Blues Books

A celebration of Black culture beyond the white gaze, from the \"MacArthur genius\" who has been dubbed 'the most important cultural critic in America right now' Chicago Tribune At the March on...

Black Music, Black Poetry offers readers a fuller appreciation of the diversity of approaches to reading black American poetry. It does so by linking a diverse body of poetry to musical genres that...

Spreadin' Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters,1880-1930 is a classic work on a little-studied subject in American music history: the contribution of African-American songwriters to the world of...

Blues: The Basics offers a concise introduction to a century of the blues. Organized chronologically, it focuses on the major eras in the growth and development of this popular musical style...

Blues: The Basics offers a concise introduction to a century of the blues. Organized chronologically, it focuses on the major eras in the growth and development of this popular musical style...

Across his directorial films, American filmmaker Dennis Hopper used music and sound to propel the narrative, signpost the era in which the films were made, and delineate the characters’ place within...

Feel Like Going Home vividly brings to life such early blues masters as Muddy Waters , Skip James, and Howlin' Wolf, along with illuminating excursions into the blues-based rock 'n' roll of Jerry Lee...

Born in South Carolina, White spent his childhood as a lead boy for traveling blind bluesmen. In the early '30s he moved to New York and became a popular blues star, then introduced folk-blues to a...

What was it like to be Elvis Presley? What did it feel like when impossible fame made him its prisoner? As the world's first rock star there was no one to tell him what to expect, no one with whom he...

Jerry Portnoy grew up in Chicago hearing the blues being played outside his father’s rug store on famed Maxwell Street during the late 1940s and early '50s.  After dropping out of college, he became...

Down On The Corner is the story of music performed on the streets, in subways, in parks, in schoolyards, on the back of flatbed trucks, and beyond, from the 1920s to the present day.Drawing on years...