All prior histories on the blues have alleged it originated on plantations in the Mississippi Delta. Not true, says author Chris Thomas King. In The Blues, King presents facts to disprove such myths. For example, as early as 1900, the sound of the blues was ubiquitous in New Orleans. The Mississippi Delta, meanwhile, was an unpopulated sportsman’s paradise—the frontier was still in the process of being cleared and drained for cultivation. Moreover, this book is the first to argue that the blues began as a cosmopolitan art form, not a rural one. Protestant states such as Mississippi and Alabama could not have incubated the blues. New Orleans was the only place in the Deep South where the sacred and profane could party together without fear of persecution. Expecting these findings to be controversial in some circles, King has buttressed his conclusions with primary sources and years of extensive research, including a sojourn to West Africa and interviews with surviving folklorists and blues researchers from the 1960s folk-rediscovery epoch. They say the blues is blasphemous—the devil’s music. King says they’re unenlightened, that blues music is about personal freedom.
Becoming Human
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
audiobookScatterlings : A Novel
Resoketswe Martha Manenzhe
audiobookThen the Fish Swallowed Him: A Novel
Amir Ahmadi Arian
audiobookAntonio
Beatriz Bracher
audiobookbookMules and Men
Zora Neale Hurston
audiobookEverywhere You Don't Belong
Gabriel Bump
audiobookEthan Frome
Edith Wharton
audiobookbookA Man Who Is Not a Man
Thando Mgqolozana
audiobookThe House of the Seven Gables
Nathaniel Hawthorne
audiobookbookSecrets and Lies
Selena Montgomery
audiobookOn Democracy
E. B. White
audiobookThe Tempest, a play by William Shakespeare – Summary
William Shakespeare
audiobook