“I lived in Memphis, and my interests just led me to [these people]...Things just happened, it’s the weirdest thing,” says Booth. “My father’s friend was my family doctor, and he was Gladys Presley’s doctor. My mother went to the same beauty parlor that Priscilla went to, and I befriended a man at the local YMCA that took me down to Sun Records one afternoon, and he introduced me to Sam Phillips.” Booth befriended many insiders in the music industry in the Sixties, including the two Phillips, and Jerry Wexler, a high level executive at Atlantic. He also befriended many of the musicians that he wrote about.
 “I don’t know why, but I always saw my responsibility as being the telling of the story,” says Booth. Whether he was writing about a relatively obscure blues musician such as Furry Lewis, or about a well known personality such as B.B. King, the human story, no matter what it is, is indeed always front and center. “I realized that a rock and roll band is not necessarily any more interesting than anybody else, and that you have to look at them as characters in a story in order to make the piece interesting,” says Booth. His love of a vast array of literary influences--everyone from Flannery O'Connor and Mark Twain to A.J. Leibling-- has helped him develop a style of writing that allows each essay to pique the reader’s interest, and then weave a story that grips you by the scruff of your collar and won’t let go until you reach the end of the piece. His essay following the death of Otis Redding is a prime example.
 “There was a period where I just turned up in these places when things were going on,” says Booth. “I was over at Stax, just working on a Memphis music piece, and I had no clear focus. I really had no idea what I was going to write about. Then this guy comes in out of a limo, and it was Otis Redding. Nobody told me he was going to be coming in, but there he was. He sits down, and he starts working on this song, ‘Sittin’ in the mornin’ sun, I’ll be sittin’ when the evenin’ comes...’ And he said to Steve Cropper, ‘But that’s all I got, just this guy sittin’ there! There got to be more to it than that!’ So, I sat there and I watched him and Steve work that out, which was really something to see.” That was on a Friday night, and by that Sunday, Otis, as well as some of the Stax touring band, the Bar-Kays, were dead following a plane crash. Booth now had a tragic centerpiece for his story, which he beautifully set up to begin with the funeral service of several of the musicians. The sense of loss felt by the music community, the Stax family, and Booth himself, is palpable throughout the essay.
“There are a lot of great singers, but Otis had this great openness,” says Booth. “Otis loved what he was doing. He came into Stax and he had these songs, and he wasn’t so much thinking he wanted to buy a limo or anything. There’s a moment on one of those ‘Live in Europe’ albums when Otis says to the audience, ‘You feel alright?’ and the audience says ‘Yeeeeah....!’ And Otis says, ‘I do too!’ and he meant it, you know? He was being completely sincere. He was singing these songs from his heart, and you can still hear that today.”
 Another person who sang straight from the heart, and whom Booth became close friends with, was country rock musician Gram Parsons. In Rythm Oil, Booth profiles the album Parsons made in 1969 with his group the Flying Burrito Brothers, “The Gilded Palace of Sin.” Considering the fact that Booth seemed to know just about every local music personality in Georgia in the Sixties, it seems ironic that he had never met Parsons before the album came out.
 “If you can believe it, I’d never heard of Gram Parsons. When I’d got to England in September of ‘68 to write about the Rolling Stones, they had this acetate of the Byrds’ ‘Sweetheart of the Rodeo,’ and it featured a new member named Gram Parsons,” says Booth. “I’d been a fan of the Byrds, and this country-ish album sounded different from what they’d done before. I came back to America, and by then I was hip to who Gram was, bought the record, and I liked the sincere emotion and the humor on it. And that was that, and I didn’t think anymore about it until I went to L.A. in October of 1969 to meet up with the Rolling Stones. I went out to this house, and Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman were there, and then these people came in through the back door--it was Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Mick Taylor, and they had Gram Parsons with them.” Booth chronicled his growing friendship with Parson in his book “The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones,” which lasted through Parson’s death in 1973.

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