Julio Finn
Published: 1986
Total Pages: 290
Get eBook
This book is a meticulously researched study of the roots, spiritual, social and anthropological, of the Afro-American musical form known as the blues. Despite its being arguably the twentieth century's most influential popular art form, the blues' significance and a lot of its vocabulary remain obscure for the majority of its millions of listeners. The author remedied the situation with a learned and wide-ranging survey of the subject, embracing African animist religion, the slave trade, voodoo, hoodoo, the early country blues and its modern urban electric equivalent. The major figures in the music and, most importantly, in the African-American tradition generally, such as Macandal, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Marie Laveau, are all given their rightful place in the history of the blues' development and the book culminates in a moving study of the music's greatest exponent, Robert Johnson, the very personification of the book's title.