#finishedbooks The Story of the Blues by Paul Oliver. Randomly picked this up from Cowbooks in Nakameguro walking by one day with @whereiskeco. I used to live a few blocks up from the bookstore but never stopped in seeing their selection uninteresting/overpriced and jammed with tourists. This just happened to be displayed outside in the bargain bin for basically a 200 yen so why not. I have read several book on the Blues, none topping Amiri Baraka's "Blue's People" so had low expectations going in. It works or really separates itself in its focus on the migratory patterns of the blues and it is origins stopping well short of the blue's revival movement of the 60s. This also denies a fan of the genre would know mostly from Chess records in like Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Walters or Little Walter...and electric stuff in and around rock and roll. Which unlike jazz, I do like when the blues went electric as it just seemed a pragmatic choice going from southern juke joints to northern clubs. People simply couldn't hear the music so it had to be electrified and from there... innovation came. Where jazz fusion was a commercial grab that dumbed down the very things that made the music great to expand an audience. In the contemporary I find better marriages, but initially in 70s this was the reason. With that and for the uninitiated, Blues offered a means of self expression, but through the blues a man could sing about himself as he did in the fields, he could be his own hero, he could brag a little, he can make up a story about himself, he could wish himself into a situation, leaving home for better conditions or where there were no responsibilities or he could tell of the unhappiness of yesterday and the work it out of a system the blues was the way of singing and playing. It was a kind of song and as always, it was a state of mind. The blues singer didn't reason himself into a different frame of mine he sang himself into it, and when the blues has gone, there was still the blues to sing to amuse himself or his companions, or to entertain a local joke. Or more simply like my grandpa always says growing up in a bygone sharecropping town up the road from Clarksdale. Mississippi...it is life.
annaxmalina
titsay
gummygunk
germansingergirl
