Blues category: 910 books

Kennedy's Blues: African American Blues and Gospel Songs on JFK collects in a single volume the blues and gospel songs written by African Americans about the presidency of John F. Kennedy and offers a close analysis of Kennedy's hold upon the African American imagination. These blues and gospel songs...

Spontaneity, immediacy and feeling characterize the blues as a genre. Whether it's the movement of call and response, the expressive bends and wails of voice and instruments or the synergistic relationship between audience and performers, the blues embody a kind of "living in the moment" aesthetic....

This book presents three of the greatest ragtime blues guitar players from the 1920s-1940s. They all possessed what Rev. Gary Davis called that sportin’ right hand. Each could sing the blues or play a dance instrumental. They favored first position chords but produced incredible textures and rhythms...

Though Pink Floyd created enormous radio-friendly classics during the 1970s, the legendary group started out as a British blues band. Jimi Hendrix offered up a wildly innovative interpretation of “The Star Spangled Banner,” pioneered the use of octaves with an over-amplified Fender Stratocaster®...

Rob MacKillop presents 20 wonderful fingerstyle blues arrangements and compositions in DADGAD tuning. The styles covered in this book include country blues, boogie woogie left-hand piano blues, early jazz blues, gut-bucket blues and modal blues. Great traditional songs are included such as St. James...

Boom's Blues stands as both a remarkable biography of J. Frank G. Boom (1920-1953) and a recovery of his incredible contribution to blues scholarship originally titled The Blues: Satirical Songs of the North American Negro. Wim Verbei tells how and when the Netherlands was introduced to African American...

Yank Rachell and his mandolin playing style moved every musician lucky enough to hear him perform in the early sixties. When he died in April 1997, he left behind a stack of unanswered requests to tour Europe and to play blues festivals in the United States. In Blues Mandolin Man: The Life and...

The Blues Piano Collection combines classic songs, well-known favourites and contemporary works with an abundant variety of styles to enjoy, including rich chords, contouring melodies, smooth sounds, funky rhythms and much more. Each piece is carefully arranged for solo piano, suitable for...

This acclaimed travel guide, hailed as the bible of blues travelers throughout the world, will shepherd the faithful to such shrines as the intersection where Robert Johnson might have made his deal with the devil and the railroad tracks that inspired Howlin’ Wolf to moan “Smokestack Lightnin’.”...

This user-friendly book, with access to online audio, shows how to transform standard three-chord blues changes into harmonically sophisticated jazz-blues progressions.The book covers chord substitution, twelve-bar blues, minor blues, eight-bar blues, and sixteen-bar blues. Chord frames are supplied...

Recent revisionist scholarship has argued that representations by white “outsider” observers of black American music have distorted historical truths about how the blues came to be. While these scholarly arguments have generated an interesting debate concerning how the music has been framed and...

The blues was born in the Mississippi Delta, and since that fateful night in 1903 when W. C. Handy heard the mournful sound of a pocketknife sliding over the strings of an acoustic guitar and the plaintive song of a long-forgotten musician in the hot night of Tutwiler, Mississippi, the blues has been...

This book and video will take you from basic concepts in blues guitar through performance level blues solos and techniques. Chapters include: Notation and Tablature, Time Values, Strumming, Blues Techniques, The Blues Progression, Open String Power Chords, Barre Chords, Blues Turnarounds, Blues Fill-Ins,...

Chicago Blues (1940s-1960s) is the second volume of Gordon's Blues Guides, a quick and easy primer on the Chicago blues style from the 1940s through the 1960s. The guide provides a brief history of the early days of the city's blues scene, a list of key artists with biographies, and recommended...