This book is the first rigourous and detailed exploration of exactly how blues singers used formulas to create songs, and it more than amply fills the gap in the the study of the blues, where the structure and content of the lyrics have been less fully explored than the musical form. Focusing on the songs recorded by African-American singers for pre-World War Two commercial recording companies, this is an excellent structural analysis of the formulaic composistion of blues lyrics. This book gives a step-by-step description of the rules implicit in this formulaic structure and inspires new discussion of lyric structures. A wide array of readers will find this insightful and informative: from students of African-American music, cultural studies, history and linguistics, to Blues fans fascinated by exactly how the lyrics of this influential music style are written.

Born in African American work songs, field hollers, and the powerful legacy of the spirituals, the blues traveled the country from the Mississippi delta to “Sweet Home Chicago,” forming the backbone of American music. In this anthology–the first devoted exclusively to blues poems–a wide array of poets pay tribute to the form and offer testimony to its lasting power. The blues have left an indelible mark on the work of a diverse range of poets: from “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes and “Funeral Blues” by W. H. Auden, to “Blues on Yellow” by Marilyn Chin and “Reservation Blues” by Sherman Alexie. Here are blues-influenced and blues-inflected poems from, among others, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, June Jordan, Richard Wright, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Cornelius Eady. And here, too, are classic song lyrics–poems in their own right–from Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, and Muddy Waters. The rich emotional palette of the blues is fully represented here in verse that pays tribute to the heart and humor of the music, and in poems that swing with its history and hard-bitten hope.

This computer-generated anthology serves as a companion to Taft's Blues Lyric Poetry: a Concordance and gives the user the complete poetic context for every word, phrase or line in which he is interested. He also provides a selection of blues lyrics which have never appeared in print before or are scattered. Taft has transcribed over 2,000 blues lyrics from recordings made between 1920 and 1942 and includes over 350 singers such as Josh White, Sonny Boy Williamson, Robert Johnson and Ma Rainey. The anthology includes both country and urban, male and female, "downhome" and vaudeville singers. The songs are arranged according to singer and under each singer, according to dates of recording and sequences in the recording sessions. Information given includes singer, title, place, date and record numbers. The final section is a line-concordance index to the titles of the songs. ISBN 0-8240-9235-X (alk. paper) : $75.00 (For use only in the library).

Immediately celebrated as a tour de force upon its release, Langston Hughes's first published collection of poems still offers a powerful reflection of the Black experience. From "The Weary Blues" to "Dream Variation," Hughes writes clearly and colorfully, and his words remain prophetic.

Poets, teachers, and musicologists fusing studies of form, scansion, and musical creation to redefine the place of the American bard

Translating the beauty and splendor of his native Conamara into a language exquisitely attuned to the wonder of the everyday, John O'Donohue takes us on a moving journey through real and imagined worlds. Divided into three parts -- Approachings, Encounters, and Distances -- Conamara Blues at once reawakens a sense of intimacy with the natural world and a feeling of wonder at the mystery of our relationship to this world. Whether exploring the silent, eternal memory of Conamara or focusing on the power of language and the vagaries of human need and passion, O'Donohue tenderly reveals the fragile vulnerability of love and friendship. The result is a musical, transcendent, and deeply moving series of poems that exemplifies O'Donohue at his finest. Written with penetrating insight and distilled transparence, Conamara Blues offers a singular and lasting imaginative vision of a landscape of hope and possibility -- powerfully exhibiting the mastery of a poet at the height of his lyric powers.

In this jaunty and intimate collection, Kevin Young invents a language as shimmying and comic, as low-down and high-hearted, as the music from which he draws inspiration. With titles such as “Stride Piano,” “Gutbucket,” and “Can-Can,” these poems have the sharp completeness of vocalized songs and follow a classic blues trajectory: praising and professing undying devotion (“To watch you walk / cross the room in your black / corduroys is to see / civilization start”), only to end up lamenting the loss of love (“No use driving / like rain, past / where you at”). As Young conquers the sorrow left on his doorstep, the poems broaden to embrace not just the wisdom that comes with heartbreak but the bittersweet wonder of triumphing over adversity at all. Sexy and tart, playfully blending an African American idiom with traditional lyric diction, Young’s voice is pure American: joyous in its individualism and singing of the self at its strongest.

The speaker in Cape Verdean Blues is an oracle walking down the street. Shauna Barbosa interrogates encounters and the weight of their space. Grounded in bodily experience and the phenomenology of femininity, this collection provides a sense of Cape Verdean identity. It uniquely captures the essence of “Sodade,” as it refers to the Cape Verdean American experience, and also the nostalgia and self-reflection one navigates through relationships lived, lost, and imagined. And its layers of unusual imagery and sound hold the reader in their grip.

Praised as "suave, soulful, ebullient" (Tom Waits) and "a meticulous researcher, a graceful writer, and a committed contrarian" (New York Times Book Review), Elijah Wald is one of the leading popular music critics of his generation. In The Blues, Wald surveys a genre at the heart of American culture. It is not an easy thing to pin down. As Howlin' Wolf once described it, "When you ain't got no money and can't pay your house rent and can't buy you no food, you've damn sure got the blues." It has been defined by lyrical structure, or as a progression of chords, or as a set of practices reflecting West African "tonal and rhythmic approaches," using a five-note "blues scale." Wald sees blues less as a style than as a broad musical tradition within a constantly evolving pop culture. He traces its roots in work and praise songs, and shows how it was transformed by such professional performers as W. C. Handy, who first popularized the blues a century ago. He follows its evolution from Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith through Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix; identifies the impact of rural field recordings of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton and others; explores the role of blues in the development of both country music and jazz; and looks at the popular rhythm and blues trends of the 1940s and 1950s, from the uptown West Coast style of T-Bone Walker to the "down home" Chicago sound of Muddy Waters. Wald brings the story up to the present, touching on the effects of blues on American poetry, and its connection to modern styles such as rap. As with all of Oxford's Very Short Introductions, The Blues tells you--with insight, clarity, and wit--everything you need to know to understand this quintessentially American musical genre.