Jerry Lee Lewis
by Rick Bragg | 
Here, There and Everywhere
by Geoff Emerick | 
Johannes Brahms
by Jan Swafford | 
Woody Guthrie
by Joe Klein |
A Long Strange Trip
by Dennis McNally | 
Really the Blues
by Mezz Mezzrow | 
Under the Big Black Sun
by John Doe |
The Road to Woodstock
by Michael Lang | 
White Bicycles
by Joe Boyd | 
Sam Phillips
by Peter Guralnick | 
Johann Sebastian Bach
by Christoph Wolff | 
Beethoven
by Maynard Solomon | 
Who I Am
by Pete Townshend | 
When Giants Walked the Earth
by Mick Wall | 
Positively 4th Street
by David Hajdu |
Me, the Mob, and the Music
by Tommy James |
Dream Boogie
by Peter Guralnick |
Kill 'Em and Leave
by James McBride | 
Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan
by Howard Sounes | 
Girls Like Us
by Sheila Weller |
"In all my whole career the Brick House was one of the toughest joints I ever played in. It was the honky-tonk where levee workers would congregate every Saturday night and trade with the gals who'd stroll up and down the floor and the bar. Those guys would drink and fight one another like circle saws. Bottles would come flying over the bandstand like crazy, and there was lots of just plain common shooting and cutting. But somehow all that jive didn't faze me at all, I was so happy to have some place to blow my horn." So says Louis Armstrong, a tough kid who just happened to be a musical genius, about one of the places where he performed and grew up. This raucous, rich tale of his early days in New Orleans concludes with his departure to Chicago at twenty-one to play with his boyhood idol King Oliver, and tells the story of a life that began, mythically, on July 4, 1900, in the city that sowed the seeds of jazz.