Yank Rachell and his mandolin playing style moved every musician lucky
enough to hear him perform in the early sixties. When he died in April
1997, he left behind a stack of unanswered requests to tour Europe and
to play blues festivals in the United States.
In Blues Mandolin Man: The Life and Music of Yank Rachell, Richard
Congress delivers the first biography of a family man whose playing
inspired and energized the likes of David Honeyboy Edwards, Sleepy John
Estes, and Henry Townsend. No other biography discusses the mandolin's
influence and role in the blues.
Guitar great Ry Cooder said, "Yank's style fascinated me because it had
a lot of power and it's very raw-and what a great thing to do, just
attack this little instrument like that."
Charlie Musselwhite, the noted harp player, worked with Rachell and club
hopped in Chicago with the elder bluesman. "He just had a great spirit
about him," Musselwhite said of Rachell's playing and singing, "really
just shouting it out. If the world was made up of people like Yank
Rachell it would be a wonderful place to live."
Blues Mandolin Man chronicles the life, times, and music of a man who
was born into a family of sharecroppers in 1910 in rural western
Tennessee. An active musician for 75 years, Rachell mastered several
musical instruments and first recorded for Victor in Memphis in 1929.
Through the blues, Rachell's world expanded to include Chicago, New
York, recording studios and, after the sixties, radio, TV, and national
and European tours.
Yank's recollections reveal new information about personalities and
events that will delight blues history buffs. Rich appendixes detail
Yank's mandolin and guitar style and his place in the blues tradition.
For this book Richard Congress, who reissued two of Rachell's old LPs in
CD format, worked closely with him to record memories spanning decades
of blues playing. Congress tells a compelling and engaging story about a
colorful and thoughtful character who as a child picked cotton and
plowed a field behind a mule, who grew to manhood coping with the
southern Jim Crow system, and who participated in the creation and
perpetuation of the blues.
Richard Congress is the owner of Random Chance Records, a record company
based in New York City.
