Product Description

The Voice of the Blues brings together interviews with many pioneering blues men including Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, B.B. King, and many others.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #962504 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

From Library Journal
Authentic American blues music had its heyday from the 1920s through the 1950s. The origins and history of rural and urban blues are well documented, and any real blues fan can identify and discuss the key artists of each era. This work offers, for the first time in book form, the spoken recollections of several key artists. The editors, who provide introductions and postscripts for each interviewee, were cofounders, publishers, and editors of Living Blues Magazine from 1970 to 1987. The lengthy interviews capture the voices of Georgia Tom Dorsey, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Little Walter, Freddie King, and others. Their words evoke a vivid picture of their passion and love of blues music. Dorsey, for instance, recalls a time when his band played a lively blues set from a flatbed truck to a herd of cows, which were actually listening attentively, at the edge of a pasture. The book paints a picture of an America and a scene, now long gone, that was experienced and revered by generations of music lovers. Recommended for all blues collections and for larger public libraries. Bill Walker, Stockton-San Joaquin Cty. P.L., CA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review
Carefully edited and conscientiously presented...these interviews read like elegant memoirs..
–Peter Guralnick, author of Last Train to Memphis

About the Author
Jim O'Neal and Amy Van Singel were co-founders publishers, and editors of Living Blues magazine from 1970-87. In this capacity, they interviewed many of the most famous blues musicians on the Chicago and international scene. The magazine helped launch and sustain the blues revival, focusing on living bluesmen, as opposed to more scholarly journals that focused on blues history. O'Neill and Van Singel live in Kansas City, Missouri.

Customer Reviews

Great interviews
Living Blues magazine has always been the leading periodical in the field in the US; one reason for this is the superb interviews with bluesmen/women that have graced its pages since its founding in the 1970s. Allowing artists to tell their stories fully and freely, often prodded on by knowledgeable and probing question by the interviewers Jim O'Neal and Amy Van Singel, produced important first-hand documentation of the art form. This book compiles a dozen of those interviews, ranging from Georgia Tom Dorsey to Muddy Waters, Eddie Boyd to Little Esther. One of the most fascinating is the very long (the longest in the magazine's history) interview with Delta blues legend Houston Stackhouse who was able to relate first-hand information and reminiscences of just about all the great bluesmen who worked in Mississippi and Arkansas going all the way back to Tommy Johnson. But all of the interviews plumb deeply into each artist's background, career, opinions, and memories, and that's what makes them (and the book) so interesting and indispensable. Hopefully additional volumes of more Living Blues interviews will be issued.

Not just the Voice of the blues
Living Blues Magazine has long been the champion of the common man with uncommon talents. These interviews from this fine magazine are drawn from a wide range of blues masters, now all but gone. In their own words, they reveal not only the sense of purpose that marked their lives, but something about their music, something of the hardships of growing up and old in a racist society.

The reader cannot easily distance himself from this fact. This alone can make it a tough, but fascinating read. The violent life in the ghetto is not new and it took many a bluesman's life early. The cry for justice is at the core of the blues, as these voices recount. Their words paint a picture of hope and angst in colors as vivid as the best Van Gogh.

Great blues book
This is really a great book, if you want to hear about the blues from the men who created it first hand. The blues is often either treated as an academic subject with big sincerity or as a subject of legends. This way the it is undramathized and becomes much more alive, but without losing the fascination. For example read about Houston Stackhouse drinking canned heat together with Tommy Johnson in the delta or how Muddy Waters felt when he heard his first single being played from every house as he was walking down the street just a few days after its release. The book is packed with stories like this as well as the opinions and thoughts of these great artists.