Written by one of rock's most renowned word-slingers, Ralph Gleason Award winner Charles Shaar Murray, The Hellhound Sample is a serious contender for the title of the definitive rock'n'roll novel. Its focus is on the Moon family, an African-American musical dynasty spanning three generations. At its head sits James "Blue" Moon, legendary blues guitarist from the Mississippi: his daughter, Venetia Moon, is a soul diva, and his grandson, Calvin, a millionaire rapper, producer and mogul. But the Moon clan's seamless influence on pop culture masks a family riven with discord. Venetia hasn't spoken to her dad in years, and has fallen out of love with her music, too, churning out lucrative but vacuous jingles and adverts. Meanwhile her son, Calvin, is living a double-life. By day a paragon of hip-hop machismo, his label specializing in often violent, homophobic and misogynistic recordings, by night Calvin frequents rent-boys and gay clubs. And people are starting to talk - a situation that threatens to endanger both his livelihood and life expectancy. James Blue himself is having a worse time still, having just been diagnosed with liver cancer. Blue realizes it's time to put his house in order, pull together his dispersed family, and make one final record. Looking to kill both birds with the same stone, he contacts his daughter and grandson and invites them to record with him, opening up a can of worms sealed for decades. Enter hapless and affable British rock legend Mick Hudson, trailing a string of addictions, divorces and demons as he staggers through his fourth decade of musical stardom. On top of all this, the troubled troubadours have to deal with murderous homophobic yardies, teenage daughters, imposing managers, an increasingly curious media, their own sizable egos, Robert Johnson (or at least his ghost)... and the Devil. Or whatever entity it was that slipped Mick and James their talents, guitars and fortunes, and is now starting, in their dreams and visions, to get a bit impatient for a certain unspecified recompense.The Hellhound Sample is a hilarious, reeling distillation of six decades of musical mythology and history, the world of rock'n'roll re-imagined, in peerless prose, by a writer that partied with the Stones, took tea with Miles, and nearly came to blows with the Clash. Funny, warm and vivid, with a cast of genuinely unforgettable characters, The Hellhound Sample is The Corrections of rock.

With John Lee Hooker’s death in June 2001 the world lost one of the last great Mississippi Delta bluesmen. Acclaimed writer Charles Schaar Murray’s Boogie Man is the authorized and authoritative biography of this musician whose extraordinary career spanned over fifty years and included over one-hundred albums and five Grammy Awards. Murray was given unparalleled access to Hooker, and lets him tell his own story in his own words, from life in the Deep South to San Francisco, from the 1948 blues anthem “Boogie Chillen” to the Grammy-winning album The Healer nearly a half-century later. Boogie Man is far more than merely a brilliant biography of one man; it also gives the story of the music that inspired him. “When I die,” Hooker said, they’ll bury the blues with me. But the blues will never die.” Here is the book that does him and his music full justice.

Called by Entertainment Weekly "The best book on Hendrix", Crosstown Traffic rode their A-list for over two months and won the prestigious Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award. Roots-savvy British critic Charles Shaar Murray assesses the lifework of guitarist Jimi Hendrix in the context of black musical tradition, social history, and the upheaval of the 1960s. 8 pages of photographs.

'You the funkiest man alive.' Miles Davis' accolade was the perfect expression of John Lee Hooker's apotheosis as blues superstar: recording with the likes of Van Morrison, Keith Richards and Carlos Santana; making TV commercials (Lee Jeans); appearing in films (The Blues Brothers); and even starring in Pete Townshend's musical adaptation of Ted Hughes' story The Iron Man. His was an extraordinary life. Born in the American deep south, he moved to Detroit and then, in a career spanning over fifty years, recorded hypnotic blues classics such as 'Boogie Chillen', rhythm-and-blues anthems such as 'Dimples' and 'Boom Boom' and, in his final, glorious renaissance, the Grammy-winning album The Healer. Charles Shaar Murray's authoritative biography vividly, and often in John Lee Hooker's own words, does magnificent justice to the man and his music.