustrates this: he starts strong, gives you the feeling he’s really on the scent of something, then loses it and, increasingly, wanders off into blandness.
What I’m saying: Stanley Booth is great. I love his southerner’s take on the music of the South. I love his pithy observations. (Regarding a festival promoter: ‘I have found that the more impressed people are with the importance of what they’re doing, the less likely they are to be good at it.’) But, though I may have hung on the words of his generation in my youth, I guess I just don’t quite buy this whole ‘I was there on the frontlines in the revolution’ (drunk, of course) stance any more. Don’t get me wrong, he ain’t a blowhard - he’s an underachiever. The Dashiell Hammett of music-writing. I read this like I read The Glass Key, going, ‘Damn, now what else might this guy have done?’
Four stars for the good bits and because I only gave him two for his Stones book, but if you've got a novel around, Mr Booth, bring it on!
The thing is, a stage act in Memphis, Tennessee (or, as the famous Stax marquee puts it, ‘Soulsville, U.S.A.’) is not the same as a stage act in San Francisco, Los Angeles or New York. These days a lot of people think if a fellow comes on stage wearing black vinyl pants, screams that he wants to fuck his poor old mother, then collapses, that’s a stage act; but in Memphis, if you can’t do the Sideways Pony, you just don’t have a stage act.
Stanley Booth’s heart is in the right place. Here’s his take (or one of his takes) on the Rolling Stones:
When I was working for the Tennessee Department of Public Welfare, I would come out of a house that reeked with the urine-stench of poverty, turn on the radio, hear the Supremes’ bouncy cheer, and turn it off. But the Stones I could listen to no matter where I’d been or what I’d had to smell.
Stanley Booth knows the south. Here’s the opening of his script-form take on Robert Johnson’s deal with the devil:
Midnight. A deserted crossroads in the Mississippi Delta. Beside the white sandy roads, weeds grow rank, bitterweed, gallberry, dogfennel. The clear redbrown water running in the ditches looks stained with old blood... Onto the road, coming through the dark swampy woods, hurtles an Old Black Man...
OLD BLACK MAN: Damn! Damn! Damn! Too close! Peckerwoods like to kilt me!
Stanley Booth has credentials. He’s in the studio with Otis, Steve Cropper and the boys during the writing and recording of ‘Dock of the Bay’. He’s at the Bar-Kays’ funeral after Otis’s plane crashes. He can make himself at home in seemingly any situation, and during his time at Stax he has the sense to talk shop with songwriters Dave Porter and Isaac Hayes way before Hayes is a star, and to suggest that the next Otis could be walking down a Memphis street in his Converse All-Stars as he speaks. His ‘Blues for the Red Man’ – an extended elegy for Charlie Freeman, one of those transcendent but barely-acknowledged musicians you’ve heard plenty of without knowing it (he played with Jerry Lee Lewis, Slim Harpo, Aretha Franklin), and who died young from drugs and alcohol – is a manifesto of sorts, opening with an epigraph from A Profile of Primitive Culture:
A few of the bravest men in the tribe constitute a small group known as the ‘Contraries’. As the name suggests, these men always do the opposite of what is said... In battle, they are possessed of a special magic, a ‘thunder bow’, which causes them to accomplish acts of extraordinary bravery [as I transcribed this, I accidentally wrote ‘beauty’]. One is called to the society of Contraries by a special vision...
Later, after Freeman’s wake, having taken ‘some medicinal substances for my mind and body,’ he listens to ‘a record by Freeman’s original favorites, Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers’:
The Red Man was pressed from this part of the West,
It’s unlikely he’ll ever return
To the banks of Red River where seldom if ever
Their flickering campfires burn.
I mean, I dunno. It’s beautiful, but it’s kinda confused, ain’t it? The outlaw imagery is rife: he throws in the Alamo as well, just for good measure. It’s an elegy not just for Charlie Freeman but for the whole tribe of ‘Contraries’, I’d guess, for a way of life, which increasingly can’t coexist with the commercial concerns of the music ‘industry’. And it does move me, but I guess it’s just ever so slightly (and I don’t use this word often) dated. Dated in that, holy shit, am I sick of listening to Booth’s generation eulogising addicts and alcoholics! I grew up with it! I’ve done it myself – to a limited degree, granted, but enough to know that, after a certain point in the trajectory, it’s all diminishing returns. What I’m saying: drugs take you closer, ever closer, but never quite to illumination. And Booth’s book illustrates this: he starts strong, gives you the feeling he’s really on the scent of something, then loses it and, increasingly, wanders off into blandness.
