Robert Palmer was born and educated in Little Rock, Ark., where he began writing about music and played in a number of blues, jazz and rock bands. A founder and organizer of the Memphis Blues festivals of the middle and late '60s, Palmer was also The New York Times' first full-time rock writer and chief pop critic (1976-88) and has been a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. His articles have also appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Saturday Review, The Journal of American Folklore, Ethnomusicology, and other publications. He has taught courses in American music at Yale, Carnegie-Mellon, Bowdoin, the University of Mississippi, the Smithsonian Institution and Brooklyn College, where he was the first senior research fellow of the Institute for Studies in American Music to teach and write a musical monograph on rock 'n' roll.

Palmer is the author of "Rock and Roll: An Unruly History" and "Deep Blues," among other books, and he served as writer and music director for two award-winning documentary films, "The World According to John Coltrane" and "Deep Blues." Since producing the latter film's soundtrack for Atlantic Records, Palmer has also produced several albums for the Fat Possum label, winning a number of polls and awards.

• http://bostonphoenix.com/archive/music/97/11/26/ROBERT_PALMER.html (Ted Drozdowski, Boston Phoenix)
• http://www1.minn.net/~egusto/a95.htm (Stephen Holden, New York Times)
• http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/music/palmer-97.php (Robert Christgau, Village Voice)
• http://www.vh1.com/artists/news/1940/11211997/palmer_robert.jhtml (Chris Nelson, Addicted To Noise)
• http://www.80sretromusic.com/biography/P/robert.htm (Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide)
• http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:rlf3zff8eh2k~T1
• http://www.arjazz.org/artists/hof/2002/2002_palmer.html (Jobeth Briton - wife)
• http://www.jazzhouse.org/gone/lastpost2.php3?edit=920666057 (Eric Nisenson, Jazz Notes)
• http://www.mnblues.com/memorial/rpalmer.html (press release upon death)
• http://www.alligator.com/artists/album.cfm?AlbumID=al4769&ArtistID=061 (Palmer's liner notes to Rufus Thomas LP)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Palmer_(author/producer)
• http://www.furious.com/Perfect/palmer.html (link entire magazine?)
• http://weeklywire.com/ww/12-01-97/boston_music_3.html

1. Deep Blues (1981, reprinted 1995, 0140062238)
Amazon customer revirew: Palmer's love of the blues shines through in this exceptional book. He's not interested in showing off his knowledge of the form (although that knowledge is exceptional); he's interested in illuminating for the reader the roots of a great indigenous art form and how that form developed in the 20th century. In that effort, he succeeds masterfully. A fine early section explores how the music that we call the blues was seeded in N. America by African music. That chapter is a mini-history lesson in itself; Palmer shows how the music of slaves from W. Africa was viewed as subversive and dangerous by whites in the new land. The remainder of the book is chock full of portraits of the heroes of early blues in the Mississippi Delta, from Charley Patton to Son House to Robert Johnson to Little Walter to Muddy Waters and beyond. Palmer shows how these men developed a music that grew directly out of the soil of the Delta, making do with the instruments they had and often living itinerant lives, moving from tiny town to tiny town to play dances and juke joints to keep the music alive. The book also describes the historic migration of African-Americans from the Deep South to the industrial cities of the North, most importantly, of course, Chicago, where the musicians transformed the blues again, creating the electrified sounds that exerted such a powerful influence on white rock musicians from London to Liverpool to La Jolla, California. Palmer has given us a great work with "Deep Blues," one that should be read by students of music and social history alike. It deserves a prominent place on the bookshelf of any serious lover of music.
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2. Rock & Roll: An Unruly History 0517700506
by Robert Palmer (1996) (companion to PBS series)
Rock and roll is a profoundly American art form, the musical expression of revolutionary changes in popular culture and values, a Dionysian eruption that hit the white-bread fifties like a hurricane. It was a force destined to shake up subsequent decades and transform American culture. Throughout its nearly four-decade history, rock and roll has continued to reinvent itself, to challenge, to upset as well as delight, to break rules and make new ones. Rock & Roll: An Unruly History is the companion guide to PBS's ten-part series on rock that aired in September. When PBS first conceived the Rock & Roll series, they sought out Robert Palmer, an acclaimed rock historian, writer, and the New York Times's first full-time pop music critic, to help assemble the names, events, and landmarks that are the terrain of rock history. Palmer acted as the chief advisor to the series and it was this association that inspired him to write ROCK & ROLL: An Unruly History. ROCK & ROLL traces the course of rock's rich history through Palmer's own perceptions and experiences. Incorporating countless interviews with rock personalities that he has conducted over the last three decades, ROCK & ROLL follows rock's road of creative flashpoints, but diverges, too, to explore the fundamental traditions that have helped define both the music and its culture. With a corresponding chapter to each part in the series, ROCK & ROLL shows how people, places, and events from rock "gods" to little known session musicians, from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to the far reaches of West Africa shaped and defined the music's most important epochs. Yet, to give rock the more in-depth analysis that it deserves, Palmer has written three additional essays "I Put a Spell on You," "Delinquents of Heaven, Hoodlums from Hell," and "The Church of the Sonic Guitar" which respectively explore the rudiments of rhythm, the ritual of rebellion, and the story of the "six-string" in rock. In ROCK & ROLL, Robert Palmer traces rock's ongoing evolution, showing how its many styles and early influences from blues and gospel to reggae, punk, and rap overlap and distinguish themselves from one another. With more than one hundred and fifty illustrations, ROCK & ROLL is the best of the two primary approaches to rock and roll history the history of innovative flashpoints, and the history of an ongoing tradition. As told through the senses and lifelong experiences of one of rock's preeminent critics, ROCK & ROLL is the most insightful and intelligent history of rock ever written.
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3. Rolling Stones (1985)
Robert Christgau's review: French Roast Rock III once again makes you turn pages to find out who wrote it, and I wish I could complain louder. Robert Palmer has put more care into the text here than he did with Jerry Lee Lewis Rocks!, but both the history and the analysis are fairly pedestrian, especially measured against the standard of his definitive Deep Blues. As so often happens with these picture books, important themes--most significantly the tension between life-force and death wish--are mapped but never satisfactorily explored. Even the musical descriptions, always Palmer's long suit, do full justice only to Keith Richards, who appears to have been his most useful primary source. And I don't know about you, but I find that the Stones' songs have worn a lot better than their supposedly iconic faces, which appear in no less than 288 versions over these 256 pages.
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4. Jerry Lee Lewis Rocks! (1981)
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5. Baby That Was Rock & Roll: The Legendary Leiber & Stoller ()