Customer Reviews

The Voice of the Blues: Classic Interviews from Living Blues Magazine

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This is really a great book, if you want to hear about the blues from the men who created it first hand. The blues is often either treated as an academic subject with big sincerity or as a subject of legends. This way the it is undramathized and becomes much more alive, but without losing the fascination. For example read about Houston Stackhouse drinking canned heat together with Tommy Johnson in the delta or how Muddy Waters felt when he heard his first single being played from every house as he was walking down the street just a few days after its release. The book is packed with stories like this as well as the opinions and thoughts of these great artists.

Living Blues Magazine has long been the champion of the common man with uncommon talents. These interviews from this fine magazine are drawn from a wide range of blues masters, now all but gone. In their own words, they reveal not only the sense of purpose that marked their lives, but something about their music, something of the hardships of growing up and old in a racist society.

The reader cannot easily distance himself from this fact. This alone can make it a tough, but fascinating read. The violent life in the ghetto is not new and it took many a bluesman's life early. The cry for justice is at the core of the blues, as these voices recount. Their words paint a picture of hope and angst in colors as vivid as the best Van Gogh.

Voice Of The Blues gathers many lengthy interviews with pioneering bluesmen under one cover, revealing their life and times and an unusual participation in a dialogue over the history and directions of the blues music genre. These interviews first appeared in the pages of Living Blues magazine and here have been reprinted for the first time in book form.