chicagoBLUESnews
BOOKS
All About the Blues
By Paul Petraitis
Published 4.1.16
When the blues comes into your life, you do whatever you can to get closer to the blues...whether it is by attending shows, learning an instrument or take photographs at gigs. What about reading some blues literature to really get into it? I started reading about the blues back in the 1960s when there weren't a lot of books available. Today, there are dozens.
Here are three volumes that found a permanent home on my shelf so I can continue to revisit them.
Chicago Blues: The City & The Music
by Mike Rowe
This book was initially published as Chicago Breakdown in 1975 and reissued as Chicago Blues when DeCapo Press republished it in 1981.
Rowe is a Londoner who brings a scholar's research skills and a fan's zeal to the project. He followed the trail of the post-war blues from Muddy Waters' first single in 1948 all the way to a perceptive look at the contemporary scene in Chicago in the early 1970s. Illustrated by fascinating maps of Chicago clubs, close-ups of record labels and photographs of blues artists, this book is a must read for those fans just starting to build their blues library.
When I Left Home: My Story
By Buddy Guy with David Ritz
Published in 2012 by DeCapo Press, this book traces the singer/guitarist's journey from learning guitar in rural Louisiana to his early days when he was starving in Chicago. Guy talks about his solo recording sessions with Cobra and Chess, playing behind Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Wells, Sonny Boy Williamson and other legends, and his role in the ongoing worldwide blues boom. This book is a great read and an insider's look at how a country boy from Louisiana went on to become Chicago's best-known ambassador of the blues.
The Country Blues
By Samuel B. Charters
The late Sam Charters (he died in 2015 at the age of 85) was a record producer, music historian, musician, poet and novelist who is best known for being a pioneering writer on blues music. This book, published in 1959, was the first book-length study of the blues. This talented blues advocate also published the three-record set, Chicago Blues Today (Vanguard, 1966), which is recognized as a landmark in Chicago blues. He also produced Country Joe and the Fish's first LP, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, in 1967.
I would recommend the 1975 republished edition of The Country Blues for its insightful new forward by Charters himself. Charters mixes scholarship with some downright atmospheric writing that seems bent on trying to hook readers with the facts and the romance of the old blues from a record collector's perspective. One of the first authors to write about blues giants such as Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, he sees Muddy Waters as a modernist who works in an old tradition, similar to Big Bill Broonzy. Upon its release blues fans on both sides of the Atlantic (including the Glimmer Twins, aka Mick Jagger and Keith Richard, in London) checked this volume out of the library as they simultaneously began spending all their spare change on records and concert tickets that fueled their new passion for the blues.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Petraitis is a Chicago historian and published professional who has worked at different times since the 1970s for a variety of local organizations, including the Chicago History Museum, the Newberry Library, the Ridge Historical Society and Willie Dixon’s Blues Heaven Foundation. He also is a guitarist who performs regularly with Low-reen and the Maxwell St. Market Blues Band. He is currently working on a blues book of his own, titled Closer to the Blues.