“The be-boppingest biography!…(A) compendious array of celebratory voices all in awe and homage to the Lord…Paying due attention to the necessary details of biography, Trager traces the trajectory of Lord Buckley’s rise to prominence (and fall into obscurity after his death in 1960) with a careful eye, but the real joy of this account can be found in the many voices recreating the electricity of Buckley’s life and times. Dig it.” Starred review, Kirkus Reviews

“Trager has assembled a prismatic portrait by combining oral history, articles, reviews, liner notes, obituaries, critiques and biographical bits with Buckley’s own monologues, still classic creations. Outstanding is a chapter analyzing Buckley’s influence on the young Bob Dylan…Certain to be embraced by both longtime Buckley buffs and newcomers to His Lordship.” – Publishers Weekly

“(An) exhaustive, loving oral history…An invaluable source of information about an underacknowledged master of American comedy.” – Booklist

A shameless con man, an old-time vaudevillian, stand-up comedian and jazz shaman, Lord Buckley single-handedly brought the hip semantic into the mainstream in the 1950’s, mixing scat singing, black street talk and the King’s English to tell and retell the stories of Jesus, Shakespeare, the Marquis de Sade, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and much more. He also worked with and/or left his mark on Charlie Parker, Dylan, Sinatra, Neal Cassady, Ken Kesey, George Harrison, James Dean, and Lenny Bruce.

If so many of the most influential voices of our century were themselves influenced by this man, why is it that hardly anyone knows who he is? In this, the first study of the man behind the myth, Oliver Trager explains Buckley’s life and career and the enormous following he developed in the entertainment community as well as the reasons behind the obscurity into which the man and his work disappeared after his death in 1960.

Dig Infinity! is accompanied by a CD compilation of recordings from some of Buckley’s most legendary performances and pieces, as well as an interview of Buckley by Studs Terkel.

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