Lowdown: The Music of Boz Scaggs

Boz Scaggs has always been a musical artist of complexity.

Boz Scaggs founded his connection to music through the blues, but his lasting legacy is one of glamorous and romantic pop songwriting. He possessed a somewhat shy and sensitive demeanor never totally at home in the public eye, yet his claim to several chart-topping singles and albums, particularly the millions-selling and critically acclaimed Silk Degrees (1976), demanded constant exposure. The persona he expressed through his music was laid back, effortlessly cool, sophisticated, stylish, romantically charming, and suave. But the immense success he achieved in his career pointed in part to the driven and determined artist within.

Lowdown: The Music of Boz Scaggs examines the uniqueness of these contradictions and Boz Scaggs’s sixty-plus-year career and his rich and diverse musical catalogue. Over the decades, Scaggs collaborated with an array of talented heavies, from the Steve Miller Band to the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (which included a young Duane Allman) on Boz Scaggs (1969), from the session players on Silk Degrees (1976) who would form the hit band Toto to Donald Fagen and Michael McDonald on the Dukes of September’s 2010 Rhythm Revue tour.

This first-ever book on Boz, released in conjunction with his eightieth birthday year, is constructed around intensely thorough analysis of his complete discography, and new and exclusive in-depth interviews with a selection of Scaggs’s associated colleagues from his vast career.

Jude Warne is the author of America, the Band: An Authorized Biography and a contributor to the anthology Rag and Bones: An Exploration of the Band. She has written long and short-form pieces on Bruce Springsteen, Steely Dan, the Steve Miller Band, Procol Harum, and the Yardbirds, among others, for various publications including the Vinyl District, the Observer, and No Depression. She has also published a six-volume YA fiction series. She lives in New York City.