Conversation with the Blues and similar items

Birkitts Books presents ... Conversation with the Blues Author: Oliver, Paul Publisher: Horizon Pr Release Date: 1965 Seller Category: Music Qty Available: 1 Condition: Used: Good Sku: 250223015 Notes: Illustrated with 80 black and white photographs. Minor shelf wear, sticker remnant on front cover, binding tight, light soiling to book edges, pages clean and unmarked, rear end-page corner is creased. Interest in the blues has been widening enormously year after year; yet the story of the great blues singers and their experience has been largely inaccessible. Paul Oliver journeyed through the South and North to the Great Lakes with a tape-recorder and camera. It was a remarkable adventure?and this book, compiled from recorded interviews with over sixty-five blues singers and their associates, is a revelation of people and of Americana, unique in our history. The many intimate conversations and the eighty evocative photographs enable us to see into the singers' lives, their homes and work, their musical heritage?the inner meaning of the blues as private thought and feeling as well as performance. We learn how the blues became the essence of their lives. The singer has perhaps learned to play the guitar when only a child. He plays at Saturday night fish-fries between ploughing, cotton picking, sharecropping. In search of a better life, or merely enough money to live on, he wanders from road-gang to sawmill and levee camps, up and down the rivers and railroads, playing and singing the blues. He will join a minstrel show, a tent show, or a small theater circuit. Or he may never leave his home town, singing at small gatherings or on street corners, at local honky-tonks and barrelhouses. Whichever he chooses, the blues are with him all his days, an extension of "all my heart's feelings," of his life and society. This sensitive, moving book is made even more valuable by Paul Oliver's lists of the very best of the "undiluted" blues and his detailed comments on the singers whose personalities have so enriched the music of America and the world. Paul Oliver has lectured throughout the United States, England and Africa, where he lectured at the University of Ghana on Afro-American folk music. Mr. Oliver is also the author of Bessie Smith; Blues Fell this Morning: The Meaning of the Blues, published by Horizon Press. Of this book, Pete Welding wrote in Down Beat: "It is a magnificent study. It is the fruit of a fantastic scholarship. As it stands it is an essential component of any serious library of writings on jazz or American folk music. And it's beautifully, feelingly written too." Don't forget to check out other great deals in our Store!!