Customer Reviews

The Voice of the Blues : Classic Interviews from Living Blues Magazine

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Living Blues magazine has always been the leading periodical in the field in the US; one reason for this is the superb interviews with bluesmen/women that have graced its pages since its founding in the 1970s. Allowing artists to tell their stories fully and freely, often prodded on by knowledgeable and probing question by the interviewers Jim O'Neal and Amy Van Singel, produced important first-hand documentation of the art form. This book compiles a dozen of those interviews, ranging from Georgia Tom Dorsey to Muddy Waters, Eddie Boyd to Little Esther. One of the most fascinating is the very long (the longest in the magazine's history) interview with Delta blues legend Houston Stackhouse who was able to relate first-hand information and reminiscences of just about all the great bluesmen who worked in Mississippi and Arkansas going all the way back to Tommy Johnson. But all of the interviews plumb deeply into each artist's background, career, opinions, and memories, and that's what makes them (and the book) so interesting and indispensable. Hopefully additional volumes of more Living Blues interviews will be issued.

This is really a great book, if you want to hear about the blues from the men who created it first hand. The blues is often either treated as an academic subject with big sincerity or as a subject of legends. This way the it is undramathized and becomes much more alive, but without losing the fascination. For example read about Houston Stackhouse drinking canned heat together with Tommy Johnson in the delta or how Muddy Waters felt when he heard his first single being played from every house as he was walking down the street just a few days after its release. The book is packed with stories like this as well as the opinions and thoughts of these great artists.

Living Blues Magazine has long been the champion of the common man with uncommon talents. These interviews from this fine magazine are drawn from a wide range of blues masters, now all but gone. In their own words, they reveal not only the sense of purpose that marked their lives, but something about their music, something of the hardships of growing up and old in a racist society.

The reader cannot easily distance himself from this fact. This alone can make it a tough, but fascinating read. The violent life in the ghetto is not new and it took many a bluesman's life early. The cry for justice is at the core of the blues, as these voices recount. Their words paint a picture of hope and angst in colors as vivid as the best Van Gogh.

Voice Of The Blues gathers many lengthy interviews with pioneering bluesmen under one cover, revealing their life and times and an unusual participation in a dialogue over the history and directions of the blues music genre. These interviews first appeared in the pages of Living Blues magazine and here have been reprinted for the first time in book form.

Living Blues documents so much of American music because the Blues is so big a part that without it you do not understand much else.

Many interviews with musicians do not really allow the musicians to speak. They reflect the concerns of the interviewers more than the world of the interviewed. These interviews are different. They allow the interviewed Blues men (they are all men) to speak about what they feel about the music and their own memories. Most interesting is the long thread in this book where they speak about the way Blues artists were mistreated by the recording industry and club industries as well as the general racism of American society.

One comes to mind in reading this book is the immense intellectual and artistic achievement that these Blues singers had developed and their intense dignity as well as the degree to which blues singing in many of their times and places was a lightning rod for the expresszion of Black culture.

As someone who is very well read in regard to Blues, I still found significant things I learned and facts I did not know from every single interview.

Buy this book and then listen to the music of those who made it.