Customer Reviews

Conversation with the Blues CD included

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This is a revised edition of the original 1965 book, with more photos and an audio CD derived from the original -and now very rare- accompanying LP.

Produced from tapes made on a heroic field trip by Paul and Valerie Oliver, accompanied part of the way by Arhoolie's Chris Strachwitz, the work is important for several reasons. First, it captures the blues at a cusp in its history, when the audience for it was just starting to shift from its original African-American one to a white American and European one. Now, of course the blues has both gone global and lost most of its originators. So the interviews included here, from both the famous and the obscure, form a hugely important linch-pin in blues history, captured about midway through its current life

Oliver spent several years transcribing and organising the material that emerged into a beatutiful textual flowchart of what the blues meant to those who played it and listened to it for its orginal purposes. Not as a lifestyle accesory, but as a catahrtic experience. Then, specific topics were covered including the business of recording, the life and times of Beale Street, farming, sharecropping, prison, and the violence that often erupted - witness Blind Arvella Gray's laconic discourse on how he became blind.

Because all this information is delivered by faithful transcriptions of the voices of the men and women who directly lived the blues, every word rings true. You are drawn into and along a path that explains both bluntly and poetically what the blues really means. No other book has ever come close to that essence.

There is a superbly crafted contextual introduction by Paul Oliver, many stunning photos of what is now a bygone era and, of course, the precious CD, with speech and music -some wonderful performances, by the way - that will capture the soul and mind of anyone with a serious interest in the real thing.

If you buy only one book about the Blues make sure its this one

I took a punt on a cheap 'remaindered' copy of this and, despite its quality production, photos and CD, I think only serious blues enthusiasts would find it worth the full price. It's a selection of excerpts from interviews and recordings made in 1960: an oral history of the blues. With a few notable exceptions, such as John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, the musicians are mostly unknowns (at least to me). But that's the point: to show how singing and playing the blues was part of everyday work and socializing, not a separate career.

The interviews, especially the southern ones, are lucid vignettes of pre-war life as an agricultural or industrial worker. The book travels northwards from Mississippi to Chicago following 'The Great Migration', although that phrase isn't used. In fact there's no authorial voice at all, which left me with a fragmentary and regrettably shallow understanding of the society being represented.

Nevertheless, the personal experiences make the book worthwhile as a document of the blues, or of sheer human endurance. The cover shows Blind Arvella Gray on a Chicago street. This is how he describes dealing with being shot:

"After me bein' blinded it was somethin' new to me and I were tryin' to find my place and how to manage myself. ... And every time I went around they say 'You cain't play no guitar 'cause you ain't no fingers to chord it right.' ... I play with the bottleneck on my finger from a wine bottle. ... Well, I come here to Chicago with one quarter in a tin cup and started to hustlin'."