Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, "Coon Songs", and the Dark Parkway to Blues and Jazz Lynn Abbott & Doug Seroff Ragged But Right takes its place in the Blues Hall of Fame alongside The [...]
Paul and Beth Garon saluted Memphis Minnie’s iconic status as a premier blues artist and symbolic feminist figure in the initial publication of “Woman With Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues” in 1992 by Da Capo Press. [...]
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 [...]