Overview

After 50 years of making highly regarded music documentaries and releasing a well-received 2023 memoir titled Notes from the Road: A Filmmaker's Journey through American Music, filmmaker Robert Mugge is once again permitting 150 of his musician subjects (as well as others who support them) to speak for themselves, and this time at greater length. His new collection of thematically organized excerpts from favorite interviews is titled Quotes from the Road: The Wit and Wisdom of American Musicians and serves as a companion piece for his memoir. Among those discussing highlights of their lives and careers are singers and musicians depicted on the front cover: Sun Ra, Al Green, Sonny Rollins, Irma Thomas with Morgan Freeman, Dr. John, Gil Scott-Heron, Cyril Neville, Linda Ronstadt with Rubén Blades, Marcia Ball, Elvin Bishop, Bobby Rush with Lil' Ed Williams, and Otis Clay. Also featured are additional masters of blues, jazz, soul, gospel, folk, bluegrass, rhythm and blues, classical, Cajun, Creole, zydeco, swamp pop, roots rock, and Hawaiian music and dance, all sharing their insights, humor, and experience. In its ""starred"" review of Notes from the Road, Kirkus Reviews described the book as ""A scintillating memoir . . . a vibrant, entertaining panorama of music making and the picaresque struggle to capture it on film,"" and later dubbed it one of the 100 ""Best Indie Books of 2023."" Now, in acclaimed biographer Aidan Levy's foreword to Quotes from the Road, Levy declares: ""What you have in your hands-or on your screen-is not just a book. It's a time machine, an archive, a historical record, a musical record, a travelogue, a thousand stories all part of our one cosmic human story-maybe, most significantly, a road map to the heart and soul of American music.""

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9781971400068

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Reviews

Praise for Books by Robert Mugge ""A documentarian revisits the funkiest musical byways in this scintillating memoir...A vibrant, entertaining panorama of musicmaking and the picaresque struggle to capture it on film."" -Kirkus Reviews (starred review) ""The stories he tells go well beyond anecdotes about musicians. He opens us up to the whole world of documentary filmmaking: how they're financed; how they're recorded and edited. Notes from the Road is the best thing I've read about what it's like to direct films since Sidney Lumet's 1996 classic, Making Movies."" -Ken Tucker, NPR's Fresh Air w/Terry Gross ""One of our best and savviest documentarians about American culture brings his keen social insight and richly expansive vision to his family history. And what history! Saloon Man melds meticulous research with relentless narrative energy in bringing to vivid life Mugge's great-grandfather and namesake. The elder Robert Mugge, making his way in a turn-of-the-century America rife with both endless possibility and embedded bigotry, is shown throughout to be highly alert to injustice and just as inventive in his means of circumventing it. The lively and diverse supporting cast, from Black entertainers and radical activists to rapacious businessmen and intransigent prudes, enriches this tale of a life well-lived through both travail and triumph."" -Gene Seymour, Newsday critic and columnist and contributor to Bookforum, CNN.com, and The Washington Post

Author Information

Since 1976, Robert Mugge has produced more than three dozen documentaries about various aspects of American culture, with particular emphasis on traditional forms of American music. In his 2023 book, Notes from the Road: A Filmmaker's Journey through American Music, Mugge described the making of what he considered to be his twenty-five key music films to date, from Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise and Gospel According to Al Green to Deep Blues and New Orleans Music in Exile. His 2024 book, Saloon Man: A German Immigrant Battles the Limits of Liberty, 1870 to 1915, was a biography of his highly accomplished great-grandfather, also named Robert Mugge, and his 2026 book, Quotes from the Road: The Wit and Wisdom of American Musicians, is a collection of thematically organized excerpts from many of the interviews conducted for his films. All three books are published by The Sager Group. In addition to his many years as an independent filmmaker, and more recent ones as an indie author, Mugge has served as Filmmaker in Residence for Mississippi Public Broadcasting (2003 to 2005) and as an Endowed Chair Professor at Ball State University (2009 to 2014).

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