The Devil's Music

"Please allow me to introduce myself,.I'm a man of wealth and taste!I been around for a long, long, year,Stole many a mans soul and faith!Mick Jagger/Keith Richards Sympathy for the Devil! My parents thought the Blues was Devil's Music as have every generation of kids and parents before and since, because it's different more than anything else, if we were to go back and listen to our parents music there would be no growth and people would tire of the SOS (Same Old S...)! Maybe the lyrics were looser "Got my Mojo Working" as opposed to Amazing Grace? But I like them boyj!

While it is a good treatment of the history of the blues, it would be really nice if sellers would stop putting stickers all over the ISBN tag on back. Some of us actually use programs and applications that read the ISBN number to catalog books.

The devil must of had some great musical tastes because this book gives you all the little bits of information you need to find out some useful blues hx.

Great bookd for lovers of Americana, blues history.

Good book

I forgot this was such an old study. . .it's a good review up to the 1970s.

Excellent read !!!! Recommend to anyone wanting to learn about the roots, and appeal of the Blues.

Pros:- Well detailed history of blues, focusing particularly on the artists and musicians involved- Lots of original blues lyrics, which adds color to the whole work. Oakley bolsters his points with lyrics, giving him more credibility.Cons:- Prose is not very engaging- It may not look it, but the book is very long, and certain paragraphs can be very dense (I found myself reading one paragraph 3 times to understand what the author was saying)After quickly tracing the history of blues through slavery and slave songs, to minstrel and coon songs, to ragtime, to early New Orleans jazz and blues, I was struck by how Oakley focuses his “History of the Blues” on the characters involved. And oh, what a sundry cast. From WC Handy who saw the potential for blues at a commercial scale, to Ma Rainey, one of the biggest (I mean this in both senses of the word, though not pejoratively) female blues singers, the history and shaping of blues was done through the people involved. Oakley gives a well-rounded description of each character, with a brief picture of their lives, lyrics from their songs, and memorable descriptions given by those who knew them personally. Because blues grew through many people’s contributions, it is hard to pinpoint the “starting” date; it grew organically, from many directions, which Oakley captures well in this history. “The blues singer was holding a mirror to society and the audience could see images presented of a concrete and unadorned reality,” Oakley wrote on page 167. Blues was an outlet for those who played it, and for those who listened to it. In some cases, this resulted in the riotous House Rent Parties, full of dancing and sex and drinking. It was where a singer could wryly comment on a current state of affairs—poverty, a cheating wife, etc—not in complaint, but rather in a humorous, stoic, or satirical way. But blues elicited other emotions as well; Johnny Shines, describing the musician Robert Johnson, said, “He was playing very slow and passionately, and when we had quit, I noticed no-one was saying anything. Then I realized they were crying… both women and men.” In a similar vein, Henry Townsend explained the significance of blues: “...it’s a relief for pressure… We all have something in mind and we didn’t want to talk about it to anybody, but the burden was real heavy until you could make some kinda sound about it, you could express yourself to somebody, sort of lighten the thing up.” In this respect, the blues was a cathartic release for the singer and the listeners.