What I’m saying: Stanley Booth is great. I love his southerner’s take on the music of the South. I love his pithy observations. (Regarding a festival promoter: ‘I have found that the more impressed people are with the importance of what they’re doing, the less likely they are to be good at it.’) But, though I may have hung on the words of his generation in my youth, I guess I just don’t quite buy this whole ‘I was there on the frontlines in the revolution’ (drunk, of course) stance any more. Don’t get me wrong, he ain’t a blowhard - he’s an underachiever. The Dashiell Hammett of music-writing. I read this like I read The Glass Key, going, ‘Damn, now what else might this guy have done?’
Four stars for the good bits and because I only gave him two for his Stones book, but if you've got a novel around, Mr Booth, bring it on!
December 15, 2017
My notice, for the No Depression music site:
This is a ridiculously good book of music writing – though, that’s an injustice, it’s a book about soul, and life, and America as much or more as it is about “just" music, by the great Stanley Booth.
As many of you no doubt know, Booth is also the author of “The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, ‘a harrowing account of high times and low roads with the motley crew in Villa Nellcote, the Deep South and Altamont, that makes “Gimme Shelter’’ look like “The Yellow Submarine.’’
First published in 1991 and recently re-issued as a Da Capo press paperback, “Rythm Oil’’ – the spelling is deliberate, in an apparent reference to a mojo oil once sold on Beale Street - includes bravura accounts of Booth’s friendship and travels with Furry Lewis, whom he met, long before Joni Mitchell paid tribute to him, while he was still sweeping streets in Memphis, a shockingly stark piece simply titled “The Funeral of Mississippi John Hurt,’’ a famously lubricious Elvis Presley profile published in Esquire magazine that begins with an anecdote about Elvis and Natalie Wood that the magazine did not deem fit for publication, but that makes the cut here, “Blues Boy,’’ a tribute to B.B. King that begins with an account of an unlikely gig by B.B. following the Mothers of Invention at the Fillmore Auditorium (let’s just say that Booth is not the president of the Frank Zappa fan club) and a sympathetic portrayal of James Brown’s legal troubles that got the author, in turn, a heap of legal troubles, ultimately resolved in his favor, from JB’s girlfriend at the time.
It’s hard to pick and choose from these tales of wildness and woe – there’s just too much juiciness and care involved – but the common denominator is Booth’s identification with, friendship, appreciation and concern for the wellbeing of the musicians who create America’s only indigenous art form. This is someone who writes from inside the music, from hanging out on front porches, in bars and in back alleys, and the prose shows it.
One example, among many, from the Mississippi John Hurt piece (Furry Lewis accompanied him to the funeral):
“The church looked as if it might hold 200 people, and there were more than that outside. They were all country Negroes, dressed in funny old clothes, but they wore them with a kind of grace and even hipness, as if their shiny gabardine suits and brown ventilated shoes, nylon dressed and hats with veils, were equivalent to the Italian sweaters and sharp-toed slip-ons, the miniskirts and blond wigs, of their country cousins. No one seemed to mind that the majority of the crowd was forced to remain outside.”
Invited to speak at the funeral by one of Hurt’s relatives as a kind of reward for making his long trip, Booth is abashed:
“I don’t know what I said. The last time I saw John Hurt I bought whisky for him, and he played the blues for me, so our accounts were about as even as they would ever get. I think I told the people that though this was a sad day, we should remember all the joy he had given us through his music – something like that. I may have even got an amen or two.
“Then I turned away…On the other side of the pulpit there was an old upright piano. It looked as if it had sat in the unheated church, freezing in the winter, baking in the summer, since it was new. As we left, the plump sister who played it struck the driest, most soulful chord (all the stiff, dusty strings having stretched and shrunk and grown brittle to create a new harmony, more complex, more expressive than that of any conventional music), and the congregation sang: ‘Near the Cross, be my Glory ever, and my weary soul shall find, oh rest beyond the river.’ “
Booth is a master of the throwaway anecdote that stays with you – in an appreciation of ZZ Top, he mentions to Billy Gibbons that Domingo Samudio – Sam the Sham of “Wooly Bully’’ fame – had been reduced to preaching on the street in Memphis.
