The devil is the most charismatic and important figure in the blues tradition. He's not just the music's namesake (""the devil's music""), but a shadowy presence who haunts an imagined Mississippi crossroads where, it is claimed, Delta bluesman Robert Johnson traded away his soul in exchange for extraordinary prowess on the guitar. Yet, as scholar and musician Adam Gussow argues, there is much more to the story of the devil and the blues than these cliched understandings. In this groundbreaking study, Gussow takes the full measure of the devil's presence. Working from original transcriptions of more than 125 recordings released during the past ninety years, Gussow explores the varied uses to which black southern blues people have put this trouble-sowing, love-wrecking, but also empowering figure. The book culminates with a bold reinterpretation of Johnson's music and a provocative investigation of the way in which the citizens of Clarksdale, Mississippi, managed to rebrand a commercial hub as ""the crossroads"" in 1999, claiming Johnson and the devil as their own.

Taking its title from a lyric by Mississippi bluesman Charley Patton, "Seems Liks Murder Here" offers a revealing new account of the blues tradition. Far from mere laments about lost loves and "hard times", blues songs and literature emerge in this provocative work as vital responses to the violent realities and traumatic legacies of African American life in the Jim Crow South. Blues recording artist and critic Adam Gussow begins his story in the 1890s, when the spectacle lynching of blacks became an insidious part of Southern life. Although lynchings are seldom referred to directly in blues songs, veiled references to them abound, and Gussow identifies these scattered mentions, tying them to real-life incidents and historical events in the autobiographies of bluesmen and -women. Southern violence, he shows also enters the blues tradition through folklore about "badmen": African Americans who take the lives of white aggressors in self-defence. Blues songs and literature, meanwhile, teem with searing depictions of bloodshed, such as the cutting and shooting that blacks inflicted on one another in juke joints. For Gussow, such expressive acts of violence are the quintessential blues gesture - burning examples of racial and romantic anguish. As Langston Hughes once wrote, "My love might turn into a knife/instead of to a song". With interpretations of classic songs and writings, from the autobiographies of W.C. Handy, David Honeyboy Edwards, and B.B. King to the poetry of Hughes and the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, "Seems Like Murder Here" should reshape our understanding of the blues and its enduring power.

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.

The devil is the most charismatic and important figure in the blues tradition. He's not just the music's namesake (""the devil's music""), but a shadowy presence who haunts an imagined Mississippi crossroads where, it is claimed, Delta bluesman Robert Johnson traded away his soul in exchange for extraordinary prowess on the guitar. Yet, as scholar and musician Adam Gussow argues, there is much more to the story of the devil and the blues than these cliched understandings. In this groundbreaking study, Gussow takes the full measure of the devil's presence. Working from original transcriptions of more than 125 recordings released during the past ninety years, Gussow explores the varied uses to which black southern blues people have put this trouble-sowing, love-wrecking, but also empowering figure. The book culminates with a bold reinterpretation of Johnson's music and a provocative investigation of the way in which the citizens of Clarksdale, Mississippi, managed to rebrand a commercial hub as ""the crossroads"" in 1999, claiming Johnson and the devil as their own.

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.