Customer Reviews

The Story Of The Blues

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If you are looking for a book with mini-sized, hackneyed biographies of a few acclaimed blues artists, this isn't it. After all, it's not called, "Ten Blues Artists You Ought to Know About" (I wonder, how many could one refer to, providing substantial information and interesting details, in just 300 pages?). As the title clearly claims, this book tells "The Story of the Blues," the history of the beginnings of Black American music. Paul Oliver's intention is to present the magnitude of the blues, primarily as an important part of Black American life, but also as a form of entertainment that was, in no time, packing music halls both across America and Europe. The author refers to an extremely large number of artists not with the intention of name-checking them, but with a purpose of mapping the evolution of the blues and its transformation through the years as more and more people were exposed to it. So, if you're interested in reading about the history of the blues, and the development of American music as entertainment, up to and including rock'n'roll, I recommend you check this out. Yes, reading it can become a bit dizzying, but only because it's such an engaging read.

If you are looking for a really informative book with some depth to it as an introduction to the blues, this isn't it. Reading the Story of the Blues can become a bit dizzying. Such an extremely large number of artists are introduced at such a mind-numbing rapidity that you find you can't remember a thing about any of them and you doubt whether you would be able to find any of their work at the record store anyway. When you finally to get something about Robert Johnson at page 133, he is dispatched after a couple of pages, which I found pretty disappointing. The portraits of the blues artists are so superficially done and so numerous, that I found the book unsatisfying. If you are looking for a good informative book on the blues with some depth to it, I would suggest either Deep Blues by Robert Palmer or I Feel Like Going Home by Peter Guralnick. I would think this book would be of more interest to experts who are looking for references to relatively obscure Blues figures.

I'm not faulting the research, which is comprehensive; it is the format that the author chooses to present this information that is so difficult to digest. On any given page there are as many as 15 different names with barely enough information about each artist to differentiate them from one another. The book is so short and so densely packed that it is difficult to absorb the information. The author uses the regionalization of the Blues as it traveled from the South to the North as his basis for examination; occasionally throwing in lyrics or musical notes to support a point, but their inclusion seems to be haphazard at best. If you are looking for a tremendous amount of information about the Blues this is fine, but if you are looking for an enjoyable read, look elswhere.