The life of blues legend Robert Johnson becomes the centerpiece for this innovative look at what many consider to be America's deepest and most influential music genre. Pivotal are the questions surrounding why Johnson was ignored by the core black audience of his time yet now celebrated as the greatest figure in blues history. Trying to separate myth from reality, biographer Elijah Wald studies the blues from the inside -- not only examining recordings but also the recollections of the musicians themselves, the African-American press, as well as examining original research. What emerges is a new appreciation for the blues and the movement of its artists from the shadows of the 1930s Mississippi Delta to the mainstream venues frequented by today's loyal blues fans.

An immensely pleasurable book that unlocks the door to one of the most unusual and diverse regions in the United States, the culturally rich Delta flatland embraced by two rivers, the Mississippi and the Yazoo

A Rolling Stone-Kirkus Best Music Book of 2020 “[Brother Robert} book does much to pull the blues master out of the fog of myth.”—Rolling Stone An intimate memoir by blues legend Robert Johnson's stepsister, including new details about his family, music, influences, tragic death, and musical afterlife Though Robert Johnson was only twenty-seven years young and relatively unknown at the time of his tragic death in 1938, his enduring recordings have solidified his status as a progenitor of the Delta blues style. And yet, while his music has retained the steadfast devotion of modern listeners, much remains unknown about the man who penned and played these timeless tunes. Few people alive today actually remember what Johnson was really like, and those who do have largely upheld their silence-until now. In Brother Robert, nonagenarian Annye C. Anderson sheds new light on a real-life figure largely obscured by his own legend: her kind and incredibly talented stepbrother, Robert Johnson. This book chronicles Johnson's unconventional path to stardom, from the harrowing story behind his illegitimate birth, to his first strum of the guitar on Anderson's father's knee, to the genre-defining recordings that would one day secure his legacy. Along the way, readers are gifted not only with Anderson's personal anecdotes, but with colorful recollections passed down to Anderson by members of their family-the people who knew Johnson best. Readers also learn about the contours of his working life in Memphis, never-before-disclosed details about his romantic history, and all of Johnson's favorite things, from foods and entertainers to brands of tobacco and pomade. Together, these stories don't just bring the mythologized Johnson back down to earth; they preserve both his memory and his integrity. For decades, Anderson and her family have ignored the tall tales of Johnson "selling his soul to the devil" and the speculative to fictionalized accounts of his life that passed for biography. Brother Robert is here to set the record straight. Featuring a foreword by Elijah Wald and a Q&A with Anderson, Wald, Preston Lauterbach, and Peter Guralnick, this book paints a vivid portrait of an elusive figure who forever changed the musical landscape as we know it.

Collectors of illustrator R. Crumb's work prize the music-oriented trading card sets he created in the 1980s. Now they appear together for the first time in book form, along with a CD of music selected and compiled by Crumb himself.

Junior Ray Loveblood, one of the most outrageous and original personalities to appear in American literature in many years, returns in The Yazoo Blues, the sequel to John Pritchard’s Junior Ray. Now semi-retired, Loveblood works as a security guard in one of the floating casinos that have replaced cotton as the cash crop in the Mississippi Delta. In his spare time, Junior Ray has become obsessed with the ill-fated Yazoo Pass expedition by a Union armada up the Mississippi River in 1863. He relates dual stories, both that of a soldier slowly driven mad by the haunting countryside, and of Loveblood’s friend Mad Owens, whose search for existential love meets its greatest challenge in the arms of the stripper Money Scatters. Loveblood’s conclusions are hilarious, absurd, and at times intensely revealing. Equally profane and profound, the fictional narrator of Pritchard’s novel illuminates the complex stew of evolving race relations, failed economies, and corrupt politics that define much of the post-civil rights rural Deep South.

"Wright's fervent, musical prose captures the very essence of the blues.Play Pretty Blues is a work of extraordinary imagination and soul."--Will Allison, author ofLong Drive Home The mysteries of blues legend Robert Johnson's life and death long ago became myth. Part researched reconstruction, part vivid imagination, this lyrical novel brings Johnson alive through the voices of his six wives, revealing the husband and son inside the legend. Snowden Wright was born and raised in Mississippi. His work has been published atSalon, theAtlantic Online,Esquire Online, and theNew York Daily News. He lives in New York.

John Pritchard's novels Junior Ray and The Yazoo Blues have been dubbed "hilariously tasteless" and "not for the squeamish or pure of heart"—and equally praised by Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and lovers of Southern fiction everywhere. In Sailing to Alluvium, the third installment of Pritchard's "Junior Ray Saga," irrepressible ex-deputy sheriff Junior Ray Loveblood and his sidekick Voyd Mudd have become "diktectives" to stop the murderous activities of a semi-secret, lethal organization of Southern women, the AUNTY BELLES, headed by Miss Attica Rummage. Sailing to Alluvium is another brilliant tale of the bumbling duo, with an unforgettable cast of characters deeply rooted in the Mississippi Delta, a place both real and imaginary. The novel, hilarious and moving, revolves around obsessions, underneath which lies the dark history of a class conflict that exists in the Deep South, not among black and white but between the white "haves" and the white "have-nots." John Pritchard's work fits well between the singing prose of James Agee and the rustic lampoon and high humor of Erskine Caldwell. The reader is treated to a unique brand of dark comedy that closes the divide between burlesque and metaphysics, fuses the profane with the sublime, and explains the Deep South as no other writer has done.

This acclaimed travel guide, hailed as the bible of blues travelers throughout the world, will shepherd the faithful to such shrines as the intersection where Robert Johnson might have made his deal with the devil and the railroad tracks that inspired Howlin’ Wolf to moan “Smokestack Lightnin’.” Blues Traveling was the first and is the indisputably essential guidebook to Mississippi's musical places and its blues history. For this new fourth edition, Steve Cheseborough returned once again to the Delta, revisited all of the locales featured in previous editions of the book, and uncovered fresh destinations. He includes updated material on new festivals, state blues markers, club openings and closings, and many other transformations in the Delta's ever-lively blues scene. The fourth edition also features new information on the Mississippi Blues Trail, updated information on the many blues sites throughout the Delta, and twenty new photographs. With photographs, maps, easy-to-follow directions, and an informative, entertaining text, this book will lead the reader in and out of Clarksdale, Greenwood, Helena (Arkansas), Rolling Fork, Jackson, Memphis, Natchez, Bentonia, Rosedale, Itta Bena, and dozens of other locales where generations of blues musicians have lived, traveled, and performed.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.