One night in December of 1967, soul singer Otis Redding walked into the Stax studios and sat down with guitarist Steve Cropper, and within hours, the two had polished off “(Sitting on the) Dock of the Bay.” A young writer by the name of
Stanley Booth happened to be there that night to document the occasion. Several months earlier, a crowd of boys and girls, in full sycophant mode, gathered around a lost Elvis Presley at a room in Graceland, the King appearing very much isolated in the crowd. Again, writer Stanley Booth was there to capture the moment and reflect upon its meaning. Two years later, the Rolling Stones held a free rock show in California in which a man was stabbed to death in front of the stage, and--surprise--Stanley Booth was there to take it all in.
 Stanley Booth, in fact, has made a habit of turning up in the right place at the right time in the music world, writing intelligent, insightful, and highly entertaining essays on everyone from Redding and Presley to Ray Charles and Mose
Allison. His recently re-released Rythm Oil, originally published in 1991, contains almost two dozen such essays, each of them strung together not only by the engaging prose of the writer, but also through the thematic journey of the evolution of music emanating from the American South. Booth traces country and blues music from the little known musicians such as his friend Furry Lewis and the more influential Mississippi John Hurt, through the household names of Elvis, B.B. King, and James Brown. Along the way, Booth paints fascinating character portraits of the musicians and their fellow travelers, always accentuating the fact that these are not untouchable emperors, but sensitive human beings in extraordinary situations. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Booth about the stories behind the writing of these essays, and
although some of them were written over thirty years ago, Booth still recalls each episode with enthusiasm and humor, as if each memory were just as fresh as if the event had happened weeks, not years, ago.
 “I sent this piece to Esquire, knowing that everybody in the building would be reading it before the end of the night,” chuckles Booth, recalling the essay he wrote criticizing Elvis Presley in 1967, which opened with an x-rated account detailing a rather naughty night the King spent getting friendly with Natalie Wood. That delightful opening paragraph never made it into the Esquire version, although it has found its way into Booth’s book, much to the writer’s
glee.
 “I don’t think Elvis ever really had much direction,” says Booth. “I think he was directed from outside. He did love gospel music and the music of the black rhythm and blues artists, and I think he was probably the most amazed person in the world when he became ‘Elvis Presley.’ “ Booth recalls a conversation with Dewey Phillips, the disc-jockey who broke Elvis’s first records on his radio show back in the mid-Fifties, in which Phillips told him about a phone call he received from Presley just after he had appeared on the Steve Allen show, wearing a tuxedo and standing still as he sang. “Dewey just said, ‘You better call home and get straight boy. What are you doing in that monkey suit? Where’s your guitar?’,” says Booth, who wrote the essay for Esquire in order to trace the fall of the King from the energetic, hip-swivelin’, rockabilly singing Southern boy of the mid-Fifties, to the sanitized, lousy movie-cranking, isolated Star of the mid-Sixties. Booth paints the picture of a man who is trapped high on a pedestal by his success--a situation which he may not be all that comfortable with, but who seems to lack the inner motivation to return to his true path of singing the music that he loves.
Booth’s approach to writing the Presley piece is unique, in that he happened to be friendly with Dewey Phillips, as well as with the man who discovered Presley and who first produced his classic material, Sam Phillips.

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