The Beatles by Bob Spitz

Learn about the Beatles' rise to fame, about their creativity, conflicts, loves, and failures. This book offers the most comprehensive look at the Fab Four to date.

CD Recommendation: Abbey Road

Mercy, Mercy Me: the Art, Loves, and Demons of Marvin Gaye by Michael Eric Dyson

Brilliant, tortured, sensual and soulful, Marvin Gaye reflects the dynamism of contemporary urban America like few others, and in this powerful tesimony, he is rendered with rare grace and uncommon insight.

CD Recommendation: What's Going On

Lovesick Blues: The Life of Hank Williams by Paul Hemphill

Hank Williams, the quintessential country music singer and songwriter, died alone in the backseat of his cadillac on new year's day 1953. He died much as he had lived - drunk, forlorn, suffering from a birth defect, wondering when the bubble would burst. Having sprouted out of nowhere, like a weed in the wilds of South Alabama, he was gone at the age of twenty-nine. Learn more about the man behind the legend.

CD Recommendation: Timeless

A Pirate Looks at Fifty by Jimmy Buffett

In this intensely personal book, popular singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett leaves his barstool in Margaritaville and does some soul-searching, recounting a life's odyssey that has been funnier and more adventurous than anything he has ever written.

CD Recommendation: Meet Me In Margaritaville

Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald

Robert Johnson's story presents a fascinating paradox: Why did this genius of the Delta blues excite so little interest when his records were first released in the 1930s? And how did this brilliant but obscure musician come to be hailed long after his death as the most important artist in early blues and a founding father of rock 'n' roll? Elijah Wald provides the first thorough examination of Johnson's work and makes it the centerpiece for a fresh look at the entire history of the blues.

CD Recommendation: King of the Delta Blues

Cash by Jason Fine

Johnny Cash is a giant of American music. Since its inception in the late 1960s, Rolling Stone has followed Cash's career, writing about him in settings that ranged from the San Quentin prison to a glitzy Vegas hotel. In a testament to his life, the editors of Rolling Stone magazine have compiled this tribute to a man whose legacy is exceeded only by his legend: Cash.

CD Recommendation:The Legend of Johnny Cash

Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan gives us an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times. By turns revealing, poetical, passionate and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan's thoughts and influences. Dylan's voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful and rhythmic.

CD Recommendation: No Direction Home

Before the Legend: the Rise of Bob Marley by Christopher John Farley

Drawing from original interviews with the people closest to Marley - including his widow, Rita, his mother, Cedella, his bandmate and childhood friend Bunny Wailer, his producer Chris Blackwell, and many others - this book paints a fresh picture of one of the most enduring musical artists of our times.

CD Recommendation: Babylon By Bus

Elvis Presley: The Man, The Life, The Legend by Pamela Clarke Keogh

This book draws on extensive research and interviews with Presley friends and family, among them Priscilla Presley, Joe Esposito, Jerry Schilling, Larry Geller, Bernard Lansky, famed Hollywood photographer Bob Willoughby, and designer Bill Belew. Offered access to the Graceland archives, the author considered thousands of images, selecting more than one hundred color and black-and-white photographs for this book, many of them rarely seen before.

CD Recommendation: Elvis: 30 #1 Hits

Room Full of Mirrors: a Biography of Jimi Hendrix by Charles R. Cross

Beyond his legendary sex appeal, his drug use, his onstage presence, and his backstage magnetism, Room Full of Mirrors captures the whole man, from birth to death - a view of Hendrix unlike any revealed before.

CD Recommendation: Are You Experienced?

Bruce Springsteen's America: the People Listening, a Poet Singing by Robert Coles

In this book, Robert Coles turns his attention to popular music legend Bruce Springsteen, and to the powerful impact Springsteen's work has had both on the lives of his audience and on this country's literary tradition. Coles places Springsteen in the pantheon of American artists - Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Percy, among others - who understood and were inspired by their "traveling companions in time," the ordinary people of their eras.

CD Recommendation: We Shall Overcome

Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend by Stephen Davis

The author uncovered documents, conducted dozens of original interviews, and scoured Morrison's unpublished journals and recordings to write the definitive biography of a misunderstood legend.

CD Recommendation: The Doors

Journals by Kurt Cobain

Kurt Cobain filled dozens of notebooks with lyrics, drawings, and writings about his plans for Nirvana and his thoughts about fame, the state of music, and the people who bought his music. Over 20 of these notebooks survived his many moves and travels and have been locked in a safe since his death. Now, printed here for the first time, his journals reveal an artist who loved records, who knew the history of rock, and was determined to define his place in that history.

CD Recommendation: Nevermind

Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul by Craig Werner

Higher Ground weaves the specific and intensely personal narratives of Stevie, Aretha, and Curtis's lives into the historical fabric of their times. The three shared many similarities: They were all children of the great migration and of the black church. But the gospel impulse manifested itself in different ways within the dramas of their individual lives and musical creations.

CD Recommendation: The Very Best of Aretha Franklin: the 60s

Dream Boogie: the Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick

In a biography that for the first time tells the full story of Sam Cooke's short life, Dream Boogie re-creates in detail the richness of the African American world from which he emerged and the combination of style, wit and resiliency that was necessary to survive and overcome the pervasive prejudice of the day.

CD Recommendation: The Man Who Invented Soul


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