* This novel was originally published as Mojo's Guitar. “Ran Walker's The Last Bluesman plays an authentic Blues song on the page, filled with all the sorrow, heartache, and beauty that entails. This layered, haunting book is worth listening to.” ~ Mat Johnson, author of Pym and Loving Day “Ran Walker brings the blues into the 21st century and shows us how we can never forget our roots as long as we keep the love in our hearts. Thank you, Ran, for picking up the guitar of fiction and fretting together characters of such warmth, depth, and humanity.” ~ Tyehimba Jess, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olio and Leadbelly “In The Last Bluesman, readers encounter a modern-day blues novel, complete with a forgotten musician and a historically disenfranchised past. Walker's clarity of style and smooth, mellifluous language render this effort one to be proud of. This work places him among the cadre of new black voices budding with fresh, ripe tales of a past and present yet to untold.” ~ Daniel Black, author of Perfect Peace and Twelve Gates to the City "The Last Bluesman is a Southern tale ripe with lust, regret, death. It epitomizes the blues. Read with a stiff drink in hand." ~ jewel bush, Founder of MelaNated Writers Collective (New Orleans, LA) “The Last Bluesman touches deep in the soul. The words jump off the page, and I feel like I'm right there with the characters of the story. And the Blues...it's ever so present and honest!” ~ Lamont Jack Pearley Talking Bout The Blues, NYC “The characters become so familiar, their conflicts so realistic, and their dilemmas and dreams so tangible, that as a reader you will feel as though you were in the Mississippi Delta along with them.” ~ Sabin Prentis, author of Compared to What and Better Left Unsaid A first-time novelist is assigned the task of interviewing a legendary bluesman for a magazine article. A fifteen-year-old boy struggles to make sense of his parents’ deaths by turning to blues music. An estranged son seeks answers for his father's absence. Discover how these lives are forever altered by their interactions with an all but forgotten bluesman named Morris “Mojo” Jones. With all of the color and flavor of the Mississippi Delta, The Last Bluesman is a rare glimpse into a world rarely explored in literary fiction.

The Oprah Book Club selection for November 2000.

With House of Sand and Fog, his National Book Award-nominated novel, Andre Dubus III demonstrated his mastery of the complexities of character and desire. In this earlier novel he captures a roiling time in American history and the coming-of-age of a boy who must decide between desire, ambition, and duty. In the summer of 1967, Leo Suther has one more year of high school to finish and a lot more to learn. He's in love with the beautiful Allie Donovan who introduces him to her father, Chick — a construction foreman and avowed Communist. Soon Leo finds himself in the midst of a consuming love affair and an intense testing of his political values. Chick's passionate views challenge Leo's perspective on the escalating Vietnam conflict and on just where he stands in relation to the new people in his life. Throughout his — and the nation's — unforgettable "summer of love," Leo is learning the language of the blues, which seem to speak to the mourning he feels for his dead mother, his occasionally distant father, and the youth which is fast giving way to manhood.

Experience music history with this memoir by one of the last of the genuine old school Blues and R&B legends, the Grammy-winning dynamic showman Bobby Rush. This memoir charts the extraordinary rise to fame of living blues legend, Bobby Rush. Born Emmett Ellis, Jr. in Homer, Louisiana, he adopted the stage name Bobby Rush out of respect for his father, a pastor. As a teenager, Rush acquired his first real guitar and started playing in juke joints in Little Rock, Arkansas, donning a fake mustache to trick club owners into thinking he was old enough to gain entry. He led his first band in Arkansas between Little Rock and Pine Bluff in the 1950s. It was there he first had Elmore James play in his band. Rush later relocated to Chicago to pursue his musical career and started to work with Earl Hooker, Luther Allison, and Freddie King, and sat in with many of his musical heroes, such as Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed and Little Walter. Rush eventually began leading his own band in the 1960s, crafting his own distinct style of funky blues, and recording a succession of singles for various labels. It wasn't until the early 1970s that Rush finally scored a hit with "Chicken Heads." More recordings followed, including an album which went on to be listed in the Top 10 blues albums of the 1970s by Rolling Stone and a handful of regional jukebox favorites including "Sue" and "I Ain't Studdin' Ya." And Rush's career shows no signs of slowing down now. The man once beloved for performing in local jukejoints is now headlining major music/blues festivals, clubs, and theaters across the U.S. and as far as Japan and Australia. At age eighty-six, he is still on the road for over 200 days a year. His lifelong hectic tour schedule has earned him the affectionate title "King of the Chitlin' Circuit," from Rolling Stone. In 2007, he earned the distinction of being the first blues artist to play at the Great Wall of China. His renowned stage act features his famed shake dancers, who personify his funky blues and his ribald sense of humor. He was featured in Martin Scorcese's The Blues docuseries on PBS, a documentary film called Take Me to the River, performed with Dan Aykroyd on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and most recently had a cameo in the Golden Globe nominated Netflix film, Dolemite Is My Name, starring Eddie Murphy. He was recently given the highest Blues Music Award honor of B.B. King Entertainer of the Year. His songs have also been featured in TV shows and films including HBO's Ballers and major motion pictures like Black Snake Moan, starring Samuel L. Jackson. Considered by many to be the greatest bluesman currently performing, this book will give readers unparalleled access into the man, the myth, the legend: Bobby Rush.

