'Shoes' turnsa blind eye to its subject

You'll find a photo of Blind Willie McTell on the cover, but you'll be hard pressed to find the blues great from Thomson within the pages of Michael Gray's Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell.

The second part of the book title is an appropriate description. These 357 pages are all about Mr. Gray and his journey through Georgia and South Carolina tracing McTell's life. What you get, for the most part, is a book of asides punctuated with nuggets of information. A book about McTell would have been half as long and twice as interesting.

Mr. Gray is a British national who comes across at times as though he believed he was slumming while doing his research. He delights in making fun of the goobers he meets in the process.

He snidely calls North Augusta ''a miserable little place," and Thomson "a collection of stores, including a dying womenswear store where the clothes in the rotten wood-framed windows have been bleached to forlorn and anemic colours by long years in the sun, and a seriously cheap and shoddy supermarket tucked in a corner of the parking lot.''

He's a good writer, but there are long, unnecessary passages that prove he has an eye for detail but is in need of a self-edit button on his keyboard. He goes into a too-long account of his excursion to Atlanta's main library, and another describing the Vital Records Building Office.

He also quotes long passages from original sources without checking for veracity. One extensive section derived from an interview by another author with McTell's wife, Kate, has her rambling on about Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta: ''You know they had a tunnel at the old Grady's. I imagine they still have it, where, if nobody claims the body, they got a train that carries all that stuff out to Marietta River and dumps it over there: the bodies and everything."

Mr. Gray seems to care about music and has a talent at turning a pithy phrase. This book is worth a skim if you're looking for an interesting read for a rainy Sunday afternoon, but if you're in need of a definitive biography of McTell, look elsewhere.