Blues category: 910 books

Hugh Laurie: Let Them Talk (PVG) is the matching songbook for Hugh Laurie's debut album featuring all 15 classic blues songs, arranged for intermediate level piano, voice and guitar. A talented musician and multi-instrumentalist, Laurie is here returning to his passion: The blues. This impeccable...

From the preface: In order to study American folk guitar styles in depth, one is forced to turn to the country blues because nowhere else do recorded sources of instrumental folk guitar abound so profusely. It is in the blues that Negro musicians have explored and developed the finger style instrumental...

The commercial explosion of ragtime in the early twentieth century created previously unimagined opportunities for black performers. However, every prospect was mitigated by systemic racism. The biggest hits of the ragtime era weren't Scott Joplin's stately piano rags. "Coon songs," with their ugly...

Obsessions of a Music Geek, Volume I: Blues Guitar Giants is the debut ebook from veteran musician and music journalist Ted Drozdowski. The book, the first in a series, focuses on seven guitarists from the blues pantheon: John Lee Hooker, Otis Rush, Johnny Winter, Freddie King, Michael Bloomfield, Z.Z....

A collection of 12 great acoustic blues guitar solos by Duck Baker in notation and tablature. The solos are intermediate to advanced in difficulty and successfully capture the earthy myriad of influences comprising classic American blues guitar stylings. Chords, scales, keys and turnarounds for the...

Providing a clear look into the life of one of the greatest Mississippi bluesmen, this is the first biography of the late Skip James, perhaps the most creative and idiosyncratic of all blues musicians. His 1931 performances of "Devil Got My Woman," "I'm So Glad," and "22-20...

Howlin’ Wolf was a musical giant in every way. He stood six foot three, weighed almost three hundred pounds, wore size sixteen shoes, and poured out his darkest sorrows onstage in a voice like a raging chainsaw. Half a century after his first hits, his sound still terrifies and inspires. Born...

I'm Just Dead, I'm Not Gone chronicles Jim Dickinson's extraordinary life in the Memphis music scene of the fifties and sixties and how he went on to play with and produce a rich array of artists, including Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Ry Cooder, Duane Allman, Arlo Guthrie, and Albert King....

From the time the first “Diddley Bo” appeared on a wooden barnyard wall, countless great sounding blues songs, acoustic and electric, have been written and recorded by many talented artists. These ten legendary songs, among them “Boogie Chillun,” “John the Revelator” and “St....

From the time the first “Diddley Bo” appeared on a wooden barnyard wall, countless great sounding blues songs, acoustic and electric, have been written and recorded by many talented artists.These ten legendary songs, among them “Boom Boom,” “Little Red Rooster” and “The Thrill...

In this extraordinary reconstruction of the origins of the blues, historian Marybeth Hamilton demonstrates that the story as we know it is largely a myth. Following the trail of characters like Howard Odum, who combed Mississippi's back roads with a cylinder phonograph to record vagrants, John and...

Are you a fan of rhythm and blues? Can you name the great R&B artists from yesteryear and the songs that made them famous? Do you consider yourself to be an expert on R&B music? If so, why not put your knowledge to the test with The Rhythm and Blues Quiz Book? Which Fats Domino single stayed at number...

This book and online audio has been carefully prepared for guitarists who are starting to learn blues fingerpicking-and yes, the book can actually be used by an ambitious total beginner. The arrangements, written in tab and standard notation, include new blues songs, standards, introductions, turnarounds,...

Anyone who knows R. Crumb’s work as an illustrator knows of his passion for music. And all those who collect his work prize the Heroes of the Blues, Early Jazz Greats, and Pioneers of Country Music trading card sets he created in the early to- mid-1980s. Now they are packaged together for the first...