While all music genres incorporate religious imagery, the blues has its origin in the soil of the church. In its infancy, the blues was often dismissed as undermining the church’s gospel songbook. The initial resistance, however, could not suppress the organic development of a genre of music born from suffering. The great Mississippi Delta bluesman, Muddy Waters, once said, "The blues was born behind a mule." Behind a beast of burden, the working man found in the blues a way to console the...

A Guide to Library Research in Music introduces students to the process and techniques for researching and writing about music. It provides examples of different types of writing, offers a thorough introduction to music literature, describes various information-searching methods and library-based organizational systems, and explores the wide array of music resources.This second edition discusses the latest innovations in library catalog searching, new matters in digital technology,...

Search the Internet for the 100 best songs or best albums. Dozens of lists will appear from aficionados to major music personalities. But what if you not only love listening to the blues or country music or jazz or rock, you love reading about it, too. How do you separate what matters from what doesn’t among the hundreds—sometimes thousands—of books on the music you so love? In the Best Music Books series, readers finally have a quick-and-ready list of the most important works published on...

Born 130 years ago in the heart of Mississippi, Charlie Patton (c. 1891–1934) is considered by many to be a father of the Delta blues. With his bullish baritone voice and his fluid slide guitar touch, Patton established songs like “Pony Blues,” “A Spoonful Blues,” and “High Water Everywhere” in the blues lexicon and, through his imitators, in American music. But over the decades, his contributions to blues music have been overshadowed in popularity by those of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters,...

The Blues Encyclopedia is the first full-length authoritative Encyclopedia on the Blues as a musical form. While other books have collected biographies of blues performers, none have taken a scholarly approach. A to Z in format, this Encyclopedia covers not only the performers, but also musical styles, regions, record labels and cultural aspects of the blues, including race and gender issues. Special attention is paid to discographies and bibliographies.

Growing up in an affluent Jewish family in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Dick Waterman (b. 1935) was a shy, stuttering boy living a world away from the Mississippi Delta. Though he never heard blues music at home, he became one of the most influential figures in blues of the twentieth century.A close proximity to Greenwich Village in the 1960s fueled Waterman's growing interest in folk music and led to an unlikely trip that resulted in the rediscovery of Delta blues artist Son House in ...