Customer Reviews

The Blues Then and Now: History of the Blues

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Very "interesting" read. Apparently the editor, if there was one, gave up. Numerous grammatical errors on every page, along with many factual errors. He states that Lucille Bogan died in 1936. On the very next page he states that she died in 1935. The book is full of errors like this. He has a tendency to mangle the English language; confuses tenses of verbs, wrong versions of words, misspellings, too numerous to list the rest here. He jumps around without any flow between names and events, and leaves disjointed stories about bluesmen without much information that is useful or interesting. He does mention a lot of artist's recordings, but with all of the errors his information is suspect. You would have to spend quite a bit of time verifying his information; maybe this is why the editor gave up?

It would be a hoot to have a conversation with him, if you could keep from laughing long enough to figure out what he is saying. He does put a few nice pictures of himself in the book; not sure what the relevance is to the material. My guess is he likes to see his name on the cover.

Addendum: I just found out that Mr. Leanza, the author, owns the publishing company that is responsible for this book. I think that piece of the puzzle helps to clarify why this book was ever put in print.