Conversation with the Blues CD included [Hardcover] Review

This is a revised edition of the original 1965 book, with more photos and an audio CD derived from the original -and now very rare- accompanying LP.

Produced from tapes made on a heroic field trip by Paul and Valerie Oliver, accompanied part of the way by Arhoolie's Chris Strachwitz, the work is important for several reasons. First, it captures the blues at a cusp in its history, when the audience for it was just starting to shift from its original African-American one to a white American and European one. Now, of course the blues has both gone global and lost most of its originators. So the interviews included here, from both the famous and the obscure, form a hugely important linch-pin in blues history, captured about midway through its current life

Oliver spent several years transcribing and organising the material that emerged into a beatutiful textual flowchart of what the blues meant to those who played it and listened to it for its orginal purposes. Not as a lifestyle accesory, but as a catahrtic experience. Then, specific topics were covered including the business of recording, the life and times of Beale Street, farming, sharecropping, prison, and the violence that often erupted - witness Blind Arvella Gray's laconic discourse on how he became blind.

Because all this information is delivered by faithful transcriptions of the voices of the men and women who directly lived the blues, every word rings true. You are drawn into and along a path that explains both bluntly and poetically what the blues really means. No other book has ever come close to that essence.

There is a superbly crafted contextual introduction by Paul Oliver, many stunning photos of what is now a bygone era and, of course, the precious CD, with speech and music-some wonderful performances, by the way - that will capture the soul and mind of anyone with a serious interest in the real thing.

If you buy only one book about the Blues make sure its this one

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Product Description:
Compiled from transcriptions of interviews with blues artists made by Paul Oliver in 1960, Conversation with the Blues tells--in the artists' own words--of the significance of their music and the turbulent times and lives it reflects.Included are guitarists, pianists and other instrumentalists from the rural South and the urban North, from famous blues singers who recorded extensively to singers known only to their local communities. Copiously illustrated with Paul Oliver's photographs the book provides a rare glimpse--from cotton fields to the big-city--of African American music at a time when the South was still segregated.In a larger format to better display the pictures and with a new introduction by the author, this edition also contains a CD that captures the stark, ironic, but moving music and narratives of the singers themselves.

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