For immediate release Contact: Yona Deshommes Associate Director of Publicity [email protected] (212) 698-7566

THE GOD GROOVE By DAVID RITZ

David Ritz has written over 50 books. Ritz’s job as a ghostwriter molded his prime directive into becoming the voice of who he was writing about, rejecting the temptation to implant his/her own point of view into the story. So, you’ve never really seen a clear portrait of the man himself until The God Groove, his first memoir.

Seeking an escape from death by boredom in advertising, Ritz began his 40-plus year journey as a writer and ghostwriter with a simple but seemingly impossibly goal: to be ’ first biographer. What began with a 32-year-old husband and father of two’s plane ride from Dallas to Los Angeles to bang on Ray’s front door began an odyssey from which he never truly returned as the same man.

The God Groove places Ritz in rooms with artists, musicians and academics who have shaped the last 50 years in American culture: the late , Blues legend , and the tortured genius of , for whom he writes the titles to the now- classic “”, the first stone on the path to Ritz becoming a songwriter in his own right. For immediate release Contact: Yona Deshommes Associate Director of Publicity [email protected] (212) 698-7566

Ritz documents the thoughts and feelings of late bluesman B.B. King on a tour bus through the cotton fields of the deep South. He bears witness to the technical artistry of Grandmaster Flash, and the evolving legacy of country icon among so many others. But The God Groove isn’t just about music or history, or American culture. It’s the story of one’s man’s journey through the lives of others while wrestling with substance abuse, sexual identity, and most importantly, his love of a God beyond the Jewish creator he was raised to know.

God is the only true subject within the pages of The God Groove, a protagonist who just happens to speak through the mouths and lives of some of the greatest to ever do what they do. For Ritz the whole trip, through various states and countries, through the decades that come and go and through the love and marriage with the girl he met in army-green denim, dancing to the Temptations at a college party, The God Groove is a story of art, redemption and transformation unlike anything else in print.

THE GOD GROOVE by David Ritz Howard Books Hardcover 978-1-5011-7715-6 July 2019 $26.00 256 pages