In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Davis, controversial activist, author, and professor widely known for her revolutionary politics, argues against some conventional views of women and their songs in the blues. The lyrics sung [...]
The vaudeville theater was the major public venue for blues in its earliest years, before the advent of radio, blues records, and jukeboxes. Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, whose previous books chronicled the minstrel and [...]
Red River Blues was hailed as the definitive study of traditional blues from the Southeastern states when it was published in 1986, and it remains so today thanks to the thoroughness of author Bruce Bastin’s [...]
French writer, producer, and translator Sebastian Danchin, who played guitar with blues bands in Chicago in the 1970s, was a few years too late to spend time with Earl Hooker, who had died of tuberculosis [...]
Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942, by JohnW. Work, Lewis Wade Jones, and Samuel C. Adams, Jr.; Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov, Editors Alan Lomax’s Land Where the [...]
I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy, by Bob Riesman, has earned a place as one of the most definitive blues biographies since it was published in 2011 by University [...]
Father of the Blues by W.C. Handy is a monumental opus that is indispensable to the study of American musical history. Published in 1941, the book traces Handy’s background as a trained orchestra leader, his [...]
Jeff Todd Titon's Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis ranks as one of the most important analytical studies of the blues, examining the music in an incisive and interconnected web of contexts, including [...]
Dream Boogie is the fourth book by Peter Guralnick, America's premier music biographer, to attain Blues Hall of Fame status. In this meticulously researched and detailed 750-page opus, Guralnick delves into the mind, music and [...]
Canadian professor Rob Bowman, leading authority on the legendary Stax operation out of Memphis, spent 12 years researching Soulsville USA, and his familiarity both with music and the business operations of the iconic label makes [...]