In Search Of The Blues: Black Voices, White Visions

Description

Original, illuminating and beautifully written, this is one of the first books ever written about American blues music. Everyone knows the story of the Delta blues, with its fierce, raw voices and tormented drifters and deals with the devil at the crossroads at midnight. In this compelling book, Marybeth Hamilton radically rewrites that story. Archaic and primeval though the music may sound, the idea of something called 'Delta blues' emerged in the late twentieth century, the culmination of a longstanding white fascination with 'uncorrupted' black singers, untainted by the city, by commerce, by the sights and sounds of modernity. Written with exquisite grace and sensitivity, at once historically acute and hauntingly poetic, the book is an extraordinary excavation of the blues mystique and provides a deeper understanding of the place of blues within wider American culture.

Marybeth Hamilton was born in California and teaches American history at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of When I'm Bad, I'm Better- Mae West, Sex and American Entertainment.

Fascinating... Hamilton's book deserves to be read, particularly by those who think they've read it all before. In future, all searches for the blues must start here -- Robert Sandall * Sunday Times * Provocatively entertaining...Assiduously researched and beautifully written, what this book reminds us is that the blues has always meant something quite different to white audiences than to black ones -- Mick Brown * Daily Telegraph * Iconoclastic... Marybeth Hamilton proves herself a fine and sensitive detective... It shakes the foundation myth of so much music that followed, as well as explaining a great deal about what it is to be a record collector, itself a dying calling in the age of the iPod -- Caspar Llewellyn-Smith * Observer * An important and often beautifully written piece of historical revisionism * Observer Music Monthly * Hamilton has a keen, unforgiving eye...an eloquent book about people making the forgotten important -- Roz Kaveney * Time Out *