Music Book Review: Talking Guitar by Jas Obrecht

Talking Guitar: Conversations With Musicians Who Shaped Twentieth Century American Music
by Jas Obrecht (Music 787.87 Obr)

As you’ll likely guess from the book title, former editor of Guitar Player magazine Jas Obrecht has interviewed a range of guitar players who have worked in blues, rock and pop idioms, asking them to dig deep into their love for the instrument. There are some crucial interviews featured here by folks who are not well-known but are essential to the status of the guitar in American music culture, like Nick Lucas, who recorded a couple of the earliest solo guitar singles ever to be released back in the 1920s, or Pops Staples, who recorded gospel, soul, and pop albums starting in the pre-rock and roll 1950s. Some of the more well-known guitarists here have since passed on, like Jerry Garcia, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Eddie Van Halen.

 

These are unique interviews compared to the more general questions these artists are typically asked for magazine and newspaper interviews, and you’ll get more personal insights relating to how these artists express themselves through the guitar, as well as their deep love for guitarists who came before them. As a cool bonus, this book also features a CD that has audio clips taken from each of the interviews in the book — considering that many of the featured artists do most of their talking through the guitar, it’s fun to hear them talk about the instrument with their voices, instead.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan by Paul Alan, Jerry on Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews by Jerry Garcia or Strange Beautiful Music: A Musical Memoir by Joe Satriani.]

[ publisher’s official Talking Guitar web site ]

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!