Editor-in-Chief Darcy Newell chats with Peter Guralnick, famed Elvis biographer, blues connoisseur and fiction writer. Oh yeah, he also teaches the Advanced Nonfiction workshop at Vanderbilt each spring. Guralnick chats about his first interview (Howlin' Wolf) why he chose Elvis and how he fell in love with the blues.

Versus Magazine: Take us back to when you were 20 or 21 years old. Did you know this is what you wanted to do?

Peter Guralnick: What I wanted to do was be a writer. I started writing about music when I was probably about 20, and I started writing purely to tell - I was writing fiction, short stories novels, I still write fiction - but the nonfiction, I just wrote solely to tell people about this music that I thought was so great, it was almost entirely the blues, and I did it at a time when there were almost no outlets where you could even put down the name Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf, Lightnin' Hopkins, James Brown, it was such a thrill. I wrote these things telling people how great they were. It wasn't for money, there was no money; it was just to tell people.


VM: How did you get acquainted with the blues? Was that a childhood thing or did you sort of stumble into it?

PG: I just kind of fell into it when I was about 15, a brother of a friend of mine went to the Newport Folk Festival and came back with a bunch of records, you know, it could have been Pete Seeger, John Jacob Niles and among them were a couple of blues records, and we started listening to them. And I just never heard anything like it, it just hit me, and I can't tell you why, it just totally grabbed me, and from that point on there was no turning around I was totally into the blues, and it led me to every other kind of music, gospel to country.


VM: Did you have a big break moment? How did you get your foot in the door?

PG: A kid I knew a few years younger than me started a magazine, the first rock 'n' roll magazine, Crawdaddy, on campus. I think he went to Swarthmore, he was actually going to interview Howlin' Wolf, and he didn't know anything about Wolf or the blues and he says, "How would you like to go with me?" and I'm thinkin', "Wow, sure, yeah," and so we interviewed Howlin' Wolf, and then he asked me to write for Crawdaddy, and I said yeah, but, Crawdaddy was all about the psychedelic stuff, which was fine but I had no interest in it. I wanted to write about is Robert Pete Williams and Buddy Guy and Skip James.


VM: How did you decide to spend so much time and energy on Elvis? Do you like him as a musician or was it just that he lived an interesting life?

PG: I've never written a single piece about anybody or anything that I haven't chosen myself and hasn't been out of my admiration for their work. It would be inconceivable for me to write something about a subject that I wasn't totally invested in. I just saw Elvis as a continuum of this great music, which included Howlin' Wolf, Hank Williams, T.Bone Walker, but what led me to write the biography was two things - one was, I worked on a documentary in 1986 which I removed my name from, but while I was doing it, people that were making it got me all these interviews with Elvis that he had done in '55 and '56. I'd written about him, but I'd written all I had to say from the outside, celebrations of his music. They were theoretical, in the sense that it's always theoretical from the outside. I thought, man, Elvis could speak for himself, he's articulate, he's intelligent, he has a lot to say, he knows what he's doing. Then I was driving down Macklin Avenue with Rose Clayton, a woman I know, and as we were driving towards Stacks there was a boarded-up drug store, and Rose said, "That's where Elvis' cousin Jean used to work, and Elvis would sit at the counter and wait for her to get off work, and tap his fingers with nervous energy like this (taps finger on table)," and all of a sudden I had this vision, this picture of this 16- or 17-year-old kid, not Elvis Presley, And it crystallized something for me.


VM: What has been the most fun project that you've done?

PG: They've all been fun. It's like saying, what age did you enjoy most with your kids? I've enjoyed every moment up to the present time. When I say it's all been fun, I have a very bleak view of life, so it's not that it's an optimistic statement or a statement of belief and purpose, but in terms of process, it's been totally fun. The Sam Cooke was just something from 1982 on, I knew I wanted to do a book on Sam Cooke ... I'm working on a book about Sam Phillips, and for me Sam Phillips was this inspirational figure, and I've written about him before, and he's someone that had a great deal of influence over my life, and I loved, I always loved spending time with him. I wanted to work on a biographical portrait that incorporates some of the insights that I gained when I was with him.


VM: What are some of the memorable interviews you've had?

PG: Every interview I've ever gone into, I try to go into as a blank slate. I'm excited about it beforehand, and it's never exactly what you think it's going to be, and sometimes I'm disappointed in myself that I didn't get all that I thought I'd get. They're all good; they depend on people having the kindness, giving you the opportunity to talk to them. I've met an astonishing array of people ... it would be impossible for me to single out just one. And a lot of them have become friends; I stay in touch with a great number of people that I've interviewed.


VM: What do you find about your students? What surprises you most about teaching your nonfiction class?

PG: It's not a question of surprise, to me, the challenge, I'm not saying I meet the challenge, but the challenge is to bring the class together so by the end of the semester there is some sort of identification as a group. Each class is a different challenge; it's a different combination of people. The message that I preach, that Sam Phillips preaches to me, is freedom. Dare to be yourself, don't worry about what I say to you, what anybody else says to you. Believe in what you believe in. I don't think a lot of people are inclined to embrace that, but to me it's the sense that there are no rules that fit everybody, and the class is not just the easiest class, it's a gift. The intention is to give everybody a chance at self-expression; at some level, from my point of view as a kid, this was incredible. You get credit for something you'd do anyway.