All the contributions are heartfelt, but "Fascinating Changes," the longest, and perhaps most successful piece, is the tale of the life and death of the late, great underappreciated Memphis jazz pianist Phineas Newborn Jr., plagued by mental illness like such near contemporaries as Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, but determined to make a joyful sound nonetheless.
After visiting awhile with Newborn and his Mama Rose (who’d once encouraged a poverty-stricken B.B. King after the draperies were repossessed from his home), the author reflects:
“I drove up Crump Boulevard, past Elvis Presley and remembered seeing Phineas a dozen years ago standing on that corner, rumpled, unshaven, but radiating power, like Clark Kent after a bad kryptonite binge. I thought of seeing him five years ago at a piano bar on Beale Street, drinking Scotch in silent fury while a white girl sang ‘San Francisco.’…I thought of Lucky Thompson, sleeping on the beach on St. Simon’s Island and on a park bench in Savannah, and of King Oliver, dying in Savannah, writing to his sister, ‘The Lord is sure good to me here without an overcoat.’…
“Before we went to Europe in 1979, I asked Phineas what he considered the most important thing for a young musician to keep in mind.
“Stay young at heart. That’s the right idea as far as I’m concerned. Play young at heart. Play the way you feel. A thing of value outlasts a thing that has no value. Attempt to produce things of value as you go along. If it’s worthless, it won’t last; if it has value, it generally does – an eternity, almost, in minds and hearts.”
It’s a crazy world. E.L. James and J.T. Rowling make millions, doing what they do, and Stanley Booth lives quietly on the Georgia coast – one gets the sense that the wild, drug-drenched days with the Stones are a distant memory – writing about the music he loves. No sense complaining about it, that’s just the way of the world. But the music he loves, and the words he uses to describe it, have a value, too, that no one can take away. If some fool tried, they’d have to get through him first.
This is a ridiculously good book of music writing – though, that’s an injustice, it’s a book about soul, and life, and America as much or more as it is about “just" music, by the great Stanley Booth.
As many of you no doubt know, Booth is also the author of “The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, ‘a harrowing account of high times and low roads with the motley crew in Villa Nellcote, the Deep South and Altamont, that makes “Gimme Shelter’’ look like “The Yellow Submarine.’’
First published in 1991 and recently re-issued as a Da Capo press paperback, “Rythm Oil’’ – the spelling is deliberate, in an apparent reference to a mojo oil once sold on Beale Street - includes bravura accounts of Booth’s friendship and travels with Furry Lewis, whom he met, long before Joni Mitchell paid tribute to him, while he was still sweeping streets in Memphis, a shockingly stark piece simply titled “The Funeral of Mississippi John Hurt,’’ a famously lubricious Elvis Presley profile published in Esquire magazine that begins with an anecdote about Elvis and Natalie Wood that the magazine did not deem fit for publication, but that makes the cut here, “Blues Boy,’’ a tribute to B.B. King that begins with an account of an unlikely gig by B.B. following the Mothers of Invention at the Fillmore Auditorium (let’s just say that Booth is not the president of the Frank Zappa fan club) and a sympathetic portrayal of James Brown’s legal troubles that got the author, in turn, a heap of legal troubles, ultimately resolved in his favor, from JB’s girlfriend at the time.
It’s hard to pick and choose from these tales of wildness and woe – there’s just too much juiciness and care involved – but the common denominator is Booth’s identification with, friendship, appreciation and concern for the wellbeing of the musicians who create America’s only indigenous art form. This is someone who writes from inside the music, from hanging out on front porches, in bars and in back alleys, and the prose shows it.
One example, among many, from the Mississippi John Hurt piece (Furry Lewis accompanied him to the funeral):
“The church looked as if it might hold 200 people, and there were more than that outside. They were all country Negroes, dressed in funny old clothes, but they wore them with a kind of grace and even hipness, as if their shiny gabardine suits and brown ventilated shoes, nylon dressed and hats with veils, were equivalent to the Italian sweaters and sharp-toed slip-ons, the miniskirts and blond wigs, of their country cousins. No one seemed to mind that the majority of the crowd was forced to remain outside.”
