Deep Inside the Blues collects thirty-four of Margo Cooper’s interviews with blues artists and is illustrated with over 160 of her photographs, many published here for the first time. For thirty years, Cooper has been documenting the lives of blues musicians, their families and homes, neighborhoods, festivals, and gigs. Her photographic work combines iconic late-career images of many legendary figures including Bo Diddley, Honeyboy Edwards, B.B. King, Pinetop Perkins, and Hubert Sumlin with youthful shots of Cedric Burnside, Shemekia Copeland, and Sharde Thomas, themselves now in their thirties and forties. During this time, the Burnside and Turner families and other Mississippi artists such as T-Model Ford, James "Super Chikan" Johnson, and L. C. Ulmer entered the national and international spotlight, ensuring the powerful connection between authentic Delta, Hill Country, and Piney Woods blues musicians and their audience continues. In 1993, Cooper began photographing in the clubs around New England, then in Chicago, and before long in Mississippi and Helena, Arkansas. On her very first trips to Mississippi in 1997 and 1998, Cooper had the good fortune to photograph Sam Carr, Frank Frost, Bobby Rush, and Otha Turner, among others. "The blues come out of the field," Ulmer told Cooper. Seeing those fields, as well as the old juke joints, country churches, and people’s homes, inspired her. She began recording interviews with the musicians, sometimes over a period of years, listening and asking questions as their narratives unfolded. Many of the key blues players of the period have already passed, making their stories and Cooper’s photographs of them all the more poignant and valuable.

This omnibus volume offers a unique look at a fascinating and evocative strain of art that originated chiefly in the rural American South and in the black cultural centers as blacks migrated across the continent.

Pictorial quilts, sculpture and carvings, basketry, pottery, forged metal, musical instruments, and dwellings---these are among the forms that express this appealingly quaint yet powerful presence in American art and African folk heritage from which this wonderful art springs.

Celebrating its African folk roots and the individual artists whose lives are so closely intertwined with their art, this illuminating introduction collects writings by sixteen notable scholars of this rich and varied treasury of folk culture.

Contributors include Marie Jeanne Adams, Elizabeth Adler, Simon Bronner, John Burrison, Gerald L. Davis, Dena Epstein, David Evans, William R. Ferris, Roland L. Freeman, Christopher Lornell, Brenda McCallum, Clarence Mohr, John Scully, Ellen Slack, Robert F. Thompson, Mary Twining, John Vlach, and Maude Wahlman.

"Story after wonderful story, tall tale after tall tale. Ray Lum tells a southern writer where he came from, and where he ought to go."
-Shelby Foote

"Bill Ferris makes me wish I'd known Ray Lum."
-Larry Brown

"Indeed, the mule trader has undoubtedly helped to form our great oral tradition in the South . Ray Lum was] a man born and bred to the practice of the country monologue."
-Eudora Welty

Readers captivated by this book will be happy that Bill Ferris found Ray Lum and that he thought to turn on a tape recorder. Lum (1891--1977) was a mule skinner, a livestock trader, an auctioneer, and an American original.

This delightful book, first published in 1992 as "You Live and Learn. Then You Die and Forget It All," preserves Lum's colorful folk dialect and captures the essence of this one-of-a-kind figure who seems to have stepped full-blooded from the pages of Mark Twain. This riveting talespinner was tall, heavy-set, and full of body rhythm as he talked. In his special world he was famous for trading, for tale-telling, and for common-sense lessons that had made him a savvy bargainer and a shrewd businessman. His home and his auction barn were in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where mules were his main interest, but in trading he fanned out over twenty states and even into Mexico. A west Texas newspaper reported his fame this way: He is known all over cow country for his honest fair dealing and gentlemanly attitude..... A letter addressed to him anywhere in Texas probably would be delivered.

Over several years Ferris recorded Lum's many long conversations that detail livestock auctioneering, cheery memories of rustic Deep South culture, and a philosophy of life that is grounded in good horse sense. Even among the most spellbinding talkers Lum is a standout both for what he has to say and for the way he says it. Ferris's lucky, protracted encounters with him turn out to be the best of good fortune for everybody.