Mister Satan’s Apprentice

The story of an unlikely musical partnership, the blues, and race in America, with a new preface by the author

Enough roadblocks, heartbreaks, catastrophes, and redemptions to fill a modern-day Pilgrim’s Progress . . . A fascinating and revealing portrait of one of the most unusual partnerships in the long history of the blues.

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Living Blues Magazine

Tags

Film and Media, American Studies, Literature, Music, African American, Culture and Society, Creative Nonfiction

Mister Satan’s Apprentice is the history of one of music’s most fascinating collaborations, between Adam Gussow, a young graduate school dropout and harmonica player, and Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee, a guitarist and underground blues legend who had originally made his name as “Five Fingers Magee.”

Adam Gussow is the author of Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition and Journeyman’s Road: Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner’s Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York. Associate professor of English and southern studies at the University of Mississippi, he continues to tour with Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee.

Enough roadblocks, heartbreaks, catastrophes, and redemptions to fill a modern-day Pilgrim’s Progress . . . A fascinating and revealing portrait of one of the most unusual partnerships in the long history of the blues.

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Living Blues Magazine

Beneath the effusive and effervescent tone of Mister Satan’s Apprentice lie gnawing questions of race and identity, of cultural imperialism and human connection.

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Washington Post

The heart of the book is the luminous portrait of Mr. Satan . . . whose Technicolor medallions, doomsday proclamations, and furious guitar style mask a storied past, including stints with James Brown, Etta James, and the Supremes.

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Publishers Weekly

Gussow’s prose is full of long, twisted, sobbing, roaring, rollicking sentences that are not unlike his blues lines.

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The Wall Street Journal

Mister Satan's Apprentice is also available as an audiobook.