Stanley Booth

Who is Stanley Booth?

Stanley Booth is an American music journalist. Booth has written extensively about important music figures, including Keith Richards, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, James Brown, Elvis Presley, Gram Parsons, B.B. King, and Al Green. He chronicled his travels with the Rolling Stones in several of his works.

After going to college at what was then Memphis State University in the early 1960s, Booth began his music journalism career with articles on Memphis musicians like Furry Lewis and Otis Redding, the latter of whom Stanley witnessed writing the famous song "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" with Steve Cropper at Stax studios on the Friday before Redding's death. He was present for and wrote about the infamous 1969 Rolling Stones concert in Altamont, California, at which a concertgoer was murdered by a member of the Hells' Angels motorcycle gang. In addition to writing books, Booth has also published music articles in Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, and Playboy and appeared in many documentaries, not only on Southern music and the Rolling Stones, but Tom Thurman's Movies of Color and Peckinpah. Booth now lives near Brunswick with his wife, the poet Diann Blakely, and is finishing the successor to Rhythm Oil, currently entitled Blues Dues, as well as working on a memoir, Tree Full of Owls.