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.

A pivotal member of the hugely successful bluegrass band Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, Dobro pioneer Josh Graves (1927-2006) was a living link between bluegrass music and the blues. In Bluegrass Bluesman, this influential performer shares the story of his lifelong career in music. In lively anecdotes, Graves describes his upbringing in East Tennessee and the climate in which bluegrass music emerged during the 1940s. Deeply influenced by the blues, he adapted Earl Scruggs's revolutionary banjo style to the Dobro resonator slide guitar and gave the Foggy Mountain Boys their distinctive sound. Graves' accounts of daily life on the road through the 1950s and 1960s reveal the band's dedication to musical excellence, Scruggs' leadership, and an often grueling life on the road. He also comments on his later career when he played in Lester Flatt's Nashville Grass and the Earl Scruggs Revue and collaborated with the likes of Boz Scaggs, Charlie McCoy, Kenny Baker, Eddie Adcock, Jesse McReynolds, Marty Stuart, Jerry Douglas, Alison Krauss, and his three musical sons. A colorful storyteller, Graves brings to life the world of an American troubadour and the mountain culture that he never left behind. Born in Tellico Plains, Tennessee, Josh Graves (1927-2006) is universally acknowledged as the father of the bluegrass Dobro. In 1997 he was inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame.

Now collected into one stunning hardcover! This story, structured like a traditional twelve bar blues song, with three sections each made of four chapters, follows blues musician Lem Taylor's harrowing journey across Arkansas of the late twenties, hunted for a crime he didn't commit.

For more than 30 years, Taj Mahal has delighted fans with his eclectic blending of musical guitar styles and forms. He has performed with the likes of Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, John Lee Hooker, and The Rolling Stones, among others. In this autobiography, Taj Mahal conveys his personal honest and frank account of his life and legacy.

Alcoholic. Epileptic. Technically challenged. Described as all this and worse, Jimmy Reed nevertheless overcame these roadblocks to become perhaps the most successful R&B/pop crossover artist of the '50s. In "Big Boss Man," musicians, family members, and those whose lives Reed touched offer revealing and heart-wrenching insights into this now-revered bluesman. Although Reed's alcoholism was no secret, its effect on his musicianship is less understood -- this and more is explored in this comprehensive biography of a classic bluesman.

From 'Crossroads Blues' to 'Sweet Home Chicago', 'Hellhound on My Trail' to 'Come On In My Kitchen', Robert Johnson wrote some of the most enduring and formative songs of the original blues era, songs that would go on to help shape the birth of rock'n'roll in the 1960s. Beloved of Clapton, Dylan and the Stones, Robert Johnson remains one of the most iconic and mythologised figures in popular music (and the first of many to die at the age of 27). Born in the in the South in Mississippi, Johnson made his way to the urban North as a travelling musician, but it was only when he returned to the South that he recorded the twenty-nine songs, in two sessions, which would create his legacy.Exploring the stories and legends that surround his life and death - his childhood, his womanising, his pact with the devil at the crossroads - Mezzo and DuPont have produced a fittingly creative and beautiful depiction of this most extraordinary life.