Invited to speak at the funeral by one of Hurt’s relatives as a kind of reward for making his long trip, Booth is abashed:
“I don’t know what I said. The last time I saw John Hurt I bought whisky for him, and he played the blues for me, so our accounts were about as even as they would ever get. I think I told the people that though this was a sad day, we should remember all the joy he had given us through his music – something like that. I may have even got an amen or two.
“Then I turned away…On the other side of the pulpit there was an old upright piano. It looked as if it had sat in the unheated church, freezing in the winter, baking in the summer, since it was new. As we left, the plump sister who played it struck the driest, most soulful chord (all the stiff, dusty strings having stretched and shrunk and grown brittle to create a new harmony, more complex, more expressive than that of any conventional music), and the congregation sang: ‘Near the Cross, be my Glory ever, and my weary soul shall find, oh rest beyond the river.’ “
Booth is a master of the throwaway anecdote that stays with you – in an appreciation of ZZ Top, he mentions to Billy Gibbons that Domingo Samudio – Sam the Sham of “Wooly Bully’’ fame – had been reduced to preaching on the street in Memphis.
All the contributions are heartfelt, but "Fascinating Changes," the longest, and perhaps most successful piece, is the tale of the life and death of the late, great underappreciated Memphis jazz pianist Phineas Newborn Jr., plagued by mental illness like such near contemporaries as Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, but determined to make a joyful sound nonetheless.
After visiting awhile with Newborn and his Mama Rose (who’d once encouraged a poverty-stricken B.B. King after the draperies were repossessed from his home), the author reflects:
“I drove up Crump Boulevard, past Elvis Presley and remembered seeing Phineas a dozen years ago standing on that corner, rumpled, unshaven, but radiating power, like Clark Kent after a bad kryptonite binge. I thought of seeing him five years ago at a piano bar on Beale Street, drinking Scotch in silent fury while a white girl sang ‘San Francisco.’…I thought of Lucky Thompson, sleeping on the beach on St. Simon’s Island and on a park bench in Savannah, and of King Oliver, dying in Savannah, writing to his sister, ‘The Lord is sure good to me here without an overcoat.’…
“Before we went to Europe in 1979, I asked Phineas what he considered the most important thing for a young musician to keep in mind.
“Stay young at heart. That’s the right idea as far as I’m concerned. Play young at heart. Play the way you feel. A thing of value outlasts a thing that has no value. Attempt to produce things of value as you go along. If it’s worthless, it won’t last; if it has value, it generally does – an eternity, almost, in minds and hearts.”
It’s a crazy world. E.L. James and J.T. Rowling make millions, doing what they do, and Stanley Booth lives quietly on the Georgia coast – one gets the sense that the wild, drug-drenched days with the Stones are a distant memory – writing about the music he loves. No sense complaining about it, that’s just the way of the world. But the music he loves, and the words he uses to describe it, have a value, too, that no one can take away. If some fool tried, they’d have to get through him first.
April 3, 2015
Without Question; Stanley is THE Best, Most Eloquent & ACCURATE Chronicler of Indigenous American Music I have encountered since I was drafted into The Music Buisness 47 years ago.
I am honored to have the opportunity to call him My Friend.
Period. End of Discussion.
I am honored to have the opportunity to call him My Friend.
Period. End of Discussion.
June 9, 2014
A collection of essays published over the years by music journalist Stanley Booth. (He's probably best known for his book about the Rolling Stones.) But Booth is a southerner and these are essays about southern music focusing primarily (but not exclusively) on the Memphis area. Brings well needed attention to the old blues artists who are often forgotten these days. The only real negative is that some of these pieces are pretty dated. I read somewhere that the author is working on a follow up to this book. If true, I look forward to reading it.
July 12, 2008
I thought his book about the stones was really overrated, and expected to dislike this, but it was pretty good. I imagine someone who's never been in the south, and doesn't have much musical background, would learn a lot and be dazzled by it.
January 31, 2009
If you read nothing in this book besides the essays about Mississippi John Hurt's funeral, the Bar-Kays' funeral, and about Stax (including Otis writing "DOck of the Bay"), it will be worth more than what you paid for it.
