Tony Scherman

Tony Scherman is the author of Backbeat: Earl Palmer's Story , which won a 2000 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music writing. He was an editor at Musician and Audio and a contributing editor at Life ; he has written about art, music, American history, and American culture for dozens of publications, including the New York Times Magazine , the New York Times Arts and Leisure section, Atlantic Monthly , Rolling Stone , Smithsonian , American Heritage , New York , Entertainment Weekly...See more

Tony Scherman is the author of Backbeat: Earl Palmer's Story , which won a 2000 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music writing. He was an editor at Musician and Audio and a contributing editor at Life ; he has written about art, music, American history, and American culture for dozens of publications, including the New York Times Magazine , the New York Times Arts and Leisure section, Atlantic Monthly , Rolling Stone , Smithsonian , American Heritage , New York , Entertainment Weekly , and People . He was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1997. A magazine article he wrote that year about the poet-activist-professor Melvin Tolson was the basis for the 2007 Denzel Washington film The Great Debaters . He has two daughters and lives in Rockland County, New York. See less