Book description
Everyone knows the story of the Delta blues, with its fierce, raw
voices and tormented drifters and deals with the devil at the
crossroads at midnight. In this compelling book, Marybeth Hamilton
radically rewrites that story.
Archaic and primeval though the music may sound, the idea of
something called 'Delta blues' emerged in the late twentieth century,
the culmination of a longstanding white fascination with 'uncorrupted'
black singers, untainted by the city, by commerce, by the sights and
sounds of modernity.
Written with exquisite grace and sensitivity, at once historically
acute and hauntingly poetic, the book is an extraordinary excavation
of the blues mystique and provides a deeper understanding of the place
of blues within wider American culture.
Marybeth Hamilton was born in California and teaches American history
at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of
When
I'm Bad, I'm Better: Mae West, Sex and American Entertainment
.
