The Land Where the Blues Began - Softcover

Lomax, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1565847393 ISBN 13: 9781565847392

Publisher: The New Press, 1993

Synopsis

A self-described song-hunter,” the folklorist Alan Lomax traveled the Mississippi Delta in the 1930’s and 40s, armed with primitive recording equipment and a keen love of the Delta’s music heritage. Crisscrossing the towns and hamlets where the blues began, Lomax gave voice to such greats as Leadbelly, Fred MacDowell, Muddy Waters, and many others, all of whom made their debut recordings with him.

The Land Where the Blues Began is Lomax’s stingingly well-written cornbread-and-moonshine odyssey” (Kirkus Reviews) through America’s musical heartland. Through candid conversations with bluesmen and vivid, firsthand accounts of the landscape where their music was born, Lomax’s discerning reconstructions . . . give life to a domain most of us can never know . . . one that summons us with an oddly familiar sensation of reverence and dread” (The New York Times Book Review). The Land Where the Blues Began captures the irrepressible energy of soul of people who changed American musical history.

Winner of the 1993 National Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, The Land Where the Blues Began is now available in a handsome new paperback edition.

About this title

Review:

Without Lomax it’s possible that there would have been no blues explosion, no R&B movement, no Beatles and no Stones and no Velvet Underground.”
—Brian Eno

No one has come close to Alan Lomax in illuminating the intersecting musical roots of an extraordinary range of cultures, including our own.”
—Nat Hentoff

If not for Lomax, few people would have heard Tom Dooley’ or Goodnight Irene’ and Bob Zimmerman might be singing Feelings’ at Holiday Inns around Hibbing, Minnesota.”
—Newsweek

About the Author:

Alan Lomax is an ethnomusicologist, record producer, and network radio host/writer. His work includes the prize-winning 1990 PBS television series American Patchwork and the multimedia interactive database called the The Global Jukebox, which he produced as an anthropologist for Columbia University and Hunter College.

About this edition

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 1565847393
• ISBN 13: 9781565847392
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 560