Reviewed by: Dick Waterman: A Life in Blues by Tammy L. Turner Anthony Bushard Dick Waterman: A Life in Blues. By Tammy L. Turner. (American Made Music Series.) Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. [xiv, 240 p. ISBN 9781496822697 (hardcover), $28; ISBN 9781496822680 (e-book), $70.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Son House, Fred McDowell, B. B. King, Junior Wells, Taj Mahal, Bonnie Raitt, Big Mama Thornton, Buddy Guy, and Arlo Guthrie are well known to aficionados of blues, folk, and American roots music, and their careers have been well documented. These artists all benefitted tremendously, however, from someone who is not nearly as renowned, but as Tammy L. Turner argues, should be: Dick Waterman (b. 1935). Waterman was a musical promoter, photographer, and freelance writer, and, in Dick Waterman: A Life in Blues, Turner develops a fascinating and entertaining narrative about a man whose experiences behind the scenes are as eventful, colorful, and harrowing as the lives of the musicians he represented. Turner's fine account is based almost wholly on personal interviews conducted with Waterman from 2013 through 2018—though her first encounters with him came in the late 1990s as a graduate student at the University of Mississippi—as well as correspondence with Bonnie Raitt, Buddy Guy, B. B. King, Eric Clapton, and other blues/folk/roots luminaries dating back to 2011. These primary-source "Interviews, Correspondence, and Personal Communications" (pp. 217–18) serve as the sole documentation for the book, as it lacks a formal bibliography or notes to guide the reader. Thus, while Turner demonstrates an impressive ability to synthesize her numerous personal interviews into a compelling narrative and provides important insights into Waterman's pioneering efforts in promoting blues artists, the lack of secondary literature and critical commentary tends to isolate the reader from the larger world of blues scholarship and renders problematic some of the less savory anecdotes. Chapter titles in the book each derive from Son House lyrics, and in the opener, "I Didn't Have No Blues," the reader gains insight into Waterman's youth growing up in a relatively affluent Jewish household in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Waterman was a shy child and prone to stuttering, but he believes his social awkwardness and difficulty communicating verbally actually made him a better craftsman of the written word. After military service in the late 1950s, Waterman became a reporter at the local newspaper in Bridgeport, Connecticut, during which time he became interested in folk music and witnessed firsthand the developing folk scene through frequent trips to Greenwich Village and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Turner paints a detailed picture of the various clubs Waterman visited and musicians he met, including Phil Ochs, in a particularly alarming account of the abject squalor in his apartment. Turner also makes clear that Waterman not only was a devoted fan of the music but also was completely invested in [End Page 236] the folk-music culture and advocated for its importance more broadly. For instance, Waterman moved to Cambridge so that he could be in the middle of the scene and began to write for the Broadside of Boston (in addition to simultaneous work for the National Observer) because it helped Waterman "diversify and learn about different kinds of music" (p. 15). Waterman's dedication led to his covering the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, where he was "captivated" by Mississippi John Hurt (p. 16) and earned himself a job at Folklore Productions, where he helped book gigs for Bob Dylan, Gary Davis, and even Hurt. These experiences compelled Waterman, along with two fellow blues enthusiasts, to find the whereabouts of Son House, a journey partially dramatized in the documentary Two Trains Runnin' (2016) and covered by Waterman for the National Observer. The trail ultimately led back to Rochester, New York, where House had been living for more than twenty years since his Library of Congress recordings for Alan Lomax, unbeknownst to the rest of the musical world. Waterman took it upon himself to help revive House's career, thus initiating his life's work as one of the foremost promoters of blues music. Through Turner's account of Waterman's relationship with House, the reader gains an intimate sense of House's visceral...