Stormy Monday: The T-Bone Walker Story

By Helen Oakley Dance

Book Overview

The most significant factor in the career of Aaron "T-Bone" Walker was his ability to bridge the worlds of blues and jazz. The guitar artistry of this early exponent of urban blues was not only admired by blues musicians like B.B. King, Gatemouth Brown, Albert King, and Albert Collins, and rock guitarists such as Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Duane Allman, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, but by such jazz greats as Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, and many others with whom he recorded.

Stormy Monday is the first biography of T-Bone Walker to be published. Using dozens of interviews with Walker, as well as with members of his family, close friends, fellow musicians, and business associates, the book offers a remarkable frank insider's account of the life of a blues musician and compulsive gambler, from the wild living and hard drinking on the road to a solid and contented family life at home.

"In a very real sense the modern blues is largely his creation." blues authority Pete Welding has written about T-Bone Walker. "The blues was different before he came on the scene, and it hasn't been the same since, and few men can lay claim to that kind of distinction. No one has contributed as much, as long, or as variously to the blues."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807124583
• ISBN13: 9780807124581
• Release Date: March 1999
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Evocative oral histories, lovingly and intelligently contextualized

T-Bone Walker, ace electric guitarist, blues- and jazzman, charismatic performer and writer of enduring songs, deserves to be much better remembered than he is, and his music more widely available, because it is thoroughly modern and enjoyable. Helen Oakley Dance, an elegant, self-effacing writer who depends on the intelligence of her readers to fill in the historical gaps of T-Bone's far-flung adventures, spent substantial time with the man, his family and friends during his final years, and having followed his career for a couple of decades (in company with her husband Stanley Dance, biographer of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, among others) had unique access and perspective on Walker's salad days on Los Angeles' Central Avenue and subsequent conquering of African-American entertainment throughout the U.S., as well as his international tours starting in the '60s. Her focus is so close to her subject that the broad social perspective and definitive chronology is underplayed -- if you want to know exacting details of T-Bone's engagements and discography you'll have to look elsewhere. But for a portrait of the man, told in his own words and those of his mother, wife, children, friends and proteges who was adventurous, generous, ingeniously creative, a family man as well as gambler and rambler, you must start here. Ignore the 2-star review in this queue, whose writer wanted a beginner's book. Dance's "Stormy Monday" conveys the true flavor of life in the blues world from the '20s through the '70s. Characters come and go, reminiscences flow over the years, as in life itself. But very little of significance is missing from this book, with T-Bone's on-stage persona as well as his private self portrayed economically but vividly. You will definitely want to hear him after reading this, and if you already know his music you'll appreciate it all the more.