They were thrilled when advance copies arrived in the mail. "It's like seeing your byline for the first time, but it's a book," beams Milward, whose first book, The Beach Boys Silver Anniversary, came out in 1985. "For all the toil, we're both pretty proud of it."
He worked on Crossroads nonstop for two-and-a-half years. "The first year, I read everything," he says, and it's barely an exaggeration; the bibliography cites nearly 200 titles. "And, of course, there are all these conflicting accounts. Did Muddy Waters make Buddy Guy a baloney sandwich, or a salami sandwich?"
He also interviewed artists such as Bonnie Raitt, Geoff Muldaur, and Jorma Kaukonen. "I realized I was not going to get quality time with Clapton and Keith Richards," he says drily. (He did interview Richards for a 1986 feature on Dirty Work; they shared a bottle of Makers' Mark.) For such marquee names, he relied on painstaking research and well-chosen quotes, such as Richards recalling how Brian Jones named the band while placing a phone ad, "The Best of Muddy Waters album was on the floor—and track one was 'Rolling Stone.' So the band's name was picked for us by Muddy Waters."
The Stones went on to adapt blues classics by Robert Johnson ("Love in Vain"), Willie Dixon ("Little Red Rooster"), and more. Blues-based rock, along with an earlier wave of folk-era rediscoveries, like Mississippi John Hurt playing the Newport Folk Festival, injected new life into faded careers. Crossroads recounts moving stories of elderly players—some of whom had to relearn their old tunes—becoming "strangers in a strange land: Southern black men in a northern white world. Songs that they once played to rowdy neighbors in a juke joint or at a fish fry were now performed for attentive college kids."
"B. B. King once said, 'Playing the blues is like being black twice,'" Milward says. "Young blacks didn't want to know from the blues. A) it was their parents' music; b) they didn't want to go back to Alabama. They were listening to Ray Charles, the Coasters, the Drifters. So was B.B. King grateful to find a white rock'n'roll audience? You bet. He had a whole second career, especially after 'The Thrill Is Gone.'"
Crossroads's title refers to the site where Robert Johnson reputedly sold his soul to the devil in trade for musical genius. But it also alludes to the cross-pollination of musical styles. "Folk music purists, blues purists, and rock'n'roll purists don't meet very often," Milward notes. "As I got older, I related more to the rootsier players. I knew of these players—Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Mississippi John Hurt—but didn't really start listening to them till I was in my forties, when the music on the radio wasn't the music I loved anymore. It was my midrock crisis."
That "midrock crisis" also launched a band named for Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition skit ("Not ... the Comfy Chair!"). Principals include Milward on vocals and rhythm guitar, with Josh Roy Brown, Steve Mueller, Larry Packer, Eric Parker, Baker Rorick, and the late Steve Burgh; according to a recent flyer, they play "music at the crossroads of blues, rock, country, and soul."
That's a busy intersection, and many names weave throughout the book. Milward cites legendary music collector Harry Smith, whose Anthology of American Folk Music was the gateway drug for a generation of blues fans, demonstrating string tricks to a young Patti Smith at the Chelsea Hotel and producing the Fugs' first album. "And then you have Ed Sanders of the Fugs visiting Joplin two days before she died and noticing the bangles she wore to cover her heroin tracks."
Sanders, like many of Milward's other sources, lives in Woodstock. Crossroads's local connections cover the waterfront, from the exploits of local impresario Albert Grossman to Muddy Waters receiving a key to the town while recording The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album, with such local stars as Levon Helm and Paul Butterfield.
Indeed, the web of interconnections is so dense that one waggish GoodReads reviewer called it "Six Degrees of Robert Johnson." But the real joy of Crossroads is well-tuned prose that illuminates the music along with its history. Here's Milward on Hendrix:
"'Voodoo Chile' is a 15-minute musical meditation in the key of E, a virtual Gone with the Wind of the blues that opened deep in the Delta with Hendrix repeatedly hammering on a single string before casting our long, reverberating lead lines. Hendrix references 'Catfish Blues' in the introduction, but by the time the band enters, it's as if the blues had already moved from Mississippi to Chicago, with Hendrix's lyrics suggesting Muddy's "Hoochie Coochie Man.'"
For added pleasure, Milward suggests, "You can YouTube your way through it. The book starts with a blues collector who was willing to travel from Brooklyn to Washington to listen to a rare 78—not to buy it, just to listen—and now, boom, it's all right there on YouTube." Pull up a comfy chair.