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 disseminated, they have so far only told an American story, failing to acknowledge that in the post-war era the blues had spread far beyond the borders of the United States. As Christian O'Connell shows in Blues, How Do You Do? Paul Oliver's largely neglected scholarship-and the unique transatlantic cultural context it provides-is vital to understanding the blues. O'Connell's study begins with Oliver's scholarship in his early days in London as a writer for the British jazz press and goes on to examine Oliver's encounters with visiting blues musicians, his State Department-supported field trip to the US in 1960, and the resulting photographs and oral history he produced, including his epic "blues narrative," The Story of the Blues (1969). Blues, How Do You Do? thus aims to move away from debates that have been confined within the limits of national borders-or relied on cliches of British bands popularizing American music in America-to explore how Oliver's work demonstrates that the blues became a reified ideal, constructed in opposition to the forces of modernity.

A first-ever book on the subject, New York City Blues: Postwar Portraits from Harlem to the Village and Beyond offers a deep dive into the blues venues and performers in the city from the 1940s through the 1990s. Interviews in this volume bring the reader behind the scenes of the daily and performing lives of working musicians, songwriters, and producers. The interviewers capture their voices - many sadly deceased - and reveal the changes in styles, the connections between performers, and the evolution of New York blues. New York City Blues is an oral history conveyed through the words of the performers themselves and through the photographs of Robert Schaffer, supplemented by the input of Val Wilmer, Paul Harris, and Richard Tapp. The book also features the work of award-winning author and blues scholar John Broven. Along with writing a history of New York blues for the introduction, Broven contributes interviews with Rose Marie McCoy, ""Doc"" Pomus, Billy Butler, and Billy Bland. Some of the artists interviewed by Larry Simon include Paul Oscher, John Hammond Jr., Rosco Gordon, Larry Dale, Bob Gaddy, ""Wild"" Jimmy Spruill, and Bobby Robinson. Also featured are over 160 photographs, including those by respected photographers Anton Mikofsky, Wilmer, and Harris, that provide a vivid visual history of the music and the times from Harlem to Greenwich Village and neighboring areas. New York City Blues delivers a strong sense of the major personalities and places such as Harlem's Apollo Theatre, the history, and an in-depth introduction to the rich variety, sounds, and styles that made up the often-overlooked New York City blues scene.

For over sixty years, American guitarist John Fahey (1939-2001) has been a storied figure, first within the folk and blues revival of the long 1960s, later for fans of alternative music. Mythologizing himself as Blind Joe Death, Fahey crudely parodied white middle-class fascination with African American blues, including his own. In this book, George Henderson mines Fahey's parallel careers as essayist, notorious liner note stylist, musicologist, and fabulist for the first time. These vocations, inspired originally by Cold War educators' injunction to creatively express rather than suppress feelings, took utterly idiosyncratic and prescient turns. Fahey voraciously consumed ideas: in the classroom, the counterculture, the civil rights struggle, the new left; through his study of philosophy, folklore, African American blues; and through his experience with psychoanalysis and southern paternalism. From these, he produced a profoundly and unexpectedly refracted vision of America. To read Fahey is to vicariously experience devastating critical energies and self-soothing uncertainty, passions emerging from a singular location-the place where lone, white rebel sentiment must regard the rebellion of others. Henderson shows the nuance, contradictions, and sometimes brilliance of Fahey's words that, though they were never sung to a tune, accompanied his music.

Tony Bolden presents an innovative history of funk music focused on the performers, regarding them as intellectuals who fashioned a new aesthetic. Utilizing musicology, literary studies, performance studies, and African American intellectual history, Bolden explores what it means for music, or any cultural artifact, to be funky. Multitudes of African American musicians and dancers created aesthetic frameworks with artistic principles and cultural politics that proved transformative. Bolden approaches the study of funk and black musicians by examining aesthetics, poetics, cultural history, and intellectual history. The study traces the concept of funk from early blues culture to a metamorphosis into a full-fledged artistic framework and a named musical genre in the 1970s, and thereby Bolden presents an alternative reading of the blues tradition. In part one of this two-part book, Bolden undertakes a theoretical examination of the development of funk and the historical conditions in which black artists reimagined their music. In part two, he provides historical and biographical studies of key funk artists, all of whom transfigured elements of blues tradition into new styles and visions. Funk artists, like their blues relatives, tended to contest and contextualize racialized notions of blackness, sexualized notions of gender, and bourgeois notions of artistic value. Funk artists displayed contempt for the status quo and conveyed alternative stylistic concepts and social perspectives through multimedia expression. Bolden argues that on this road to cultural recognition, funk accentuated many of the qualities of black expression that had been stigmatized throughout much of American history.

Joe Cocker is a rock legend. A gas fitter who went from playing Sheffield pubs to the stadiums of the world, he was the man who no one - not even himself - expected to survive the age of 30. Now, approaching his 60s and having recovered his life and career, he has co-operated with the full and frank biography to tell of all the highs and lows of his remarkable journey. Even by the crazy standards of rock'n'roll it is an amazing story. Since his mind-blowing interpretation of the Beatles' "With a Little Help From My Friends" topped the British charts in 1968, Joe Cocker has had hits in every decade and in more countries than he can remember. His appearance in the movie of Woodstock in 1969 catapulted him to worldwide fame and his Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour of America almost killed him. Here he talks to biographer J.P. Bean about his heroin addiction, alcoholism, the arrests that got him thrown in jail, and the demons that haunted him for years. But most of all it is an uplifting story of an ordinary man who lit up America like a beacon in the night, was written off as a shambolic wreck and then - against all the odds - climbed back to become an even bigger star than he was first time around.

Follow British Blues musician and researcher, Derek Bright, as he travels along the famed Highway 61 route from Chicago to New Orleans. This thoroughly researched book delves deeply into African American culture, history and music both past and present associated with the highway. For anyone considering travelling Highway 61, or just wanting to learn more about this historic route and the origins of the blues, this book is essential reading. 2020 Edition with additional photography and updated information. 'Bright is an old master at following old and ancient trails, and you couldn't pick a better guide to show you the sights on Highway 61' ( Paul Garon, co-founder of Living Blues) 'Derek tunes the car radio to the very best black music that America has to offer...for those of us yet to make this trip into a still so relevant psycho-geographical culture, he is our eyes, ears, and conscience' (Johnny Green, former road manager of The Clash)

Mamie Smith's pathbreaking 1920 recording of "Crazy Blues" set the pop music world on fire, inaugurating a new African American market for "race records". Not long after, such records also brought black blues performance to an expanding international audience. A century later, the mainstream blues world has transformed into a multicultural and transnational melting pot, taking the music far beyond the black southern world of its origins. But not everybody is happy about that. If there's "No black. No white. Just the blues", as one familiar meme suggests, why do some blues people hear such pronouncements as an aggressive attempt at cultural appropriation and an erasure of traumatic histories that lie deep in the heart of the music? Then again, if "blues is black music", as some performers and critics insist, what should we make of the vibrant global blues scene, with its all-comers mix of nationalities and ethnicities? In Whose Blues?, award-winning blues scholar and performer Adam Gussow confronts these challenging questions head-on. Using blues literature and history as a cultural anchor, Gussow defines, interprets, and makes sense of the blues for the new millennium. Drawing on the blues tradition's major writers including W. C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Amiri Baraka, and grounded in his first-person knowledge of the blues performance scene, Gussow's thought-provoking book kickstarts a long overdue conversation.