Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta

by Robert Palmer

Book Overview

Blues is the cornerstone of American popular music, the bedrock of rock and roll. In this extraordinary musical and social history, Robert Palmer traces the odyssey of the blues from its rural beginnings, to the steamy bars of Chicago's South Side, to international popularity, recognition, and imitation. Palmer tells the story of the blues through the lives of its greatest practitioners: Robert Johnson, who sang of being pursued by the hounds of hell;...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140062238
• ISBN13: 9780140062236
• Release Date: July 1982
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 7.8"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

The Best Place to Start and End

Palmer's book was my introduction to the blues and I'm very glad of it because it's so wide and deep (like varying parts of the Mississippi River). You read this, you get the big picture story of the Delta Blues, how the music migrated to Chicago and other big cities and why it's so important to so much great music that came after it. It begins with musical historian Alan Lomax's fruitless search for Robert Johnson and ends with an older Muddy Waters, successful and wealthy, reflecting on his amazing journey. In between, we meet all the other players in Delta Blues, learn how the genre sprang up and see how it was adopted and copied wholesale by a slew of successful British and American rock 'n' rollers. Palmer never talks down to the reader but keeps his prose lively enough to entertain and educate a person with knowledge of the blues yet accessible enough to teach a neophyte. I find I come back to this book often to flesh out details of stories or anecdotes I've read elsewhere.

Fantastic effort

Palmer's love of the blues shines through in this exceptional book. He's not interested in showing off his knowledge of the form (although that knowledge is exceptional); he's interested in illuminating for the reader the roots of a great indigenous art form and how that form developed in the 20th century. In that effort, he succeeds masterfully.A fine early section explores how the music that we call the blues was seeded in N. America by African music. That chapter is a mini-history lesson in itself; Palmer shows how the music of slaves from W. Africa was viewed as subversive and dangerous by whites in the new land. The remainder of the book is chock full of portraits of the heroes of early blues in the Mississippi Delta, from Charley Patton to Son House to Robert Johnson to Little Walter to Muddy Waters and beyond. Palmer shows how these men developed a music that grew directly out of the soil of the Delta, making do with the instruments they had and often living itinerant lives, moving from tiny town to tiny town to play dances and juke joints to keep the music alive. The book also describes the historic migration of African-Americans from the Deep South to the industrial cities of the North, most importantly, of course, Chicago, where the musicians transformed the blues again, creating the electrified sounds that exerted such a powerful influence on white rock musicians from London to Liverpool to La Jolla, California.Palmer has given us a great work with "Deep Blues," one that should be read by students of music and social history alike. It deserves a prominent place on the bookshelf of any serious lover of music.

His book inspired John Sinclair's FATTENING FROGS FOR SNAKES

Robert Palmer's DEEP BLUES is a great & encyclopedic work on the blues. A resident of New Orleans for the last few years of his life, he was a close neighbor and friend of John Sinclair, poet, d.j., and the original artistic director of the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival. Both men had similar passions for the blues and all jazz-related music and relocated to the Crescent City for the reason that, in Ernie K-Doe's words, "I'm not sure, but I'm almost certain, that all music came from New Orleans." Palmer relied heavily upon original interviews and interviews conducted by other researchers, and DEEP BLUES reflects a directness and authenticity cross-pollinated by great musical erudition that includes not only the birthplace of the blues, but also its ancestry in Africa. This authenticity inspired another artist whose passion for the gut-level honesty of the blues became part of his own aesthetic. While reading and taking notes from DEEP BLUES, John Sinclair noticed that his jottings took the form of short-lined verses, and that the words of the musicians he loved had the impact of poetry. It was almost as if their words surpassed the poetry of the songs themselves. John fashioned some into poems. Later, upon meeting Palmer, he asked for permission to go further. It's a measure of the generosity of Robert Palmer, his love of the music, and the incredible heart that beats in the passages of DEEP BLUES, that he gave Sinclair the green light. John Sinclair's masterwork, FATTENING FROGS FOR SNAKES: DELTA SOUND SUITE (Surregional Press, 1999) owes its birth to Robert Palmer's own magnum opus.

An Aussie heads for Clarksdale

I read this wonderful book here in Canberra, Australia's national capital, far far away from the Delta. It was hard to put it down. But I did so just long enough to revisit favourite blues tracks by The Masked Marvel [aka Charley Patton] and Henry [Texas]Thomas...so evocative was Palmer's text that their voices crossed the decades and brought me to tears. Palmer surmounts the tyranny of time and distance and brings the Delta and its music to life for me on the other side of the world. My Road Atlas of the USA is open in front of me...Clarksdale here I come. Phil Teece Canberra Australia

Simply The Best

There's no other way to put it, this is simply the best book out there on the blues both as a music form and as force in shaping American culture. At once simple and concise, yet broad and in depth enough to tell a very complete story, this one work should satisfy everyone from the novice to the experienced blues fan.Meticulously researched, Palmer uses Muddy Waters as a jumping off point to explore the history and evolution of the blues as music as well as the society and culture from which it sprang. He peppers his work with amazing anecdotes, from the story of Robert Johnson, the Band meeting a dying Sonny Boy Williamson, an aging Howlin' Wolf giving a phenominal concert that add color to his story and helps make his frequent forays into musicology more tolerable to the non-musician. Best of all is the sense of time and place the book evokes, from plantations and dark swamps in rural Mississippi, to the noisy, crowed streets of South Chicago at the peak of the Great Migration, to small clubs and long forgotten juke-joints. I read this book for the first time 10 years or so ago and have probably reread it 5 times since. I keep coming up with new things to admire about the book every time. That so much richness can be packed into such a short readable work is amazing. This book triumphs over everything else written on the subject and only leaves you wanting to explore further.