Trans-Atlantic Music

Wynn, Neil A., ed.
Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe
Mississippi: The University Press, 2007
A unique collection of essays, Cross the Water Blues is a volume of conference proceedings that examine the influence of African American music on European audiences from the late 19th century to the present. Although the contributors range vastly across [...]

“The Music. The Music, this is our history”

Jones, LeRoi
Blues People: Negro Music in White America
New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1963
As a saxophonist who has spent the last 15 years devoted to the history, practice, tradition, and evolution of jazz and blues music, I began reading this book with the assumption that its content would be familiar, perhaps like that of a jazz [...]

Baddest of the Bad

Jackson, Buzzy
A Bad Woman Feeling Good: Blues and the Women Who Sing Them
New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2005.
It was Ma Rainey’s piano player, Thomas Dorsey, who said, “The blues is a good woman feeling bad” (xiii). Author Buzzy Jackson, however, explores the blues through an entirely different lens, one which sheds light [...]