The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason is a thoughtful celebration and an engagingly detailed reading of the work of one of the great American music journalists. Above all Don Armstrong captures the astonishing energy with which Gleason sought to make sense of the music (and the country) that he loved.

Simon Frith, Emeritus Professor of Music, University of Edinburgh, UK

Ralph Gleason was among the most astute and impactful interpreters and mediators of mid-20th century American music, hip to everything from Bunk Johnson and Billie Holiday to Miles Davis's Bitches Brew and the Grateful Dead. In this superb book, Don Armstrong gives Gleason what he deserves, and what we desperately need: a richly detailed chronicle of this singular writer/producer/social activist's career, and a timely argument about the indispensable role such people play in shaping and sustaining our culture and our democracy.

John Gennari, Professor of English and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, University of Vermont, USA, and author of Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (2006)

[A] thorough, unstuffy study of a figure who, like the early journalistic figures he encountered in his father's horse-racing papers, took on the role of secular priest, dishing out revelations and real talk in equal measure, all the while believing “in the magic that can set you free”.

The Times Literary Supplement

We've waited too long for a full-length biography of legendary music journalist Ralph J. Gleason... In this judicious and balanced account, Armstrong casts Gleason as a musical omnivore whose first love was jazz.

Alta

Page after page, Armstrong is in the audience with Gleason and with the crowds and fans, and he's backstage, too, before and after the stars of the shows belt out their hit singles. He's up close and personal, as well as at a distance, able to sketch the big picture and situate the music, whether bebop, the blues or rock, in the social and political climate in which they were nurtured, from the days of the Cold War and McCarthyism to Woodstock and Watergate.

Rock and the Beat Generation

Armstrong's biography does what I want a biography of a critic to do, emphasizing the work, contextualizing it, exploring not just what went into Gleason's writing but what came out-the impact his writing had, the feuds and the praise it inspired.

RockCritics.com