John campbell artist new orleans

A book about the late, transcendentally great blues guitarist and conjure man John Campbell is long overdue. It’s almost inconceivable that no one including yours truly, who wrote the most visceral prose of my career about Campbell for OffBeat Magazine and Details (Magazine) or Keith Spera, who penned a deeply evocative remembrance in OffBeat shortly after John’s untimely death at 41 in 1993—ever took the next step and wrote a book about the life and music of a man whose story is so compelling it almost writes itself.

John’s star burned incandescently bright for just a few short years, when he shot from complete obscurity—to all but the cognoscenti who watched him evolve from playing pickup gigs in his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana to bus-hopping across Ark-La-Tex as a solo blues guitarist on the crawfish circuit—to become a meteorite blazing across the firmament of the early ’90s blues revival.

What happened during that brief journey is the stuff of