The Voice of the Blues, edited by Jim O’Neal & Amy van Singel

The Voice of the Blues: Classic Interviews from Living Blues Magazine, edited by Jim O’Neal & Amy van Singel, New York and London: Routledge, 2002.

In the belief that the ultimate authorities and historians on the blues were the blues artists themselves, and that their stories were best told in their own words, Living Blues magazine published extensive question-and-answer interviews in almost every issue during the 1970s and ’80s. The Voice of the Blues collects 12 historic interviews, some conducted by editors Jim O’Neal and Amy van Singel, some by Kip Lornell, Tim Schuller, Bruce Iglauer, Bill Lindemann, and others, preserving the words of Georgia Tom Dorsey, Sleepy John Estes & Hammie Nixon, Houston Stackhouse, T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Eddie Boyd, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, Freddie King, Esther Phillips and Little Milton. Several interviews are expanded from the edited versions that originally appeared in the magazine, and the book also includes new or revised introductions and editorial notes and a foreword by Peter Guralnick.