As his story opens, Coley Williams, a blues musician as old as the music itself, becomes the reluctant recipient of a guitar-shaped cake courtesy of Al Roker in celebration of what may or may not be his 100th birthday. Unimpressed and probably reluctant to become a museum exhibit, he decides to celebrate with a bottle, a joint, and the company of friends. With this scene, author David Dalton quickly establishes that Been Here And Gone will attempt nothing less than the grand project its subtitle suggests: "a memoir of the blues." It's a dubious undertaking given the cliches and stereotypes that have piled up around the music, as well as the fact that it's the conceptual brainchild of one man (Martin I. Green) but the product of another (former Rolling Stone editor and Jim Morrison biographer Dalton) with no direct connection to the world he portrays. But it doesn't take long for Dalton's winning, detailed blues fantasy, an achievement in cultural immersion as impressive in its best parts as Memoirs Of A Geisha, to lay any fears to rest. With colorful but three-dimensional narration from the fictional Williams, Been Here And Gone doesn't so much have a plot as a through-line corresponding to blues history. Befriended by Charley Patton, Williams hoboes his way through the Mississippi Delta, takes a detour into Texas in time to meet up with Blind Lemon Jefferson, finds gainful employment in the road shows of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, and so forth, following the blues through the 20th century from the mythic South to Chicago's Maxwell Street and back again. Far more gifted as a writer than as a storyteller, Dalton keeps his novel entertaining from start to finish, but his greatest achievements occur in Gone's first half, a remarkable evocation of the world that created the blues and a fine primer in blues history. Freed of the burdens of reportage, Dalton revisits a place in which the supernatural and the mundane mingle indiscriminately, where "you could imagine the Devil come knockin' on your door." It makes sense as the birthplace of the blues, and Dalton's ability to make it come alive makes Gone a must for even the most casual fan of the music its protagonist embodies.