August 21, 2008
Stanley Booth is able to tie all facets of rock and roll to the South, in a way that is both intriguing and beautiful. You can almost hear the music flowing from the pages.
April 9, 2018
This is a collection of writings about the South (mainly Memphis), its musicians, and its music. Booth has gotten to know and hang out with musicians as diverse as Furry Lewis, Al Green, Phineas Newborn, Jr., and Keith Richards (okay, he's not from the South). And his portraits of each gets right to what makes them tick.
The most poignant, for me, was the chapter on Phineas Newborn, Jr., someone I hadn't known much about. Newborn was a virtuoso jazz pianist, with unmatched style and facility. Booth's portrayal sent me straight to iTunes and YouTube to check out Newborn's music more closely.
But the thing about Newborn, and all of Booth's subjects, is the friction in their lives. Newborn was repeatedly hospitalized for mental or emotional disorders. Furry Lewis collected garbage on the streets of Memphis to make ends meet. Keith Richards is an unholy mess. James Brown ran into legal problems and some obvious emotional troubles. But the personalities, the talents, and the friction are all one thing -- that's what makes these people interesting, more than just "heroes of music".
Well worth the time spent reading, for the background of the music, but more importantly for the portraits of the musicians as people.
The most poignant, for me, was the chapter on Phineas Newborn, Jr., someone I hadn't known much about. Newborn was a virtuoso jazz pianist, with unmatched style and facility. Booth's portrayal sent me straight to iTunes and YouTube to check out Newborn's music more closely.
But the thing about Newborn, and all of Booth's subjects, is the friction in their lives. Newborn was repeatedly hospitalized for mental or emotional disorders. Furry Lewis collected garbage on the streets of Memphis to make ends meet. Keith Richards is an unholy mess. James Brown ran into legal problems and some obvious emotional troubles. But the personalities, the talents, and the friction are all one thing -- that's what makes these people interesting, more than just "heroes of music".
Well worth the time spent reading, for the background of the music, but more importantly for the portraits of the musicians as people.
August 18, 2018
A wide ranging collection of previously published articles (the final essay, "The Godfather's Blues", appears to have been previously unpublished) which taken together encapsulate Stanley Booth's great obsession: the music of the South, and how it shaped his own life. We follow Stanley as he attends the funerals of Mississippi John Hurt, the members of the Bar-Kays, and the prodigiously talented and entirely forgotten Charlie Freeman; we are there with Stanley in the studio as Otis Redding, Steve Cropper, and the MG's are writing and recording "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay", less that a week before Otis' (and the Bar-Kays) death. But Booth has a knack for walking into our cultural history; in the Maysles' Brothers "Gimme Shelter", he can briefly be seen twice: boogieing to the master tape of "Brown Sugar" in Keef's room at the Fairmont Hotel, and sitting on Gram Parson's lap on the helicopter evacuating the Stones from Altamont. Both images are extremely awkward, and he has no qualms about writing himself into awkward situations on his own.
What chiefly comes through in this collection, which Booth ties together with brief, autobiographical liner-notes at the beginning of each article, is Booth's abiding love for the music.
What chiefly comes through in this collection, which Booth ties together with brief, autobiographical liner-notes at the beginning of each article, is Booth's abiding love for the music.
July 29, 2018
Interesting read...
Being a music fan,I found this book interesting,although I found some of the text and writing style hard going,and some of the artists he discusses in the book i don't know....
Being a music fan,I found this book interesting,although I found some of the text and writing style hard going,and some of the artists he discusses in the book i don't know....
January 27, 2025
A wonderful writer. He will be missed.
December 5, 2011
A grand book that looks at some of the forgotten as well as the oft remembered greats of southern blues. If you are one of the ones that thinks rock and roll began in the 1980's you will be disappointed in this book. But if you appreciate the history of rock and roll and its connection with the blues and genres, this will be right up your alley. The author is from Waycross and lived a few years here on Saint simons Island. Stanley Booth has written for many publications including Rolling Stone and has other books as well.
February 2, 2008
Somewhat dated and melancholy columns primarily from the old "Eye Magazine". You don't have to be 50 + but it's sure going to help.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews