Roy Book Binder Will Perform at The Focal Point on September 22

Roy Book Binder has performed with iconic bluesmen Reverend Gary Davis, Pink Anderson, Robert Lockwood, Arthur Big Boy Crudup, B.B. King, and many additional artists including Ray Charles, Doc and Merle Watson, Bonnie Raitt and J.J. Cale.

“I don’t always consider myself a blues musician but sometimes more of a traveling minstrel,” says the man that many people call “The Book.”

Over the years he has absorbed hundreds of songs, stories and legends about folk music, country, ragtime and acoustic blues that originated and became popular in the early to mid-20th century.

He plays, sings or talks his way through those historic musical idioms in more than 40 stage performances every year across the United States.

“Aside from his accomplished fingerpicking, Book Binder is known for his dry wit and hilarious monologues often about his adventures as blues great Reverend Gary Davis’ driver in the late 1960s,” wrote journalist Ian Zack in Acoustic Guitar Magazine. “The stories are rehearsed and finely tuned, but they come off as spontaneous yarns…and they perfectly complement his songs: a mixture of originals, classics, and obscurities.”

Fifty-two years of performing at clubs, festivals, coffee houses and places he parked his motor home and hung his hat – whether his choice is newsboy style, porkpie, riverboat gambler or cowboy hat– have generated experiences that prompt Roy to assert, ““I’m a travelin’ man. My stories about people and places are interesting to this day because I was there!”

On Saturday, September 22, “The Book” will perform at The Focal Point at 2720 Sutton Boulevard, St. Louis, 63143, where he will appear onstage starting at 8 p.m. Tickets are $15 in advance, $20 at the door. (https://www.brownpapertickets.com/profile/85789)

Whether picking old time country blues, ragtime or traditional folk styles, or a style that is sometimes called “hands in the oatmeal,” he is a celebrated master of the acoustic blues and ragtime guitar. Since he launched his musical adventures in Greenwich Village in 1966, Book Binder has recorded some 12 albums, contributed to many other recordings, often appeared on television, met more celebrities and done more media interviews than he can count.

Yet he still finds time to teach folk/blues guitar master classes at the Fur Peace Ranch created by his friend Jorma Kaukonen, who previously cofounded the original Jefferson Airplane and the blues band Hot Tuna.

“My life is the music and carrying the music on. Anything else gets in the way,” says Book Binder. He drives his motor home packed with vintage guitars more than 50,000 miles a year crisscrossing the nation for performance dates in every direction. He calls himself “semi-famous.”

“I’ve been traveling and playing music for more than 50 years. I live kind of outside the mainstream of life, and I like that,” says Roy. He has a house in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he winters, but is otherwise on the road.

Songs such as “Candy Man Blues” by Mississippi Fred McDowell (circa 1923) are a Roy Book Binder trademark; so is performing classic old favorites such as “Hesitation Blues,” “It Coulda Been Worse,” “Police Dog Blues,” and his own compositions “He was a Friend of Mine” and “Goin’ Back to Tampa.”

See “The Book” perform those and more at The Focal Point on September 22. Experience true Americana.

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