Deep Blues Format: Paperback

A detailed history of the musical and social impact of the blues, the bedrock of rock and roll

“A lucid . . . entrancing study.”—Greil Marcus

“Palmer has a powerful understanding of the music and an intense involvement in the culture.”—The Nation

In Deep Blues, Robert Palmer traces the odyssey of the blues from its rural beginnings, to the steamy bars of Chicago’s South Side, to international popularity, recognition, and imitation. Palmer tells the story of the blues through the lives of its greatest practitioners: Robert Johnson, who sang of being pursued by the hounds of hell; Muddy Waters, who electrified Delta blues and gave the music its rock beat; Robert Lockwood and Sonny Boy Williamson, who launched the King Biscuit Time radio show and brought blues to the airwaves; and John Lee Hooker, Ike Turner, B. B. King, and many others.

Robert Palmer was the New York Times's first full-time rock writer and chief pop critic (1976–1988) and has been a contributing editor at Rolling Stone since the early seventies. He has taught courses in American music at Yale, Carnegie-Mellon, Bowdoin, the University of Mississippi, and Brooklyn College, where he was the first senior research fellow of the Institute for Studies in American Music to teach and write a musicological monograph on rock and roll. He is the author of Deep Blues and other books, and served as writer and music director for two award-winning documentary films, The World According to John Coltrane and Deep Blues. Since producing the latter film's soundtrack CD for Atlantic Records, he has produced a number of raw juke-joint blues CDs for the Fat Possum label, winning a number of polls and awards. He acted as the chief advisor to the ten-part WGBH/BBC series.