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Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago's South Side to the World
Robert Palmer · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorLast Train to Memphis The Rise of Elvis Presley
Peter Guralnick · 578 pages
The Land Where the Blues Began
Alan Lomax · 539 pages
"The bluesmen were the bards of America's last frontier, the rowdy Mississippi Delta, in the days of the cotton boom, of levee and railroad building. Alan Lomax takes us on an adventure into the "bad old days" of the Delta. Weaving together the tales of muleskinners and roustabouts, church matrons and convicts, children and blind street singers, Lomax gives us the rich, sorrow-ridden background of
Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul
James McBride · 244 pages
"A product of the complicated history of the American South, James Brown was a cultural shape-shifter who arguably had the greatest influence of any artist on American popular music. Brown was long a figure of fascination for James McBride, a noted professional musician as well as a writer. When he received a tip that promised to uncover the man behind the myth, McBride set off to follow a trail t
Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B.B. King
B.B. King, David Ritz · 344 pages
Riley B. King grew up amidst the cotton farms of Mississippi, picking in the fields. At age 21 he wrecked a tractor and took it as a sign that a brighter future awaited him as a musician in Memphis. The rest is history. Recounting his days as a disk jockey and pioneering bluesman on the rhythm and blues circuit, B. B. dramatizes his whirlwind adventures, from the Memphis of the forties to the M
Cash
Johnny Cash, Patrick Carr · 320 pages
He was the "Man in Black," a country music legend, and the quintessential American troubadour. He was an icon of rugged individualism who had been to hell and back, telling the tale as never before. In his unforgettable autobiography, Johnny Cash tells the truth about the highs and lows, the struggles and hard-won triumphs, and the people who shaped him. In his own words, Cash set the record st
Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story
Rick Bragg · 505 pages
"A monumental figure on the American landscape, Jerry Lee Lewis spent his childhood raising hell in Ferriday, Louisiana, and Natchez, Mississippi; galvanized the world with hit records like "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and "Great Balls of Fire," that gave rock and roll its devil's edge; caused riots and boycotts with his incendiary performances; nearly scuttled his career by marrying his thirtee
Please Be with Me: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman
Galadrielle Allman · 385 pages
Portrait of Duane Allman, founder of the legendary Allman Brothers Band, written by his daughter Galadrielle.
The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song
Frank M. Young, David Lasky · 191 pages
This biography is a moving account that reveals the Carter family's rise to success, their struggles along the way, and their impact on contemporary music.
Shout because you're free
Rosenbaum, Art., Art Rosenbaum, Margo Newmark Rosenbaum · 216 pages
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Alex Ross · 624 pages
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is a 2007 nonfiction book by the American music critic, Alex Ross, first published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It received widespread critical praise in the U.S. and Europe, garnering a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guardian First Book Award, a Premio Napoli and the 2011 Grand Prix des Muses. The Rest is Noise also had a spot on the N
The Beatles: The Biography
Bob Spitz · 992 pages
Even before the Beatles hit the big time, a myth was created. This version of the Beatles legend smoothed the rough edges and filled in the fault lines, and for more than forty years this manicured version of the Beatles story has sustained as truth - until now. The product of almost a decade of research, hundreds of unprecedented interviews, and the discovery of scores of never-before-revealed
Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore
Albert Mudrian · 336 pages
In 1986, it was unimaginable that death metal and grindcore would ever impact popular culture. Yet this shockingly fast and barbaric amalgam of hardcore punk and heavy metal would define the musical threshold of extremity for years to come. Initially circulated through an underground tape-trading network by scraggly, angry young boys, death metal and grindcore spread faster than a plague of undead
Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop
Bob Stanley · 776 pages
For fifty years, pop music was created and consumed like this: you heard a record on the radio, or read about it in a music paper; you bought it on Saturday; you lent it to, or taped it for, a friend; and they reciprocated with another record. This book covers the birth of rock, soul, punk, disco, hip hop, indie, house and techno.
The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs
Greil Marcus · 313 pages
Selects ten songs recorded between 1956 and 2008 that embody rock and roll as a thing in itself--in the story each song tells, inhabits, and creates in its legacy.
The History of Jazz
Ted Gioia · 480 pages
Tells the story of jazz as it has never been told before, in a book that brilliantly portrays the legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the world in which jazz evolved.
Blues People: The Negro Experience In White America And The Music That Developed From It
LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka · 244 pages
"...the first book on jazz by a negro writer...new and highly provocative conclusions bolstered by bothe history and sociology...a must for all who could more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America's most popular music, Negros in origin -Blues based- but now belonging to everybody." Langston Hugues "*Blues people* is not only a fresh, incisively instructive reinterpretation of
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
John Eliot Gardiner · 650 pages
Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most unfathomable composers in the history of music. How can such sublime work have been produced by a man who (when we can discern his personality at all) seems so ordinary, so opaque, and occasionally so intemperate? John Eliot Gardiner grew up passing one of the only two authentic portraits of Bach every morning and evening on the stairs of his parents' house
Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music
Rob Young · 664 pages
While ostensibly purporting to be a history of that much derided four-letter word 'folk,' Electric Eden provides a survey of the visionary, topographic and esoteric impulses that have driven the margins of British visionary folk music from Vaughan Williams and Holst to The Incredible String Band, Nick Drake and John Martyn.
Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011
Lizzy Goodman · 622 pages