Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie as Told to Albert Murray |  | Authors: Count Basie, Albert Murray
Publisher: Plume
Category: Book
List Price: $10.95
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $10.94 (100%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 3560294
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7 x 5 x 1
ISBN: 0917657896
Dewey Decimal Number: 785.420924
EAN: 9780917657894
ASIN: 0917657896
Publication Date: November 1, 1986
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Very nice, clean, bright, unmarked pgs. No dog eared pgs. Crease on spine. Very faint scuffing to cover. A nice clean copy. I ship daily.
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Product Description
Count Basie (1904–1984), pianist, composer, and icon of big-band jazz, known for such classics as "Jumpin' at the Woodside," "Cherokee," and "One O'Clock Jump," recounts his life story to Albert Murray with all the charm and dry humor of two friends sitting at the kitchen table. Good Morning Blues is both testimony and tribute to a remarkable, rich life.
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| Customer Reviews:
 The book of lists March 11, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I'll admit to being a bit dissappointed by this book about Basie.As mentioned in some of the other reviews, you get list after list of recording dates and tour dates, interesting, but not enlightening. Where are the road stories? I feel I've learned more about Basie from other peoples books about jazz and Kansas City than I did in this book. It's too bad, I'm sure he could have filled a few books with what he saw in 60 plus years of jazz.
 Basie the cool professional, Murray the former general April 18, 2005
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is a particularly useful book if you know basie, Basieism and what is happening already. Count Basie never was the kind of person you would expect to write a tell all, or note how much reefer was being smoked like Buck Clayton did in his memoir, or spill the inside dope on John Hammond as a number of Basieites have in their books and interviews.
Basie has always been a cool professional, concerned with handling the business side, keeping everybody happy, and keeping the ship above the water. He goes by the old watchword from the 50s we used to have "Maintain your cool at all times."
Thus we get a memoir that has a lot of places and names in it, a lot about working in the band, but very little that is going to surprise or wow anyone who isn't into the Basie story. He stays pretty close to the vest, and presents a very easy going story.
One example of how this book smoothes over conflict and controversy and makes everything seem smoother than the truth is how it treats the departure of Claude Fiddler Williams from the Basie Band in 1937. While the ignorant think Freddie Green was Basie's only guitarist, Williams was the band's first guitarist--and he was Downbeat guitarist of the year that year--and also played hot jazz fiddle solos with the band. Only the Live at the Chatterbox recording lets you hear his brilliant fiddling.
When the band arrived in New York, John Hammond who acted like manager, director, and overlord over the band for years, decided the Fiddler's violin was too "country" and replaced him with Freddie Green who was playing in a New York Club when Basie arrived in the Apple.
Williams who lived until last year (2004) always said John Hammond fired him, although he says he felt grateful in the end because his career as an independent fiddle soloist would have never taken off had he stayed with Basie. In this book, Basie says that he and Williams came to a friendly parting of the ways that let Williams become independent. There is lots of smoothed over stuff like this.
To be fair, this was more or less of an interview with an aging Basie with little attempt to research things. Many things get hazy or are remember conveniently as the years pass on, as I am coming to realize myself as I enter my late 50s.
The book also suffers from Albert Murray's interviewing. Murray never presents his credentials in his appearances as an "expert" on Jazz. In fact he is a retired Air Force General and has never been a musician, a musicologist, or anything professionally associated with music. He's imposed his own rather conservative viewpoint on Jazz as the all American capitalist product, rather than an expression of Black culture, oppression, and a struggle to Africanize music. Rather, Murray priviledges a progression to take Jazz closer to the forms of European classical music. So, it is no surprise that Murray isn't going to try to ferret out controversy, difficult truthes, or unconventional behavior, particularly with a man as cool and under control as Bill Basie.
Nevertheless, there is a lot of information here that exists nowhere else. Sadly, no one has written a serious biography of Basie, or a serious study of his music save for the section on him in Gunter Schuller's great book on Swing. Until that takes place, this is the book.
Like most books of this kind, the part about Basie's life before he became famous, growing up, learning his chops on piano in New York, travelling with TOBA shows, hooking up with Rushing, then with the Blue Devils, then with Moten, are the most interesting and readable parts of this book. Similarly, the book speeds up and summarizes too quickly the closer it gets to the time the interviews took place.
One thing is nice is the list of who took what solo on some of the Old Testament sides.
Still, Basie is important enough for every true Jazz lover, or at least every true swing lover, to own this book, particularly as a cheap used edition can be obtained for little!
 How Did They Do It? November 30, 2004
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
How did Albert Murray and Dan Morgenstern manage to write an uninteresting and at times boring book about the great Count Basie? This is a sanitized and unemotional look at Basie's career. It is full of details that can only be of interest to a Basie historian- and that's about the only good thing you can say about it. I guess The Count wanted it that way. If you want to read everything about Basie that's ever been written, then buy this book. Otherwise, skip it.
Good Morning Blues, Blues How Do You Do? May 4, 2002
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book contains a wealth of historical information, and is written in a calm, mellow style. Murray perfectly captured the laid-back elegance of Basie's voice and tells his story in a smooth, graceful manner. This book contains no sensational or scandalous materials about Basie's many associates, including Lester Young, Billy Holiday, Frank Sinatra, or Benny Moten, and that's the way Basie wanted it. Basie was a gentleman who believed in proper decorum, and he never revealed any secrets about his many friends. There are no bombshells in this book, but if you are looking for a comprehensive life story of one of the 20th century's most important and succesful musicians (both commercially and artistically), this is the book for you. This is an absolute neccesity for students of jazz and is essential to any collection of jazz biographies. The information on the music alone (where they were touring, what they were playing, when they recorded what, etc.) is vast.
For Basie aficionados only August 6, 1998
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
If you expect some spectacular insight how Basie and his music came into being, you're in for a slight letdown. The book has a somewhat sedate pace, doesn't feature to many anecdotes or details about Basie and his musicians. There are certainly some interesting facts but on the whole it's rather dry. The book covers Basie's career from its beginnings. I found the chapters on his early life the most interesting ones. From about 1940 onwards Basie structures his memories along his recording sessions; and this gets a bit tedious. I can only recommend this for true Basie aficionados who want to pick up the odd piece of new information.
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