Stephen Calt

Stephen George Calt was an American blues researcher and writer, who wrote biographies of Skip James and Charley Patton.
A teenage blues fan, Calt met Skip James at the 1964 Newport [Folk Festival]. James allowed Calt to interview him numerous times over subsequent years, and the resultant tapes formed the basis of Calt's biography, I'd Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues, published in 1994, many years after James' death. In it, Calt says of their first meeting: "Had I known how our lives would intersect over the next four years, I would not have initiated that first conversation."
In 1988, Calt's book, King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton, was published. He also wrote Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary, co-wrote R. Crumb's Heroes of Blues, Jazz and Country, and wrote many articles and liner notes on pre-war blues music.
Calt died of emphysema in Queens, New York, in 2010, aged 64.