Customer Reviews

Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records

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It is a crime that this wonderful book is not available in an inexpensive edition but only in a collectible price because it is effectively out of print.
It provides a real history of the music that preceded the Blues and Dorsey-based Gospel in and outside of the recording music and makes an essential contribution to the history of the Blues and African American music in the 1880-1930 period. Oliver speaks about factors left out of most discussion of the Blues. For example, he surveys the very large repertoire of Ragtime and pseudo ragtime tunes that were part of the repertoire of early Blues singers and he suggests how this music may have been one of the initial building blocks of the blues. Oliver also discusses the wave of Black Southern vernacular dances that conquered the South and much of the nation in the early 20th century which were key to the development of new Black musics in those years.

When you first read this, you will wish you had bought this book sooner!