My first encounter with blues happened years ago. It was my "long lost" half brother that tried to learn me to play guitar when i was about 9 years old and ever since i´ve been hooked. My friends listened to metal and nirvana but i found some comfort in "texasguitarwankingguitaring" and i´ve been misunderstood ever since. But when i got tired of cream, SRV and so on i started to explore the blues and found my self listening to, and really connect with, that old time dark blues. I mean listening to son house howling about people grinnin´ in his face makes my hair stand straight. The problem is that i don´t know why. I´m a white boy from sweden and i don know a anything about the blues. Who the F are crow jane and stagger lee? I guess my question is what should i read to learn about the blues? I want to read about american history but NOT the declaration of independence thingy i want to know about people and how they lived. This should be right down dr gussow´s alley and i hope he will take the bait.
crow jane is an old godess of death http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrigan
a 3 fold godess related to old hanna the sun godess read ancient versions of snow white theres also an irish tale called the snow the crow and the blood.
There are several good general histories of the blues. When I teach grad classes, I often start things off with Paul Oliver's BLUES FELL THIS MORNING, which was written in 1960 or so--it's one of the very first "blues books"--but still remains a solid work of scholarship, one that combines a very wide familiarity with blues recordings and very wide reading in African American social history. He puts the two together. It's a good place to start.
Francis Davis's THE HISTORY OF THE BLUES is also good.
There are three other books I'd turn to next. David Honeyboy Edwards's THE WORLD DON'T OWE ME NOTHING is arguably the best autobiography by a Mississippi Delta blues musician; it gives you the musician's perspective on the birth of the blues and a life made by traveling and playing the blues
Elijah Wald's ESCAPING THE DELTA explodes many of the myths about the blues by way of trying to explain the life and music of Robert Johnson.
Finally, Angela Y. Davis's BLUES LEGACIES AND BLACK FEMINISM is a somewhat academic study of blues women Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. It explains who they were and why they were important. If you're leery of academic language, then you should get Daphne Duval Harrison's BLACK PEARLS, which, although written by an academic, doesn't use that sort of language and is just a straightforward history/study of the classic blueswomen.
None of those books will have much to say about the key of F, although Edwards and Wald make passing mention of such stuff.
A lot of people like DEEP BLUES by Robert Palmer. I actually got it when it came out, back in 1981, because I was working at Viking Press at the time and worked down the hall from the young woman who edited it. It's very readable, and it tells the story of the movement of Mississippi blues to Chicago very well. The scholarship, unfortunately, isn't 100% accurate, particularly the African roots of the blues element. But it has stayed in print this long because it's exceptionally well written, and it's also worthwhile. It's get these other books first, though.
Last Edited by on Apr 28, 2012 7:05 AM
Yeah. Stagger Lee was a murderer. St. Louis, late 1800's if I recall correctly. Samuel L. Jackson sings a version of Stack-O-Lee in Black Snake Moan. Pretty bitchin. ---------- Hawkeye Kane
There's a great book called WHEN STAGOLEE SHOT BILLY that will tell you everything you want to know and then some about the song and the world out of which it emerged in the 1890s.
Here's the whole Stagger Lee story in a song from Nick Cave. Some very interesting lyrics. I don't know if the real Stagger Lee would have uttered the phrase "I'm a bad motherfucker don't you know I'd crawl over 50 good pussies just to get to one fat boys asshole"
I really like the Satan & Adam version of Stagga Lee on Living on The River. Cephas and Wiggins also have a good one called Stack and the Devil on the Somebody Told The truth album. ---------- Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Isaac Asimov
Hi Nate, I posted that from work and although I work in London my comapny is french so that came through a server in Paris. Maybe that's why it's not available. If you type in "Nick Cave Stagger Lee" you should be able to hesar the song. It's quite a story! ---------- Oisin
Recently, I picked up that book and started reading it (got it from B&N store). As I got deeper into it I had Deja Vu. I had used it as a source when I did a American Music History class paper back in college (early 90's).
You had this explosion of American Music in the 20th Century and blues was an ingredient in cooking all the main genres. there was far more musical exchange between black and white than is usually acknowledged. Rock N Roll, Country, Bluegrass and more can all be traced back to this exchange of musical ideas. ---------- David Elk River Harmonicas
