cover image Stormy Monday: The T-Bone Walker Story

Stormy Monday: The T-Bone Walker Story

Helen Oakley Dance. Louisiana State University Press, $24.95 (285pp) ISBN 978-0-8071-1355-4

When he died in 1975, Aaron ""T-Bone'' Walker was widely regarded as the father of modern guitar blues, whose sound influenced much of today's popular music. A proficient pianist and guitarist, a talented singer of great personal magnetism, a composer of blues and shuffles, Walker was also at home with jazz and proud of his association with Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and other major jazz musicians. In a book that well may become a basic cultural document, Dance, who produces concerts and records and has written for jazz magazines, has organized interviews with Walker, his family, friends and associates into a smooth-flowing narrative account of this important musical innovator, who also happened to be a wild-living, hard-drinking, compulsive gambler. Photos not seen by PW. (June 26)