Adam Gussow

Adam Gussow is a professor of English at the University of Mississippi and a professional blues harmonica player and teacher. The author of many books on the blues, including Mister Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir and Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition, he earned an AB and PhD from Princeton and an MA from Columbia. Satan & Adam, a 2018 documentary about his thirty-year, Harlem-based partnership with bluesman Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee, screened on Netflix for several years. Gussow’s many honors include the C. Hugh Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, the John G. Cawelti Award for Best Textbook/Primer in Popular and American Culture, and the Living Blues Award for Best Blues Book of 2017. His article, “Howard Men: Prince Jones, Carlton Jones, and the Evasions of Ta-Nehisi Coates,” was a Quillette Editors’ Choice of 2023.