Winner of a National Book Critics Circle award, a rollicking and
unforgettable memoir by the man who helped bring the music of the blues
into the mainstream
"Without Lomax it's possible that there would have been no blues
explosion, no R&B movement, no Beatles and no Stones and no Velvet
Underground." --Brian Eno
A self-described "song-hunter," the folklorist Alan Lomax traveled the
Mississippi Delta in the 1930s and '40s, armed with primitive recording
equipment and a keen love of the Delta's music heritage. Crisscrossing
the towns and hamlets where the blues began, Lomax gave voice to such
greats as Leadbelly, Fred MacDowell, Muddy Waters, and many others, all
of whom made their debut recordings with him.
The Land Where the Blues Began is both a fascinating recollection of a
pivotal time in American music history and an intimate portrait of the
struggles blues musicians faced in the Jim Crow South. The blues were an
organic expression of Black humanity in a place where slavery had been
outlawed but where segregation, violence, and racial inequality were
still the law of the land. Lomax's role as a liaison to white America,
relating the emotion and musical virtuosity displayed by those
musicians, would change American popular music forever. Through candid
conversations with bluesmen and vivid, firsthand accounts of the
landscape where their music was born, Lomax's "discerning
reconstructions . . . give life to a domain most of us can never know .
. . one that summons us with an oddly familiar sensation of reverence
and dread" (The New York Times Book Review).
Artistic expression has always been a way for oppressed peoples to speak
truth to power, assert their dignity, and simply live in a world rife
with injustice. The Land Where the Blues Began is an enthralling
chronicle of the journey to bring this irrepressible art out of the
Delta where it began and into the ears of every American.
