In late 1967, the music journalist Stanley Booth was on assignment to write about the Memphis soul sound for The Saturday Evening Post when he watched Otis Redding and the guitarist and producer Steve Cropper sit on folding chairs at Stax Records in Memphis as they composed “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.”
In one of the many vivid behind-the-scenes moments Mr. Booth captured over the years, he described Mr. Redding strumming a bright red dime-store guitar and singing the opening lyric:
Sittin’ in the mornin’ sun —
“‘But I don’t know why he’s sittin’,’ Otis says, rocking back and forth as if he were still singing. ‘He’s just sittin’. Got to be more to it than that.’ He pauses for a moment, shaking his head. Then he says, ‘Wait. Wait a minute,’ to Steve, who has been waiting patiently.”
I left my home in Georgia,
Headed for the Frisco Bay —
“He pauses again, runs through the changes on his fractured guitar, then sings,”
I had nothing to live for,
Looks like nothing’s gonna come my way.”
Mr. Booth also wrote about the subsequent recording session, at which a seemingly satisfied Mr. Redding listened to the playback of the song and said, “That’s it.” He died soon after, in a plane crash on Dec. 10, 1967, before the release of the song, which would rise to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. (It was his only No. 1 hit.)
“I spent the last week of Otis’s life with him, told him goodbye on Friday and Sunday night he was dead,” Mr. Booth said in an interview in 2015 with The Vinyl Press, a website for vinyl record enthusiasts. “He made other people feel good. I’ve never really recovered from his death.”
The article offered an early glimpse at Mr. Booth’s often-dazzling writing and ability to evoke a scene with well-chosen details and dialogue. That gift made him a respected journalist, if somewhat under the radar; his work appeared in Playboy, Esquire, Vanity Fair and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as lesser-known publications like Eye magazine. And he famously embedded himself with the Rolling Stones on their 1969 tour, which resulted in an acclaimed book.
He had a special affinity for blues musicians, especially those he met in Memphis and wrote about, like the guitarist Furry Lewis.
“One of the things that made him curmudgeonly was that many of the blues musicians lived in squalor,” Ruby Booth, Mr. Booth’s daughter, said in an interview, “so he felt blessed to create a record of the lives of people like Furry Lewis.”
Mr. Booth died on Dec. 20 in a nursing home in Memphis. He was 82.
Ms. Booth confirmed the death but said she did not know the specific cause.
Irvin Stanley Booth Jr. was born on Jan. 5, 1942, in Waycross, Ga., near the Okefenokee Swamp, and later moved with his parents, first to Macon, Ga., and then to Memphis. His father was an executive vice president at Lincoln American Life Insurance, and his mother, Ruby (McClellan) Booth, was an elementary-school teacher.
He graduated from Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis) in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in English and briefly did postgraduate work at Tulane University in New Orleans before returning to Memphis, where he worked for the Tennessee Department of Welfare for about a year.
He shifted to journalism after meeting Mr. Lewis (who was working as a street sweeper for the city of Memphis but hadn’t performed there much since the Depression) and the pioneering Memphis rock ’n’ roll disc jockey Dewey Phillips. There was, he decided, a whole world for him to write about.
One of Mr. Booth’s earliest major articles was a lengthy profile of Elvis Presley, published in Esquire in 1968, which had the fly-on-the-wall reportorial richness associated with Gay Talese’s 1966 portrait of Frank Sinatra, also in Esquire. His profile of Mr. Lewis appeared in Playboy in 1970.
By then, Mr. Booth was at work on his Rolling Stones book, an outgrowth of an assignment from Eye magazine in 1968 to travel to Europe to write about the band.
“I was from Memphis and a fellow blues aficionado, so they had a use for me,” he told Louder, an alternative music website, in 2014, explaining why the band accepted him. “I was able to introduce them to B.B. King.”
Mr. Booth joined the Stones on tour in the fall of 1969 and became an insider. He snorted heroin and cocaine with Keith Richards, and he lived with Mr. Richards in England for a while after the tour.
He was also perched behind Mr. Richards’s amplifier at the band’s free concert at Altamont Speedway in Tracy, Calif., in December 1969, when a member of the Hells Angels, which had been hired to provide security, fatally stabbed Meredith Hunter, a concertgoer.
But Mr. Booth’s book, “Dance With the Devil: The Rolling Stones and Their Times,” was not published until 1984. He had spent much of that time trying to write the book in a cabin in the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas, a time of his life when he was abusing drugs and suffering from clinical depression.
“He was also bipolar, which he struggled with all his life, and he was a very difficult person to be around,” Ms. Booth, his daughter, said.
Writing about the book in The New York Times Book Review, the Times music critic Robert Palmer wrote that Mr. Booth “gets closer to the essence of the Rolling Stones and their world than any previous author,” particularly in what he called “the most authoritative and insightful account in print” of the Altamont violence.
“Without knowing exactly what,” Mr. Booth wrote about Altamont, “we all felt that something bad had happened. I assumed, and I was not given to flights of horrible imaginings, that the Angels had killed several people.” Referring to Gram Parsons, the country-rock pioneer who performed at the concert with the Flying Burrito Brothers, he added, “Gram told me later that he saw Meredith Hunter lifted up, with a great spreading ketchup-colored stain on the back of his suit.”
When the book was published in paperback in 2000, it had a new title, “The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones,” and a blurb from Mr. Richards, who called the book “the only one I can read and say, ‘Yeah, that’s how it was.’”
Mr. Booth’s other books include a biography of Mr. Richards, “Keith: Standing in the Shadows” (1995), and two collections of his articles, “Rythm Oil” (1992) — the title refers to a potion sold on Beale Street in Memphis — and “Red Hot and Blue” (2019). At his death, his daughter said, he had been working on his autobiography.
Mr. Booth was married and divorced several times, most recently to Diann Blakely, a poet, who died in 2014, his daughter said. Ms. Booth’s mother, Paula Townsend, was not married to Mr. Booth.
During Mr. Booth’s reporting for Playboy on Furry Lewis, he followed the bluesman on his street-sweeping route and then to a coffee house where he performed.
“He had begun to play a slow, sad blues,” Mr. Booth wrote, “one that none of us had ever heard, a song without a name: ‘My mother’s dead,’ he sang, the guitar softly following, ‘my father just as well’s to be. Ain’t got nobody to say one kind word for me.’
“The room, which had been filled with noise, was now quiet. ‘People holler mercy,’ Furry sang, ‘don’t know what mercy mean. People … ’ — and the guitar finished the line. ‘Well, if it mean any good, Lord, have mercy on me.’”
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