Been here and gone

the long version

"Coley Williams, a backup musician to some of the most famous and infamous figures in the annals of blues music, and a former recording artist in his own right, had a backstage pass to a world that most of us could never even imagine. In 1998 at the astonishing age of one hundred and two, Williams agreed to tell his tale for the first time.". "From his youth as a tenant farmer on the Mississippi plantations to the Great Migration to the Northern cities, from his incarceration in the notorious Sugarland prison farm to the temptations of freedom on the open road, from the juke joints of the deep South to the stages of Swinging London, Coley Williams' life is at once the story of the blues and the story of the twentieth century. Across a hundred years of tumultuous change, we follow him through the hardships of the Flood of 1927 and the hardscrabble years of the Great Depression, the race riots of the 1960s and the birth of the Civil Rights movement. Along the way, Williams' vividly recounted anecdotes introduce us to the pantheon of blues legends whose paths he crossed: Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, Bessie Smith, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey, T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, the immortal Robert Johnson, and even the young Elvis Presley. Raucous, rambunctious, and often downright dangerous, these larger-than-life musicians, singers, and all-around rabble-rousers live again in Williams' wonderfully colorful recollections."--BOOK JACKET.