Mister Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir

by Adam Gussow (Pantheon Books/Random House, $25.00, 396 pp.)
by Thomas Christian

Satan (a string-bending, Mississippi-born musician), and Adam (harp player turned scholar) are the two real-life, street-busking musicians brought together by their appreciation of The Blues. Trailing their road path like a heel-nipping hellhound and set against the social backdrop of a racially-torn nation, the volume validates art’s fusing power of like-minded geniuses in pursuit of the twelve-bar shuffle.