Deep Blues

A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta

Author Robert Palmer

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Blues is the cornerstone of American popular music, the bedrock of rock and roll. In this extraordinary musical and social history, 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.

"A lucid…

$24.00

July 29, 1982

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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…