The life of blues legend Robert Johnson becomes the centerpiece for this innovative look at what many consider to be America's deepest and most influential music genre. Pivotal are the questions surrounding why Johnson was ignored by the core black audience of his time yet now celebrated as the greatest figure in blues history. Trying to separate myth from reality, biographer Elijah Wald studies the blues from the inside -- not only examining recordings but also the recollections of the musicians themselves, the African-American press, as well as examining original research. What emerges is a new appreciation for the blues and the movement of its artists from the shadows of the 1930s Mississippi Delta to the mainstream venues frequented by today's loyal blues fans.
An immensely pleasurable book that unlocks the door to one of the most unusual and diverse regions in the United States, the culturally rich Delta flatland embraced by two rivers, the Mississippi and the Yazoo
A Rolling Stone-Kirkus Best Music Book of 2020 “[Brother Robert} book does much to pull the blues master out of the fog of myth.”—Rolling Stone An intimate memoir by blues legend Robert Johnson's stepsister, including new details about his family, music, influences, tragic death, and musical afterlife Though Robert Johnson was only twenty-seven years young and relatively unknown at the time of his tragic death in 1938, his enduring recordings have solidified his status as a progenitor of the Delta blues style. And yet, while his music has retained the steadfast devotion of modern listeners, much remains unknown about the man who penned and played these timeless tunes. Few people alive today actually remember what Johnson was really like, and those who do have largely upheld their silence-until now. In Brother Robert, nonagenarian Annye C. Anderson sheds new light on a real-life figure largely obscured by his own legend: her kind and incredibly talented stepbrother, Robert Johnson. This book chronicles Johnson's unconventional path to stardom, from the harrowing story behind his illegitimate birth, to his first strum of the guitar on Anderson's father's knee, to the genre-defining recordings that would one day secure his legacy. Along the way, readers are gifted not only with Anderson's personal anecdotes, but with colorful recollections passed down to Anderson by members of their family-the people who knew Johnson best. Readers also learn about the contours of his working life in Memphis, never-before-disclosed details about his romantic history, and all of Johnson's favorite things, from foods and entertainers to brands of tobacco and pomade. Together, these stories don't just bring the mythologized Johnson back down to earth; they preserve both his memory and his integrity. For decades, Anderson and her family have ignored the tall tales of Johnson "selling his soul to the devil" and the speculative to fictionalized accounts of his life that passed for biography. Brother Robert is here to set the record straight. Featuring a foreword by Elijah Wald and a Q&A with Anderson, Wald, Preston Lauterbach, and Peter Guralnick, this book paints a vivid portrait of an elusive figure who forever changed the musical landscape as we know it.
Winner of the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, this mususical and cultural exploration of the rich, sorrow-laden birth of the blues is an intimate and respectful look at an integral part of African American culture--a master work that has been 60 years in the making. Photos.
Collectors of illustrator R. Crumb's work prize the music-oriented trading card sets he created in the 1980s. Now they appear together for the first time in book form, along with a CD of music selected and compiled by Crumb himself.
"Deep Blues" offers a concise, authoritative account of the music's Afircan beginnings, its early evolution, and its transformation from a backcountry good-time music into today's modern blues and rock and roll.
"Wright's fervent, musical prose captures the very essence of the blues.Play Pretty Blues is a work of extraordinary imagination and soul."--Will Allison, author ofLong Drive Home The mysteries of blues legend Robert Johnson's life and death long ago became myth. Part researched reconstruction, part vivid imagination, this lyrical novel brings Johnson alive through the voices of his six wives, revealing the husband and son inside the legend. Snowden Wright was born and raised in Mississippi. His work has been published atSalon, theAtlantic Online,Esquire Online, and theNew York Daily News. He lives in New York.
New Yorkers Grant and his girlfriend Mariah decided on a whim to buy an old plantation house in the Mississippi Delta. This is their journey of discovery to a remote, isolated strip of land, three miles beyond the tiny community of Pluto. They learn to hunt, grow their own food, and fend off alligators, snakes, and varmints galore. They befriend an array of unforgettable local characters, capture the rich, extraordinary culture of the Delta, and delve deeply into the Delta's lingering racial tensions. As the nomadic Grant learns to settle down, he falls not just for his girlfriend but for the beguiling place they now call home.
John Pritchard's novels Junior Ray and The Yazoo Blues have been dubbed "hilariously tasteless" and "not for the squeamish or pure of heart"—and equally praised by Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and lovers of Southern fiction everywhere. In Sailing to Alluvium, the third installment of Pritchard's "Junior Ray Saga," irrepressible ex-deputy sheriff Junior Ray Loveblood and his sidekick Voyd Mudd have become "diktectives" to stop the murderous activities of a semi-secret, lethal organization of Southern women, the AUNTY BELLES, headed by Miss Attica Rummage. Sailing to Alluvium is another brilliant tale of the bumbling duo, with an unforgettable cast of characters deeply rooted in the Mississippi Delta, a place both real and imaginary. The novel, hilarious and moving, revolves around obsessions, underneath which lies the dark history of a class conflict that exists in the Deep South, not among black and white but between the white "haves" and the white "have-nots." John Pritchard's work fits well between the singing prose of James Agee and the rustic lampoon and high humor of Erskine Caldwell. The reader is treated to a unique brand of dark comedy that closes the divide between burlesque and metaphysics, fuses the profane with the sublime, and explains the Deep South as no other writer has done.
