cover image Delta Lady: A Memoir

Delta Lady: A Memoir

Rita Coolidge, with Michael Walker. Harper, $25 (240p) ISBN 978-0-06-237204-8

In the golden years of pop-rock music of the 1960s and ’70s, there were very few singers like the Grammy-winning Coolidge, whose memoir reads like a polite, lyrical confessional. She exhibits a deep understanding of human nature as she writes candidly of her loving family, especially her older singing sister, Priscilla, in the Jim Crow state of Tennessee. Upon graduating from Florida State in 1967, she moved to Memphis with Priscilla, who was starting her singing career in a racially mixed music scene with “a more driving Southern feel tinged with jazz and traditional R&B.” The Klan burned a cross on their lawn following Priscilla’s interracial marriage, and the 1968 killing of Martin Luther King Jr. shattered the Memphis scene; Coolidge fled to California. Once in L.A., she plunged into the music business, singing backup for Leon Russell, Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker, and Stephen Stills and striking gold with such hits as “We’re All Alone” and “Higher and Higher.” Coolidge’s backstage stories of her sessions with Clapton and Cocker, the drug-fueled orgies of the infamous Mad Dog and Englishmen tour, and her romances with Graham Nash and Kris Kristofferson are authentic and intimate. Agent: Daniel Greenberg, Levine Greenberg Literary. (Apr.)