The Land Where the Blues Began - Hardcover

Lomax, Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679404244 ISBN 13: 9780679404248

Publisher: Pantheon, 1993

Synopsis

Lomax, who has done more than anyone else to make black music of the South known as a glorious expression of American art, summs up sixty years of "discovering the African American musical heritage in this journey through the Mississippi Delta.

About this title

Review:

Co-founder--with folklorist father John A. Lomax--of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, Alan Lomax traveled the South "from the Brazos bottoms of Texas to the tidewater country of Virginia" in search of the wellspring of American blues. Previously the author of Mister Jelly Roll, Lomax stalks the ghosts of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Big Bill Broonzy and Charlie Patton, among many other blues pioneers. This winner of the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction is more than just another profile of a musical genre. It's an intimate diary of a purely American art form born of a powerful mix of despair and hope.

From the Publisher:

Set in an era as harsh and fertile as Delta silt, The Land Where The Blues Began reveals how the river of African American culture overtook its repressive banks--to give us R & B, soul, rock 'n' roll, and the only purely American art form, the blues. Alan Lomax takes us on an adventure into the "bad old days" of the post-slavery, Kim Crow Mississippi Delta--the birthplace of the blues--when railroads and levees were being built and cotton boomed at the expense of Southern working-class African Americans. Singing of their misery and their barely concealed rage, the Bluesman enlisted their African heritage to keep their souls alive and in the process created the first satirical song form in the English language. We meet Muddy Waters (the father of modern blues), learn how Robert Johnson met his end, and are introduced to Fred McDowell and Son House, who taught Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton how to play the blues.

"If not for Lomax, few people would have heard 'Tom Dooley' or 'Goodnight Irene, and Bob Zimmerman might be singing 'Feelings' at Holiday Inns around Hibbing, Minnesota."--Newsweek

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0679404244
• ISBN 13: 9780679404248
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 539