Blues category: 910 books

In the 1920s, Southern record companies ventured to cities like Dallas, Atlanta, and New Orleans, where they set up primitive recording equipment in makeshift studios. They brought in street singers, medicine show performers, pianists from the juke joints and barrelhouses. The music that circulated...

Charles Keil examines the expressive role of blues bands and performers and stresses the intense interaction between performer and audience. Profiling bluesmen Bobby Bland and B. B. King, Keil argues that they are symbols for the black community, embodying important attitudes and roles—success,...

Acoustic Blues Guitar Styles is an introduction to fingerstyle acoustic blues guitar, the style made popular by Robert Johnson, Bill Broonzy, and Mance Lipscomb. Following the success of the popular Acoustic Guitar Styles, Larry Sandberg’s Acoustic Blues Guitar Styles is an instructional book geared...

A melding of many types of music such as ragtime, spiritual, jug band, and other influences came together in what we now call the blues. Blues: A Regional Experience is the most comprehensive and up-to-date reference book of blues performers yet published, correcting many errors in the existing literature. Arranged...

In Bronzy Blues by Rick Payne you'll be exploring Big Bill broonzy's solo acoustic technique, using six classic Broonzy style instrumentals: 'The Guitar Shuffle', 'Hey Hey', 'House Rent Stomp', 'St Louis Blues', 'Slow Blues' and 'The...

Gordon's Blues Guides, Volume One: Delta Blues is a quick and easy primer on the Mississippi Delta blues music of the 1920s and '30s, providing a brief history of the music, a list of the key artists with biographies, and recommended recordings.

Beginning in the late 1950s, an influential cadre of young, white, mostly middle-class British men were consuming and appropriating African-American blues music, using blues tropes in their own music and creating a network of admirers and emulators that spanned the Atlantic. This cross-fertilization...

A Blues Bibliography, Second Edition is a revised and enlarged version of the definitive blues bibliography first published in 1999. Material previously omitted from the first edition has now been included, and the bibliography has been expanded to include works published since then. In addition to...

‘Of all the guitarists that I’ve listened to and studied over the years John Lee Hooker is the one steeped in the real DNA of the blues. You can’t help but be drawn into the primitive and simplistic way, that with just a few riffs and chords, he conjured up the sound of both the Mississippi...

With this fantastically detailed and comprehensive book, the inimitable Justinguitar.com guides your through 18 of the greatest Blues Lead Guitar Solos, featuring Guitar Tab and standard notation, as well as explaining how to get the correct sound and feel of each song. In his unique style,...

The book takes an overview of the various techniques that are used as part of the Blues Guitar, both acoustic and electric, and that any aspiring Bluesman should know and master. It begins with fingerpicking used in Country Blues, with techniques typical of the alternating bass of the Piedmont Style,...

Have you ever dreamed of playing lead guitar like John Lee Hooker, Carlos Santana, Jimmy Page, Slash, and Eric Clapton? Perhaps you took a few lessons, but became frustrated and gave up. If so, The Everything Rock & Blues Guitar Book is for you. With easy-to-understand instruction, The Everything...

Blues For Piano provides twenty-nine big blues numbers specially arranged for solo piano for intermediate-advanced players. Songs are taken from legends such as Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington, and include classics like Cry Me A River and Georgia On My Mind. An accompanying Spotify playlist...

Hot Music, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature is a multidisciplinary exploration of the ways that African American “hot” music—minstrelsy, ragtime, jazz, and especially blues—emerged into the American cultural mainstream in the nineteenth century and ultimately dominated both...