"Lauterbach spins the tale with enormous vitality and it's terribly fun to read. He masterfully explains the complex logistics of the entertainment industry, and studs the book with fascinating, little-known characters... The reader will finish with an overwhelming urge to turn up the volume." -- Kate Tuttle "A well-researched valentine to a lost world of seedy con men, promoters and club owners, the power brokers and hustlers who made the 'circuitry spark.'" -- Eddie Dean "...crucial to our understanding of late-20th-century pop music and all the more impressive for its exhaustive research. Preston Lauterbach's book-spirited, studious, surprising, occasionally hilarious-is absolutely persuasive on its subject." -- Stephen M. Deusner "Opens new doors in pop-music scholarship as well as American (and African-American) cultural history." -- Michaelangelo Matos "This sprawling, fascinating history drops readers into a chaotic, dangerous, utterly vanished world." -- John Repp "[T]he genius prequel to an oft-told epic."

Preston Lauterbach is the author of Bluff City, Beale Street Dynasty, The Chitlin’ Circuit, a Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe book of the year, and co-author of Brother Johnson: Growing Up with Robert Johnson. He is a former visiting scholar at Rhodes College and a Virginia Humanities Fellow. He lives in Virginia.