However, fine as it is, Booth's Stones book, celebrated, appropriately, by novelist Robert Stone in a Salon feature a couple of years back as "a lost treasure," is not his best. "No work on the popular arts so faithfully serves its subject while unpretentiously succeeding in being about so much more," Stone wrote of "The True Adventures ..." Right, except for Booth's "Rythm Oil: A Journey Through the Music of the American South," a collection of magazine pieces rich as barbecued pork, which was published in 1993 and is now also out of print.

Here is the writer's own opulent, accurate description of "Rythm Oil" from the book's introduction: "'Rythm Oil is the story of a journey, un voyage au bout de la nuit, from slavery in 1940s south Georgia to murder in 1960s Memphis and back again to savagery in 1990s Georgia, with many laughs along the way: the writer shows up in Louisiana, California, and England, but returns to the place where the bullfrog gets his water." In the book, Booth writes about Robert Johnson, Furry Lewis (who accompanied him to John Hurt's funeral, which he also writes about), Elvis (who tells of goin' south on Natalie Wood), James Brown, B.B. King, Janis Joplin's failure to do the Sideways Pony at her Memphis debut, ZZ Top and, well, more.

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But Booth doesn't write so much as he jumps, swings, shimmies, shouts, whispers, evokes, conjures, shakes a mojo at the page and lets words rain down. "The tradition of romantic poetry," Booth's introduction continues, "in which artists like the ones considered here surely occupy a place, derives its origin in no small part from Wordsworth and Coleridge's reading of William Bartram, the 18th century American naturalist, on the regions and legends of the Okefenokee Swamp. Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' translates -- with a supposed admixture of opium -- from Bartram's writing about Salt Springs, in Marion County, Florida. Aside from personal fascination, there is historic precedent for keeping an ear to the American South and Southeast." And in "Rythm Oil," Booth's got perfect pitch.

In praising "The True Adventures ... " Robert Stone wrote: "Booth knows the secrets of the heart as well as he knows rock music. Like Hunter Thompson's, his writing conveys in its style a whole mode of life. But his sense of irony and tragedy is usually keener than Thompson's and the examination of his subject penetrates more deeply."

And at the end of one of "Rythm Oil"'s 20 jewels, Booth, in his own precise, peculiar way, proves Stone's case: "Carla was waiting for the limo to come back from taking Johnny Taylor to his hotel when closing time came and she found herself standing on the club's steps. She had come from benighted Memphis to progressive Atlanta, where she had worried, she had worked, she had done good. At the club she had been used and insulted, and at the concert, in her view, perhaps robbed. She was exhausted and she wanted to sit down. This music is about redemption. A friend, putting an arm around the magnificent shoulders of Carla Thomas, said, 'Don't worry, baby. That's why they call it the blues.'"

So you have your weekend assignment, should you choose to accept it: Hunt down a copy of "Rythm Oil." And don't forget the crocodile's birthday.
salon.com | June 12, 1999

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