Busker’s Holiday – Noted blues scholar and harmonica player publishes first novel
Modern Blues Harmonica is pleased to announce the publication of Busker’s Holiday, a taut, sexy first novel about the summer busking scene in Europe and a pair of wild-hearted young men who make a pitch for fame and glory, finding a girl or two along the way.
Adam Gussow, the author, is an associate professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. Gussow has published three previous books on the blues, including Mister Satan’s Apprentice (1998), an award-winning memoir about his years as a Harlem street musician.
Set in the late 1980s, Busker’s Holiday is the story of McKay Chernoff, a Columbia University grad student with a harmonica in his pocket and a blues band in his background. Desolate and despairing after a disastrous romantic breakup, McKay decides to fly off to Paris and reinvent himself as a street performer.
What follows is an epic summer voyage into the busking life, propelled by the mad exploits of Billy Lee Grant, a fearless young guitar shredder whose Memphis-to-Mississippi pedigree and Dylanesque surrealism make him, when he explodes into view, precisely the partner McKay has been yearning for.
Burning like a latter-day Dean Moriarty, Bill goads McKay into a sun-drenched, all-night bender, stoked by wine, women, mushrooms, and trains, that careens down out of Avignon and across the French Riviera. What happens next—in Florence, Solingen, Amsterdam, Paris—is a story of purgatory, redemption, and love regained. Hope, in a word, as a modern troubadour returns from his wanderings, reborn.
For more information on Busker’s Holiday and a photo of the author as a reckless young street performer, visit the website:
http://www.modernbluesharmonica.com/buskers-holiday.html