Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta [Paperback]

Blues is the cornerstone of American popular music, the bedrock of rock and roll. In this extraordinary musical and social history, Robert Palmer traces the odyssey of the blues from its rural beginnings, to the steamy bars of Chicago’s South Side, to international popularity, recognition, and imitation. Palmer tells the story of the blues through the lives of its greatest practitioners: Robert Johnson, who sang of being pursued by the hounds of hell; Muddy Waters, who electrified Delta blues and gave the music its rock beat; Robert Lockwood and Sonny Boy Williamson, who launched the King Biscuit Time radio show and brought blues to the airwaves; and John Lee Hooker, Ike Turner, B. B. King, and many others.

A lucid . . . entrancing study -- Greil Marcus

Palmer has a powerful understanding of the music and an intense involvement in the culture. -- The Nation

Prologue: It Wasn't No Big Money, but We's Doin' It

Part I
Chapter 1: Beginnings
Chapter 2: Heart Like Railroad Steel

Part II
Chapter 3: Mojo Hand
Chapter 4: Chicago Pep

Part III
Chapter 5: King Biscuit Time
Chapter 6: I Believe I'll Dust My Broom
Chapter 7: Kings of Rhythm

Epilogue: The World Boogie

Discography
Bibliography
Index

Robert Palmer was the New York Times's first full-time rock writer and chief pop critic (1976–1988) and has been a contributing editor at Rolling Stone since the early seventies. He has taught courses in American music at Yale, Carnegie-Mellon, Bowdoin, the University of Mississippi, and Brooklyn College, where he was the first senior research fellow of the Institute for Studies in American Music to teach and write a musicological monograph on rock and roll. He is the author of DeepBlues and other books, and served as writer and music director for two award-winnl³(